The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse

Andre Green, Alan Sheridan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415115247
• eBook ISBN: 9781134821273
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse is a seminal work on one of the most neglected topics in psychoanalysis, that of affect. Originally published in French as Le Discours Vivant, and by one of the most distinguished living analysts, the book is structured in three parts:

• Affect within psychoanalytic literature
• Clinical practice of psychoanalysis: structure and process
• Theoretical study: affect, language and discourse; negative hallucination

Written in a clear, lucid style, connecting theory to both culture and clinical practice, this book will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and also to those involved in cultural studies.

Part I

Affect in the Psychoanalytic Literature

1

Affect in Freud’s Work

In this analytic chapter, I shall trace the development of Freud’s ideas on affect. Several stages may be distinguished:

• from Studies on Hysteria (1893–95) to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900);
• from The Interpretation of Dreams to the Papers on Metapsychology (1915);
• from the Papers on Metapsychology to the article ‘Fetishism’ (1927), the subject being taken up again in the article ‘The splitting of the ego in the process of defence’ (1939).

After 1927, there are few important references to affect.¹

The most important text on affect after the second topography is Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. I felt that it was logical to group together Freud’s various views on anxiety from 1894 to 1932, by separating them from the other texts.

Evolution of the Conception of Affect

I

From the discovery of psychoanalysis to ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’

1

Studies on Hysteria (1893–95)

The history of affect, like that of psychoanalysis itself, is closely bound up with hysteria. But, before the appearance of the ‘Preliminary Communication’, Freud, in the entry on hysteria for the Encyclopedie de Villaret of 1892, introduced the notion of modifications in the distribution of the quantities of excitation in the nervous system. What we are dealing with here is more cathectic energy than the quota of affect as such, but the second is included in the first, as the following quotation shows:

Alongside of the physical symptoms of hysteria, a number of psychical disturbances are to be observed, in which at some future time the changes characteristic of hysteria will no doubt be found but the analysis of which has hitherto scarcely been begun. These are changes in the passage and in the association of ideas, inhibitions of the activity of the will, magnification and suppression of feelings, etc.—which may be summarized as changes in the normal distribution over the nervous system of the stable amounts of excitation.²

Freud attaches more value to this hypothesis than to the description of the hysterical temperament that is lacking in many patients. Against a characterlogical conception, he opts for an economic one: that of a surplus of excitation in the nervous system, which ‘manifests itself, now as an inhibitor, now as an irritant, and is displaced within the nervous system with great freedom’.

It is the fate of this quantity of excitation to play an important role in the conception of the strangulated affect, as described in the Studies on Hysteria. Even in 1893,³ in the article ‘Some points for a comparative study of organic and hysterical motor paralyses’, Freud introduced the term quota of affect⁴ to indicate the interdependence between an associative content and its affective correlative. ‘Every event, every psychical impression is provided with a certain quota of affect (Affektbetrag) of which the ego divests itself either by means of a motor reaction or by associative psychical activity’.⁵

The pathogenic mechanism—by which the abreaction of accretions of stimuli is prevented—already appears in this text. For what operates in the no rmal psychical state, the tendency to maintain the sum of constant excitation by the most appropriate means, displaying it associatively or by discharging (abreacting) it,⁶ is not possible in hysteria. Paradoxically, however, Freud states in this same text, which was a sketch for the ‘Preliminary Communication’, that the affect may be the object of a splitting: at the time of the affect, however small and unpathogenic it may be, an impression may later become traumatic. There is the germ of the conception of symbolization here.

