ABSTRACT
Written by a pioneering New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, David Levy, this seminal statement on affect hunger was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1937. Affect hunger is defined as “an emotional hunger for maternal love and those other feelings of protection and care,” which Levy illustrates through a number of adoption cases in which maternal rejection appeared to be causative. The importance of this work lies in its being the first paper to suggest the paucity of relational affects in psychopathic disturbance, such as love, and perhaps object-related anger; and it warns us that a surface adaptation may mask a fundamental deficit in, or loss of, a capacity to bond. This is the chronic emotional detachment of psychopathy.
