This book collates and clarifies psychoanalytic theories on affect, and how they relate to the clinical process. The author outlines and analyses the most important theories on affect, and examines empirical work presented over the past 100 years, exposing the rigidity of some existing notions.
The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy explores central issues in current clinical work, using the theories put forward by Silvan Tomkins and presenting them in detail, as well as integrating them with the most up-to-date neuroscience findings and infancy research, all based on a biopsychosocial, dynamic systems approach.Part I describes the essentials of life, based on our evolutionary and biological heritage, namely a need for a coherent understanding of one’s world and the capacity to act in that world; the infant's capacities are described in detail as embodying both. Longitudinal data is provided beginning at birth into the third year of life. Part II reviews current debates in psychoanalysis relating to motivation, and the lack of an internally consistent theory. Recent neuroscience findings are presented, which both negate drive theory, and support Tomkins' theory. His theory is then described in detail. In Part III, two case histories are presented: one is a clinical case illustrating one of Tomkins' affect powered scripts. The second case is drawn from a longitudinal study extending from birth, into early adulthood, which is made sense of with the help of Tomkins' theory. Demos concludes with a look at competing approaches to theory and responds to recent cognitive-based attempts to disprove both Tomkins' work and the latest findings from neuroscience. The Affect Theory of Silvan Tomkins for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and psychiatric nurses.
Winner of th 2023 American Board and Academy of Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Psychology (ABAPPP) Annual Award! This book aims to integrate different psychoanalytic schools and relevant research findings into an integrated psychoanalytic theory of the mind. A main claim explored here, is that a revised and expanded ego psychology constitutes the strongest foundation not only for a unified psychoanalytic theory, but also for the integration of relevant research findings from other disciplines. Sophisticated yet accessible, the book includes a description of the basic tenets of ego psychology and necessary correctives and revisions. It also discusses research and theory on interpersonal understanding, capacity for inhibition, defense, delay of gratification, autonomous ego aims and motives, affect regulation, the nature of psychopathology; and the implications of a revised and expanded ego psychology for approaches to treatment. The book will appeal to readers who are interested in psychoanalysis, the nature of the mind, the nature of psychopathology, and the implications of theoretical formulations and research findings for approaches to treatment. As such, it will also be of great value on graduate and training courses for psychoanalysis.
Can the psychodynamics of the mind be correlated with neurodynamic processes in the brain? The book revisits a question that scientists and psychoanalysts have been asking for more than a century. It brings together experts from Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neurology to consider this question.
With a unique blend of clinical compassion and philosophical reflection, Donna M. Orange illuminates the nature and process of psychoanalytic understanding within the intimate and healing human context of treatment. Moving away from objectivist empiricism and its polar opposite, constructivist relativism, her work details a paradigm shift to a perspectival realism that does justice to the concerns of both. Laying the groundwork for a fuller, more encompassing view of psychoanalytic practice, Emotional Understanding is enlightening reading for all mental health professionals interested in psychodynamic theory and treatment.
A seminal work on one of the most neglected topics in psychoanalysis, that of affect. Originally published in French as Le Discours Vivant, it is considered a classic in the psychoanalytic world.
An accessible guide to the work of American psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins The brilliant and complex theories of psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1911–1991) have inspired the turn to affect in the humanities, social sciences, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, these theories are not well understood. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook makes his theories portable across a range of interdisciplinary contexts and accessible to a wide variety of contemporary scholars and students of affect. A Silvan Tomkins Handbook provides readers with a clear outline of Tomkins’s affect theory as he developed it in his four-volume masterwork Affect Imagery Consciousness. It shows how his key terms and conceptual innovations can be used to build robust frameworks for theorizing affect and emotion. In addition to clarifying his affect theory, the Handbook emphasizes Tomkins’s other significant contributions, from his broad theories of imagery and consciousness to more focused concepts of scenes and scripts. With their extensive experience engaging and teaching Tomkins’s work, Adam J. Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson provide a user-friendly guide for readers who want to know more about the foundations of affect studies.
Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory provides a masterful overview of the central issue concerning psychoanalysts today: finding a way to deal in theoretical terms with the importance of the patient's relationships with other people. Just as disturbed and distorted relationships lie at the core of the patient's distress, so too does the relation between analyst and patient play a key role in the analytic process. All psychoanalytic theories recognize the clinical centrality of “object relations,” but much else about the concept is in dispute. In their ground-breaking exercise in comparative psychoanalysis, the authors offer a new way to understand the dramatic and confusing proliferation of approaches to object relations. The result is major clarification of the history of psychoanalysis and a reliable guide to the fundamental issues that unite and divide the field. Greenberg and Mitchell, both psychoanalysts in private practice in New York, locate much of the variation in the concept of object relations between two deeply divergent models of psychoanalysis: Freud's model, in which relations with others are determined by the individual's need to satisfy primary instinctual drives, and an alternative model, in which relationships are taken as primary. The authors then diagnose the history of disagreement about object relations as a product of competition between these disparate paradigms. Within this framework, Sullivan's interpersonal psychiatry and the British tradition of object relations theory, led by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip, are shown to be united by their rejection of significant aspects of Freud's drive theory. In contrast, the American ego psychology of Hartmann, Jacobson, and Kernberg appears as an effort to enlarge the classical drive theory to accommodate information derived from the study of object relations. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory offers a conceptual map of the most difficult terrain in psychoanalysis and a history of its most complex disputes. In exploring the counterpoint between different psychoanalytic schools and traditions, it provides a synthetic perspective that is a major contribution to the advance of psychoanalytic thought.
This important new book presents a comprehensive integration of psychoanalytic theories of human development from Freud to the present, showing their implications for the evaluation and treatment of children and adults. Phyllis Tyson and Robert L. Tyson not only review the literature on emotional growth but also provide a developmental theory of their own, one that examines psychosexual development in the context of a number of other simultaneously evolving systems--emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and social--all of which work in relation to one another in a dynamic way. The authors describe the developmental sequences of these systems and how they coalesce to form the human personality. The Tysons view development as it occurs rather than retrospectively from reconstructions of earlier life experience. They begin by tracing the history of this perspective, describing the developmental process, then critically reviewing psychoanalytic theories of development. The authors present developmental sequences for psychosexuality, object relations, the sense of self, affect, cognition, the superego, gender identity, and the ego. Throughout they maintain a central and orienting focus on the intrapsychic--on what happens in the mind as it evolves. In contrast to recent psychoanalytic emphases on interpersonal aspects of early development, they view perceived and felt interpersonal interactions as working in conjunction with innate factors to provide the basis for the internal world. According to the Tysons, it is the evolution and elaboration of this internal world that is the domain of psychoanalytic theory of development.
Drawing on the literatures of child development, ethology, and neuroscience, Joseph Jones argues that, in their simplest form, affects are best understood as the presymbolic representatives and governors of motivational systems. So conceptualized, affects, and not primary process, constitute the initial processing system of the prerepresentational infant. It then becomes possible to re-vision early development as the sequential maturation of different motivational systems, each governed by a specific presymbolic affect. More complex emotional states, which emerge when the toddler begins to think symbolically, represent the integration of motivational systems and thought as maturation plunges the child into a world of loves and hates that cannot be escaped simply through hehavior.