ABSTRACT
Affect has always occupied a place of prime importance in psychosomatic thinking. Even before psychosomatics became a discipline, the relation between affective life and illness constituted a common finding in medical thinking, first in German psychiatry of the nineteenth century, then in the work of a certain number of psychoanalysts. In order to show how affects are recognized and interpreted in psychosomatic praxis, this chapter elaborates Marty’s economic conceptions on the affect of anxiety. The psychoanalysis of somatic illnesses, expanding on Freudian conceptions, has established relations between certain modalities of mental functioning and processes of somatization. The negative hallucination of affect, or this denial of internal perceptions of somatic and bodily origin, initializes the process of creating a rift in the ego and, thus, underlies the centre-point of splitting whose existence Freud postulated in 1938. A new metapsychological conception of affect forced itself upon Freud.
