Affect

“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 affect as a quantity of psychic energy or a sum or 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 or by some equivalent to it. Like libido, affect is quantifiable and both drives and images are therefore said to have a quota of affect.

In Freud’s theory of hysteria (the so-called Seduction Theory), the blocking of the affect corresponding 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 leveled at Lacan by certain of his fellow psychoanalysts is that he tends to pay little attention to affect.”

Excerpted from: Macey, David. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory. New York: Penguin, 2001.