ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on occurrent emotions, on emotional episodes, bouts of affect that strike us or come over us, which have a passionate, embodied, expressive, experiential aspect, an experience of a certain temporal duration. It shows that existing philosophical accounts of emotions fail to fit the phenomenon, that is, that they fail to capture the emotionality of emotions. The book emerges as a response to existing philosophical conceptions that do not have the resources to do justice to two crucial aspects of our ordinary experience of emotions. It consists in turning to Freud's original texts in order to extract insights that are relevant to the question of emotion formation. Philosophy, psychology, common culture and even contemporary psychoanalysis regard Freud as an important historical figure whose relevant insights have been assimilated and whose theories and case studies have no credence in terms of scientific evidence.
