There is widespread agreement in psychoanalysis as to the constitutive role of affects in the clinical process. On a recent panel in which several clinicians of different theoretical persuasions made their comments on the same clinical material, it was found that therapists with different ideas about dynamics and treatment agree as to what makes good clinical work, even if it is conducted according to theoretical perspectives different from their own. Sydney Pulver, the chairman of this study, suggested that the nonspecific curative factors common to all therapies have to do with affects. He mentioned the finding that analysts of various persuasions are all working out the same unconscious affects and fantasies in the transference, even when they approach them from different levels of development or with different metaphors, since all these levels reverberate with one another ( Pulver, 1987, p. 298).

Yet until recently a coherent and updated affect theory has been conspicuously lacking in psychoanalysis, and more than one article has been written deploring this state of affairs. Today, the situation has changed; many serious theoretical and empirical studies on affects have appeared in the last few years, and the task now is rather that of organizing, selecting, and further articulating the many ideas on affects prevalent today.

Some ideas and conceptions engendered by recent theoretical work on affects, such as the close link of affects with object relations and with the self, as well as conceptions of emotional development, have extensively permeated clinical thinking without being sufficiently appreciated by theoreticians. The constant searching of the analyst after what lies behind the patient's feelings and affect states may be construed as indicating an awareness of the fact that affects have representations of their own and comprise important cognitive aspects. These clinical insights need to be taken into consideration in the theoretical work on affects, or emotions. . .

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