Models of Shame and Addiction
Ron Potter-Efron, Bruce Carruth in Shame, Guilt, and Alcoholism, 2013
Affect theory is a general model of human development that centers around the role of affect as a major component in human behavior. It was developed by Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963, 1984, 1987). Tomkins specifically is concerned with shame as one major affect and described shame in detail in his classic work (Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: The Negative Affects, 1963) as well as in Nathanson's edited volume on shame (1987). Readers are also referred to Nathanson's introductory chapter in that volume and to Kaufman's The Psychology of Shame (1996) for excellent summations of Tomkin's thoughts. Tomkins argues that affect comprises a biological system with clear functions apart from drives. He believes that affects are sets of glandular, muscular, and skin receptor responses located in the face that then provide essential information to the entire organism. He thus reverses the standard concept that feelings start deep within us and work their way outward. Instead, they start in the face and work inward. Affect remains primarily facial behavior throughout life, although Tomkins acknowledges that adults are quite adept at masking their facial messages both from others and themselves. Tomkins identifies nine affects that he holds to be present universally in recognizable facial configurations. Seven of the nine affects
Naming the nameless
Björn Salomonsson in Psychodynamic Interventions in Pregnancy and Infancy, 2018
To sum up, Freud’s metapsychological account of infant distress has various problems. First, it delineates better the development of the drive than of the object relationships and eclipses the object’s interactive contributions. Second, if his rendering of the baby’s primary narcissism were his exclusive view – which we now know it was not – of her position in the object world, we would have a hard time explaining the object’s contributions. Third, an analytic model of the baby’s experiences must account for his representations – but Freud does not do this consistently and thoroughly. Fourth, to comprehend a baby’s distress we need a viable affect theory. Freud’s version is couched in quantitative terms and divides the affect into motor and ideational components. This seems fair enough; an affect occurs in the body and is about something. The challenge is to account for preverbal ideations. Freud’s “hostile” object is such an effort, but we need more sophisticated concepts to get behind infant distress. To this end, the next chapter will account for post-Freudian theoreticians.
Introduction
Lisa Jean Moore, Monica J. Casper in The Body, 2014
Sometimes called affect theory, affect studies attends to sensation, or rather the embodied, expressed experiences of feeling and potentiality. Scholar Russ Leo (2011) defines affect as “indices of experience, attempting to describe the sense of the world in detail, with sharper attention to the rich lived realities of seemingly sterile concepts.” Not quite feeling, not quite emotion, and not quite expression, affect is a difficult concept to pin down. In The Affect Theory Reader, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010) note that: “affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.”
Queering the Palimpsest: Affective Entanglement Beyond Dichotomization
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
Christa Binswanger, Andrea Zimmermann
One characteristic of affect theory is the attempt to relate “our power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it” (Clough, 2007, p. ix). This dual relationship concerns all aspects of intersubjectivity and technology at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. Theorists such as Clough, Gould, and Angerer who focus on technological changes, insist on replacing psychoanalytically informed understandings of the unconscious, with cybernetics, neurobiology, and theories of digital media to capture the “auto-affective circuit” as well as “digitized algorithms” (Clough, 2015, p. xi). Still, affect theory is by no means homogenous. Accordingly, whereas some of these criticisms by Clough and others may be valid, other aspects of affect theory remain untouched by these objections. Indeed, Seigworth and Gregg (2010) highlight the broad range of theoretical streams within the field, whereas Garde-Hansen and Gorton even point to “the slipperiness of the term and its usage within academic study” (2013, p. 34). In our view, this slipperiness is due to ‘the in-between-ness’ of affect at the interface of body and mind, which blurs the boundaries of the term (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 2).
Thinking Through Affect and Psychoanalysis: Introducing Papers from the Conference “Worldings, Tensions, Futures”
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
This group of articles flows from a conference held in the fall of 2015 at Millersville University, Lancaster, PA, that gathered many of the leading and emerging voices in the field of “affect theory” that had, over the past decade, opened up new questions in the humanities, the social sciences, and in artistic and research practices through the disturbances that “affect” brings to questions of subjectivity. Titled “Worldings, Tensions, Futures,” the conference featured presentations and discussions emerging from the spaces between the material and the affective, the networks of tensegrity from which worldings come into being.
Psychoeducation against depression, anxiety, alexithymia and fibromyalgia: a pilot study in primary care for patients on sick leave
Published in Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care, 2018
Eva O. Melin, Ralph Svensson, Hans O. Thulesius
According to Tomkins´ affect theory, affects are innate, unconscious, and strictly biological portions of emotions [9–12]. Each basic affect, such as anger, fear, or shame, has a specific program involving face mimicry, body gestures, voice, and autonomous nervous and hormone system physiology [9–12]. Emotions can be intertwined by both conscious feelings and unconscious affects [9–13].
Related Knowledge Centers
- Emotion
- Physiology
- Psychoanalysis
- Affect
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Surprise
- Anger
- Rage
- Frown