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Much of psychodynamic thinking is about two things: how we protect ourselves from painful feelings (defenses) and how we carry our relationships around inside us (object relations). This section is about what lies alongside both. It covers the different states of mind we move between in a single day, the quiet convictions we run on without noticing them, the feelings we have about ourselves, the raw material of feeling itself, the strange way distress can arrive on a schedule, and the loops that keep a pattern going long after whatever started it.

None of this is exotic. Everyone has a version of themselves that shows up when they are tired and frightened, and another that shows up when they are steady. Everyone has a few beliefs about how the world works that were learned early and never fully re-examined. Everyone knows shame and guilt, even if they rarely name them. Many people have had the experience of feeling low for no clear reason, only to realize later that it was the week a parent died, years ago. And almost everyone has a pattern they can describe perfectly and still cannot seem to stop.

Psychoanalysts and their neighbors in other schools have studied each of these areas closely. Some of the most useful ideas come from outside classical psychoanalysis: from schema therapy, cognitive analytic therapy, control-mastery theory, and affect science. The pages in this section bring those traditions together and note where they agree and where they don’t.

What’s in This Section

Self-States
Why one person can feel like several: the frightened child, the coper, the harsh inner critic and the steadier adult, from Fairbairn and Berne to Young, Horowitz, Bromberg and Ryle.
Pathogenic Beliefs
The organizing convictions, usually learned in childhood, that quietly shape what we expect and what we dare, and why a good week rarely shakes them.
Shame and Guilt
Shame says “I am bad”; guilt says “I did something bad.” How the two differ, how shame hides, and why the difference matters.
Affects
What feelings are made of, why some people struggle to name them, and how putting finer words to a feeling can change what it does to you.
Anniversary Reactions
Why distress sometimes returns around the date of a loss, in its season, or when we reach the age a parent was when something important happened.
Vicious Circles
Why a pattern keeps going: not because of something buried, but because of what you do now and how people answer it, and why the loop usually produces the very thing it was trying to prevent.
Envy and Gratitude
The feeling nobody admits to, why it spoils what it touches, and the capacity to take in something good that Klein set against it.

Why These Belong Together

The seven topics look different, but they share a thread. Each describes something that shapes experience from the inside, often outside awareness, and each is easier to see over time than in any single moment.

A self-state is a whole configuration of feeling, thinking and relating that comes and goes. Mardi Horowitz (1987) called these “states of mind” and showed that people shift between them in recognizable, repeating ways. Schema therapists call them modes (Young, Klosko & Weishaar, 2003). From inside a state, it can feel like the whole truth about you; seen across weeks, it looks more like weather.

A pathogenic belief, in the language of Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson (1986), is a grim conviction about oneself or the world, usually formed in childhood to make sense of painful experience, that keeps a person from pursuing goals they actually want. These beliefs are often what a particular self-state “knows.” The frightened, child-like state believes it will be left; the harsh inner parent believes you must never fail.

Shame and guilt are the feelings most tightly bound to those beliefs. Helen Block Lewis (1971) drew the line that most later work follows: in shame the whole self feels exposed and defective, while in guilt the focus is on a specific act and what it did to someone else.

Affects are the raw feelings beneath all of it. Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963) argued that a small number of innate affects amplify whatever they attach to, and later writers showed how much depends on being able to notice and name them (Lane & Schwartz, 1987; Barrett, 2017).

Envy and gratitude are the two affects that most decide whether anything good from outside can be taken in. Melanie Klein (1957) argued that envy spoils the good thing because it belongs to someone else, and that gratitude is the capacity to receive it and feel enriched, which is why a person in the grip of envy cannot take help in and a person capable of gratitude can learn from almost anyone.

Anniversary reactions show that the inner life keeps time. George Pollock (1970) and Josephine Hilgard (1953) described people whose symptoms returned on the date of a loss, or when they reached the age a parent had been at a critical moment. Often the person had no idea of the connection until someone helped them see it.

Vicious circles are how all of the above stays in place. Paul Wachtel (1997) described patterns as loops kept going in the present: a fear leads to a way of behaving, the behavior draws responses from other people that seem to confirm the fear, and the loop runs again. A self-state, a pathogenic belief, or a wave of shame is rarely held in place by the past alone; it is held in place by this week, which is also why it can be interrupted.

How This Section Relates to the Rest of the Site

These pages lean on the others. Self-states shade into dissociation at one end and ordinary moodiness at the other. Pathogenic beliefs are described for each of the personality styles. Shame sits at the heart of the narcissistic style and guilt at the heart of the depressive one. Working with affects is the same territory as the affect regulation and mentalization capacities. And anniversary reactions belong to the long work of mourning.

As everywhere on this site, these pages describe patterns that show up across many people. They are not checklists for diagnosing yourself or anyone else.

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