In the ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893), Breuer and Freud fully worked out the conception of the strangulated affect. This is directly bound up with traumatic theory. With a traumatic event, the memory of which cannot be wiped out in certain cases, it is important to know ‘whether there has been an energic reaction to the event that provokes an affect’,⁷ through which any abreaction of affects—‘from tears to acts of revenge’—could have occurred. In cases where abreaction does not occur, the affect remains attached to the memory, as a result of its not being wiped out. So the pathogenic representations have not undergone the normal wear caused by abreaction or reproduction, with impeded circulation of associations. However, through psychotherapy, an equivalent of abreaction by act may occur, thanks to the language that allows its abreaction. Language relates memory and event associatively, just as it relates the strangulated affects to representations. We must follow Freud attentively here. In this context, a verbalization is not simply an intellectual operation. ‘Language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively’.⁸

Language not only allows the load to be unblocked and experienced, it is in itself act and abreaction by words. The procedure used enables the affect to be poured out verbally; furthermore, it transforms this affective load and leads the pathogenic representation to be modified by means of association, by drawing it into normal consciousness.⁹ Freud’s words ‘the hysteric suffers from memories’ have attained a certain celebrity, but insufficient stress has been laid on the role played in them by affect, through which they are linked to memory and the success of treatment. For, to be cured, it is not enough to remember; we are well aware of this today, but Freud shows that he already knew it in his ‘Preliminary Communication’.

For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result.¹⁰

It is pointless to try to decide whether the affect or the representation is more in evidence. Each depends upon the other:

Running parallel to the sensation of a hysterical ‘aura’ in the throat, when that feeling appeared after an insult, was the thought ‘I shall have to swallow this’. She had a whole quantity of sensations and ideas running parallel with each other. Sometimes the sensation would call up the idea to explain it, sometimes the idea would create the sensation by means of symbolization, and not infrequently it had to be left an open question which of the true elements had been at the primary one.¹¹

So, if the psychotherapy of hysteria shows that the two elements are mutually dependent, this suggests that they must both be present in the treatment adopted.

Thus trauma, the memory of it and the pathogenic representations deriving from it, the non-abreacted affect and the verbalization, accompanied by emotion, form an indissociable network. In these circumstances, one cannot give greater importance to memories or pathogenic representations than to the affect, since the reappearance of the affect is the precondition for the method’s success. Similarly, language cannot be shifted to the side of the representations, for it is itself a form of abreaction, equivalent to the act.

As we know, Breuer and Freud quarrelled on the question of the hypnoid state.¹² Following P.J.Moebius, Breuer believes that the hypnoid state is an auto-hypnoid state, self-induced, under the influence of daydreams and the appearance of an affect. A certain void of the consciousness occurs during which a representation appears without any resistance. This hypnoid state cuts off a group of representations, which soon link up with other groups of representations formed during other hypnoid states, and, by stopping the circulation of associations, constitutes a splitting off, a Spaltung, from the rest of the psyche. For Breuer, this hypnoid state is the precondition of hysteria.¹³ In his Studies on Hysteria, Freud did support this idea, but he later abandoned it as superfluous. What he retained of it is the idea of a particular psychical group isolated from the rest of psychical life, which he came to see as the kernel of the unconscious. If, today, Breuer’s opinion seems unacceptable, we must nevertheless recognize that his conception prefigured what Freud was to discover only some years later: the role of phantasy and its connection¹⁴ with the affect, since together they trigger off the hypnoid state. Thus, with the abandoning of the trauma theory, a solution involving exchange is revealed, though without any need to eliminate the conception of the strangulated affect, for the phantasy may itself activate the contents of the unconscious—when it is not itself the result of it—and thus increase the load of affect, which it tries to bind by its constitution.

Between the ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893) and the publication of Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud published in January 1894 ‘The neuro-psychoses of defence’. In that article he explains in greater detail than before the notion of quota of affect.

I refer to the concept that in mental functions something is to be distinguished—a quota of affect or sum of excitation—which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body.¹⁵

Freud distinguishes between:

1. quantity measurable de jure if not de facto;
2. the variation of this quantity;
3. the movement bound up with this quantity;
4. the discharge.

