ABSTRACT
Though clearly an ambiguous compliment, this says several things that ring true about Melanie Klein and affects. The very titles of some of Klein’s most important papers indicate how central affects or feelings were for her. Psychoanalysis took some time to break free from Freud’s emphasis on the biological aspect of affects, and to include a fuller account of the subjective experience of feelings. Klein’s work has been fundamental in this development. Broadly, there are three phases in the evolution of Freud’s thinking about anxiety. In the first phase he thinks of affects as tension phenomena, arising from an excessive charge of libido. In the second phase, affects are seen as arising from a conflict between a drive and forces that oppose its expression. In the third phase, with his revised theory of anxiety (1926d) he describes affects as signals, emitted by the ego as a danger signal.
