GeistHaus

Inner Life

Affects

Feelings are the medium of inner life. We rarely experience a relationship, a memory or a belief without some feeling attached, and the feeling is often what tells us that something matters. Yet feelings are surprisingly hard to pin down. Some people can tell you at once that they are “disappointed, a little embarrassed, and underneath that relieved.” Others can say only that they feel “bad,” or “stressed,” or nothing at all, while their body tells a different story.

In psychoanalysis and affect science, an affect is the basic, often bodily, component of feeling: the surge, sinking, tightening or brightening that marks something as important. Silvan Tomkins (1962) defined affects as innate biological responses that amplify whatever triggers them, making it urgent. Many writers distinguish the affect itself from the feeling (being aware of the affect) and the emotion (the affect combined with memory and meaning, shaped by a lifetime of experience) (Nathanson, 1992).

This page looks at what affects are, why some people find them hard to recognize and name, how naming them more finely can help, and how the ability to experience and reflect on feelings develops. Everyone has blind spots here; the same person may name grief easily and miss anger entirely.

Core Ideas

How Different Thinkers See It

Tomkins: Affect Theory

Silvan Tomkins, a psychologist working outside psychoanalysis but widely read by analysts, proposed that a small number of innate affects form the primary motivational system, more fundamental than drives (Tomkins, 1962, 1963). He described nine: two positive (interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy), one neutral (surprise-startle), and six negative (distress-anguish, fear-terror, anger-rage, shame-humiliation, disgust, and “dissmell,” the reaction to a bad smell, extended to people and ideas). Each has a characteristic facial expression. In his later script theory, Tomkins described how experiences of affect get bundled into “scripts,” rules for predicting and managing recurring scenes, which become the building blocks of personality. Donald Nathanson (1992) carried this work into clinical practice, especially around shame.

Krystal and Sifneos: Alexithymia

Peter Sifneos (1973) coined the term alexithymia, literally “no words for feelings,” after observing that many patients with psychosomatic illnesses had striking difficulty describing their emotions. They tended to talk about concrete events and physical symptoms rather than inner experience. Later researchers described alexithymia as a cluster: difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing them to others, and an externally oriented style of thinking (Taylor, Bagby & Parker, 1997).

Henry Krystal, who worked extensively with Holocaust survivors, approached alexithymia developmentally and as a consequence of trauma (Krystal, 1988). He argued that in infancy affects are undifferentiated and mostly bodily, and that development normally brings them into words and makes them bearable. Massive trauma, in his view, can arrest or reverse this process, leaving feelings experienced as raw bodily states rather than as emotions with meaning. Alexithymia is now understood as a dimension on which everyone falls somewhere, not a yes-or-no condition.

Lane and Schwartz: Levels of Emotional Awareness

Richard Lane and Gary Schwartz (1987) proposed that emotional awareness develops through levels, much as thinking does. At the lowest level, feelings are registered as bodily sensations (“I felt sick”). Then as action tendencies (“I wanted to hit something”). Then as single, global emotions (“I was angry”). Then as blends (“angry and a bit hurt”). At the highest level, as blends of blends, along with an appreciation that other people’s feelings may differ from one’s own. They developed a scale to measure these levels from people’s descriptions of imagined scenes. Their model sits naturally alongside psychoanalytic accounts of how feelings move from the body into words.

Barrett: Emotional Granularity

Lisa Feldman Barrett, from a constructionist perspective in affective science, argues that emotions are not fixed circuits but are built by the brain from bodily sensations, past experience and concepts (Barrett, 2017). One consequence is emotional granularity (also called emotion differentiation): the ability to make fine distinctions between feelings, telling apart, say, disappointment, resentment and grief. Research suggests that people who differentiate their negative emotions more finely tend to regulate them more flexibly, and are less likely to fall back on blunt coping strategies like drinking or lashing out (Barrett, Gross, Christensen & Benvenuto, 2001; Kashdan, Barrett & McKnight, 2015). Psychoanalysts would recognize the point: putting a feeling into words changes what it does.

Affect Regulation

Affect regulation refers to how we manage the intensity, duration and expression of feelings. Psychoanalytic and attachment researchers argue that this capacity begins between people: infants are soothed and helped to make sense of their states by caregivers, and gradually take over the work themselves (Schore, 1994; Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002). Academic psychology has mapped the strategies people use, from choosing and changing situations to reappraising and suppressing (Gross, 1998). Difficulty here shows up as being overwhelmed by feelings, cut off from them, or swinging between the two. See the affect regulation capacity for more.

Jurist: Mentalized Affectivity

Elliot Jurist (2005, 2018) proposed mentalized affectivity as the most mature form of affect regulation: not just managing a feeling, but understanding it in the light of one’s own history and meanings. He describes three elements: identifying feelings (including mixed and confusing ones), processing them (modulating, refining and making sense of them), and expressing them, outwardly to others or inwardly to oneself. Mentalized affectivity is a bridge between the mentalization tradition of Fonagy and colleagues and the older psychoanalytic interest in emotional experience. It emphasizes that the aim is not to feel less, but to feel with understanding.

How It Shows Up

Examples

The following vignettes are composites, not real people.

“Just Stressed”

For weeks, Ana writes that she is “stressed” about her father’s illness. Asked one evening what the stress is like, she pauses and writes: scared he’ll die, guilty she isn’t visiting more, and, to her surprise, angry that he never looked after himself. The anger had been invisible under the umbrella word. Once named, it was easier to bear, and easier to understand why she had been snapping at her partner.

A Body That Speaks First

Joel writes mostly about his stomach trouble and poor sleep. Over time, it becomes clear that both get worse in the days before seeing his business partner. He doesn’t describe any feeling about the partner, only that the meetings “go fine.” In Lane and Schwartz’s terms, the feeling is being registered at the level of the body. Whether it is anxiety, resentment or something else is still to be discovered, and it may also simply be a stomach that needs a doctor.

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Mood
A mood is a longer-lasting background tone, often without a clear object. An affect is usually a response to something, and can be brief.
Isolation of affect
Isolation of affects is a defense in which a person knows the facts of something painful but the feeling has been detached. Alexithymia is a broader difficulty in recognizing and naming feelings at all, not tied to particular painful subjects.
Intellectualization
In intellectualization, a person talks about feelings in abstract or technical terms to keep them at a distance. Emotional granularity is the opposite: precise naming that brings the feeling closer.
Bodily illness
Not every bodily sensation is an emotion in disguise. Fatigue, poor sleep, hormonal changes and illness can all shape mood directly. See bodily experience.

History

Freud’s early work treated affect largely as a quantity of energy that could be discharged, displaced or blocked, and much of classical theory focused on anxiety in particular. Later psychoanalysts, including Edith Jacobson and Otto Kernberg, gave affects a more central role in building the inner world. Tomkins (1962, 1963) independently placed affects at the root of motivation, and his work spread into clinical thinking through Nathanson and others.

In the 1970s, Sifneos and Nemiah described alexithymia, and Krystal (1988) gave it a developmental and trauma-informed reading. Lane and Schwartz (1987) introduced levels of emotional awareness. From the 1990s, affect regulation became a meeting point between psychoanalysis, attachment research and neuroscience (Schore, 1994; Fonagy et al., 2002), while Barrett’s research on emotional granularity and Jurist’s mentalized affectivity have each sharpened the question of what it means to know what you feel.

Sources