In the same year, in a letter to Fliess (of 21 May 1894), this conception is complemented by the idea of the affect being different according to the clinical entities: ‘I know three mechanisms: transformation of affect (conversion hysteria), displacement of affect (obsessions) and exchange of affect (anxiety neurosis and melancholia)’.¹⁶

Thus the earlier conceptions are now joined for the first time by the idea of transformation in the broad sense; a transformation that is still the privilege of hysteria, but is also at work in other neuropsychoses; a transformation in which the affect wins out over representations and which does not necessarily lead to conversion.

Furthermore, in that year, Freud’s clinical explorations were very advanced. Draft E (undated, but written about June 1894), which deals with the origin of anxiety, and the article ‘On the grounds for detaching a particular syndrome from neurasthenia under the description “anxiety neurosis”’ show that the idea of transformation between the various forms of energy—physical, sexual and psychical—dominates his thinking at this time. I shall not develop this point any further at the moment, but I shall return to it later when dealing with the question of anxiety.

Indeed it seems to me that if Freud, from the outset, was so sensitive to this notion of moving quantity, which was to dominate the whole of the ‘Project for a scientific psychology’, it is not only because of his ‘physicalist’ prejudices. I might almost suppose that the notion of moving quantity derives from his observation of the transformations in the discourse of his first patients.

This notion of transformation is found again in the part of the Studies on Hysteria written in 1895, especially on the subject of conversion, of course. When the affect has had to be discharged by a reflex that is not simply ‘not normal’, but actually ‘abnormal’, it is from this abnormal reflex that the c onversion is produced. There is, therefore, a double transformation here: from the normal reflex to the abnormal reflex and from the abnormal reflex into its conversion. But if the affect is so destined to be transformed by conversion, it is because its origin is bound up, according to Freud, with transformation. The affect is itself, in a sense, the product of a ‘conversion turned inside out’, as the following text shows:

All these sensations and innervations belong to the field of ‘The Expression of the Emotions’, which, as Darwin has taught us, consists of actions which originally had a meaning and served a purpose. These may now for the most part have become so much weakened that the expression of them in words seems to us only to be a figurative picture of them, whereas in all probability the description was once meant literally; and hysteria is right in restoring the original meaning of the words in depicting its unusually strong innervations. Indeed, it is perhaps wrong to say that hysteria creates these sensations by symbolization. It may be that it does not take linguistic usage as its model at all, but that both hysteria and linguistic usage alike draw their material from a common source.¹⁷

Hysterical conversion, therefore, is a return to the sources of the affect. But this is less important than Freud’s remark on symbolization. Thus, if what Lacan says is true, namely that the hysteric speaks with her flesh, it seems to me even truer to say that the hysteric enslaves herself to the language of the flesh, drawing from a spring from which they both derive. The discourse of the hysteric would not seem, therefore, to take on the model of language in order to speak; rather, both language and symptom plunge their roots into a common soil.

2 Draft G (1895)

Before examining the ‘Project for a scientific psychology’, I should like to draw attention to Draft G (‘Melancholia’), which dates from 1 January 1895. There are two reasons for this: first, it deals with a subject very close to the problem of the affect; second, it contains a schema that must constitute a theorization—perhaps the most advanced so far—that seems to me to be a turning point.

After tracing two axes, a vertical one, constituting the ego boundary, separating the ego from the outside world, the other a horizontal one, constituting the somatic psychical boundary, separating the soma in its lower half and the psyche in its upper half, Freud puts in place elements and a circuit.

The elements are:

• in the external world, a sexual object;
• in the corresponding quarter, outside the ego and in the soma, a figure named ‘sexual object in favourable position’;
• in the quarter corresponding to the somatic part of the ego, an endorgan, somatic sexual excitation (S.s.) and a spinal centre;
• in the quarter corresponding to the psychical part of the ego, an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the English-language edition
• Preface to the French edition (1973)
• Introduction
• Part I: Affect in the psychoanalytic literature
• Part II: Clinical practice in psychoanalysis: structures and processes
• Part III: Theoretical study: affect, language and discourse; negative hallucination
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index