ABSTRACT
The obscurity surrounding early stages of ego organization or the nature of early ideational content is as nothing compared with the obscurity that clouds the understanding of primary affects and their vicissitudes. A fresh investigation of affect therefore requires not only more careful analysis of affective experiences but a plausible reconstruction of the affective states occurring during early phases of infancy, when analytic observation cannot be checked by examination of ideational derivatives. These findings suggest that it is to the lesser known components of any emotional cluster that one must turn in order to elucidate the early history of affect. And in this connection the most useful classification of affects seems to be that into tension affects and discharge affects. There is certainly ample scope for investigation since it is, at any rate, plausible that there are as many primitive affects as there are primitive ego-nuclei.
