Home > International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis > Emotion

The word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere, "to set in motion." It initially referred to the idea of physical movement and then assumed a figurative meaning associated with mental movement.

The term is infrequently used in psychoanalysis, where the term affect, derived from German Affekt, is preferred. Sigmund Freud, however, in a text written in French in 1895, used the expression "étatémotif" ("emotive state") to designate what was translated in the German editions as Affekt. It is with the theoretical developments associated with Kleinian psychoanalysis that the term emotion reappeared. The reasons for the change are significant.

Freudian metapsychology is centered on the study of the mental apparatus, which is considered, if not as an isolated entity, at least as one that can be isolate. In the Freudian model the mental apparatus is charged with drives, whose effects—affect and representation—are observable. Affect corresponds to the quantitative aspects, and mental representations correspond to the qualitative aspects of the drives. Positive affects accompany the satisfaction of drives, negative affects accompany the state of tension within the mental apparatus (pleasure/unpleasure principle). The object of satisfaction, that is, the object that triggers the discharge of the impulse, is contingent, vicarious. For Daniel Widlöcher, the affect refers to internal regulatory functions of the mental apparatus: a discharge of impulses and signals intended to provide information to the mental apparatus, as Freud suggested in his second theory of anxiety, and that emotion adds a third reference, that of communication with the external object, "a modality of expression intended to inform others of a particular situation, laden with value for the subject."

It should come as no surprise therefore that the theories assigning greater importance to object relations have given a central place to the concept of emotion. Compared to affect, it contains levels of additional complexity, because it is a means of communicative exchange between self and other, through its behavioral (especially facial) expressions, which have been extensively studied by specialists in development and cognitive function, and because it refers to nuanced qualitative aspects rather than simply quantitative aspects combined with a positive or negative valence.

Melanie Klein insisted on the extreme nature of the baby's emotions at the start of its extra-uterine existence, associated with love and hate relations directed at the (partial) object in what she called the "paranoid-schizoid position." Later, when the infant achieves the "depressive position," emotions become more nuanced, hate is tinged with guilt, love with ambivalence. Wilfred Bion gave the concept of emotion an essential role in his description of the intrapsychic world as a world of relations between internal or interiorized objects. For Bion the links between internal objects are emotional links, just as the links between the subject and its external objects are emotional in nature. He chose three types of emotional links: these correspond to love relations (L link = love), hate relations (H link = hatred), and knowledge relations (K link = knowledge). The first two, L and H, are emotional links; these are unstable and associated with splitting. The K link is the psychoanalytic link par excellence and has the advantage of stability. It does indeed involve an emotional link, in the sense that it corresponds to an emotion associated with uncertainty and the tension experienced in the face of the unknown in anticipation of meaning. Psychoanalytic therapy develops K links.

DIDIER HOUZEL

See also: Concept; Darwin, Darwinism, and psychoanalysis; Shame; Links, attacks on; Love-Hate-Knowledge (L/H/K links); Memories; Paranoid-schizoid position; Quota of affect; Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-Logic, The.