ABSTRACT
Affect, as proposed by Jacques Lacan, “comes to the body”—it never arises from the body itself, never primary but always secondary in relation to discourse. However, it has often been said that Lacan “neglected” the issue of affects. For Lacan the starting point is the pair fear and pity, affects deriving from the “fear for itself” and the “fear of the other”; these affects are based on a specular, mirror, or imaginary relationship. Lacan will concentrate on anxiety seen as the main affect, the one that is worth considering in the clinical practice of analysis, as all the other affects are misleading. For Melanie Klein, there is no feeling that is not attached to and expressed by an unconscious phantasy. The connection between an affect and an object is unconscious phantasy. Klein uses the expression “memories in feelings” to account for a very basic sort of memory, in which pre-verbal emotions and phantasies are revived in the transference situation.
