The Primacy of Affect

Psychotherapy, Culture, Philosophy

Manu Bazzano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781041134596
  9781041134602
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040620236
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This edited volume features a diverse, eclectic range of voices exploring affect theory in relation to psychotherapy, culture and philosophy.

The 1990s saw the beginning of the affective turn, an important cultural shift which influenced to a considerable degree the arts, politics and culture in general but failed to reach the world of psychotherapy. What would it be like if practices such as psychotherapy took more fully on board the importance of affect? Based on the outcome of a series of seminars led by Manu Bazzano over the course of 2020–2025, this edited volume aims to break new ground by drawing on affect theory, queer and feminist theory, literature and art to outline new ways of practicing psychotherapy and supervision, of doing research and of engaging more creatively and effectively with the political challenges of our time.

The Primacy of Affect: Psychotherapy, Culture, Philosophy will benefit anyone working within or interested in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, contemporary philosophy, politics, the arts and literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 What is Affect Therapy?
• 2 Shake it off: Vicarious Trauma, referred pain and othered people
• 3 Clients being beside themselves: affect and ecstatic vulnerabilities in the therapy room
• 4 Adorno and Benjamin on affect, freedom, and the promesse du bonheur
• 5 Making love to your data: on affect and post-qualitative research
• 6 Therapy beyond concepts: direct experience and active forces in therapy
• 7 The affect of living in a dream world from a Nietzschean perspective
• 8 Taking orders from the night
• 9 Life as will to nothingness: nihilism and affect in Nietzsche’s third essay of the Genealogy of Morals
• 10 Therapy, outside
• 11 Life, truth, and exception in Badiou’s Logics of Worlds
• 12 The Unborn rags of the mind
• 13 “Have you ever found yourselves in sense?”: on pathos and affect
• 14 Encounter in everyday life as affective dialogue: bridging the individual and the collective
• 15 Reality, but not as we know it
• 16 Affect in person-centred and focusing-oriented psychotherapy
• 17 On affect-based supervision
• Index