ABSTRACT
Despite the unquestionable progress made in our knowledge of affect, one is still waiting for a theory that would be unanimously accepted. One might well ask whether there will ever be such a theory. No doubt the obscurities surrounding the problem have something to do with this, but the nature of the phenomenon itself plays an even greater role. Whereas psychical phenomena relating to the intellect have aroused strong convictions that their solution was in sight, by resort to models inspired by cybernetics, artificial intelligence or computer science, rejecting outside the area of scientific investigation everything in the activity of the mind that did not satisfy the criteria that made it possible to approach it from this point of view—affectivity, in fact—until very recently one could not find equivalent theories that would take affectivity as their main focus and give rise to a general theory of psychic activity whose extension would be seen from this point of view. If at best there is a strong inclination to the idea of eliminating affective phenomena from the map of valid knowledge, there is even greater reticence to place affects in a dominant vertex from which the other concepts relating to psychical life would be ordered around it. Is this not because the very existence of affect and its supremacy over the whole psychical life would have something very wounding about it for our idea of mankind?
