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AFFECT
Loan-word borrowed from the German ''Affekt''. In nineteenth-century psychology the term is synonymous with emotion or excitement. Borrowing from that tradition, [[psychoanalysis]] defines afect as a quantity of psychic energy or a sum of excitation accompanying events that take place in the life of the psyche. Affect is not a direct emotional representation of an event, but a trace or residue that is aroused or reactivated through the repetition of that event of by some equivalent to it. Like [[libido]], affect is quantifiable and both [[drives]] and iamges are therefore said to have a quota of affect.
In [[Freud]]'s earliest theory of [[hysteria]] (the so-called [[seduction thoery]]), the blocking of the affect correspodning to a traumatic event has a causal role; because it cannot be expressed or discharged in words, it takes the form of a somatic symptom. In his later writings Freud consistently makes a distinction between affect and representations, which may be either verbal or visual. The verbalization of the [[talking cure]] thus becomes an intellectualized way of discharging affects relating to childhood experiences.
One of the criticisms levelled at [[Lacan]] by certain of his fellow psychoanalysts (for examle Green 1977) is that he tends to pay little attention to affect.
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