Emotion Research: Clinical Psychology

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic

Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapies are grouped here because of their shared emphasis of the criticality of early life experiences in determining the nature internal representations, personality, and behavior. These approaches to psychotherapy also share an emphasis on the importance of conscious awareness of conflicts and understanding of their origins (insight) as the primary means of inducing lasting personality change. This insight can be accomplished cognitively but is most effective when coupled with active, heightened affect, which may occur when the client is actively, affectively engaged with the psychotherapist (transference). However, no coherent theory of emotion exists for psychodynamic approaches as a whole, and theories of emotion for selected theoretical perspectives are therefore discussed separately below. The subdisciplines of psychodynamic theories differ in their conceptualization of the causes of psychopathology and emotional disorders, as will be seen below. In reading these theories, it is important to remember that they were conceptualized largely before the advent of modern cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Their language tends to be more vague than more recent descriptions, but one can see many points of agreement with recent information processing points of view. This is true especially for Jung's view of thinking and feeling, which is consistent with recent experiential psychotherapy theories as well as with the information processing view of emotion exemplified by LeDoux's work (LeDoux theory of affect, LeDoux circuit).

• Freud (Freud Museum,Freud Archives)
  Emotions are synonymous with "psychic energy" and are linked to instinctual, largely unconscious drives, which must be made conscious ("where id was there ego shall be") in order to be "tamed" and socialized.
  
  Different stimuli elicit different degrees and types of affective responses, depending on the individual's internal makeup (personality). Pathologies result from the repression of the discharge of this psychic energy "strangulation of affect" (i.e., lack of a full experiencing of affect associated with an (traumatic) event). This repression of affect causes repeated activation of thoughts somehow associated with the triggering event. Cure occurs through abreaction (also referred to as catharsis) (Nichols, 1986), that is, the emotional discharge associated with the full re-experiencing of the initial triggering event. Abreaction can occur through appropriate action or through verbal expression, when the conflictual material is brought into consciousness. Emotions, unlike ideas, do not have an independent existence at an unconscious level. Freud focused in particular on anxiety, which he thought was triggered by an unacceptable drive or wish surfacing into consciousness. Anxiety signaled the emergence of such repressed material into consciousness, hence the term "signal anxiety". For Freud emotions had little adaptive value. Emotions were made use of in treatment to identify conflictual or repressed material, which was then dealt with cognitively, through insight.
  
• Jung and Analytical Psychotherapy
  Both thinking and feeling are means of evaluating perceptions of the world, and both are considered rational (in contrast to the irrational functions of sensing and intuiting, which provide the information to be evaluated).
  
  Thinking produces propositional appraisals and requires more time, feeling determines values (good/bad) and is instantaneous. Ideas, especially repressed ideas, are linked (in the unconscious) via affect. Strong affect indicates that a part of the personality which has been repressed into the unconscious must be recognized and addressed. Jung's emphasis in psychotherapy was on experiencing, rather than theorizing about, in spite of the fact that interpretation, particularly the interpretation of dreams, played a major role in Jungian therapy (Kaufman, 1989).
  
• Ego Psychologists
  Emotions, while initially tightly linked with drives (i.e., instinctual impulses), differentiate through development into separate processes which are linked to motivation.
  
  The ego psychologists, like Jung, separate affect from basic drives and give emotions both an independent existence and an adaptive function. They also address the topic of affective development. The ability to experience different affects evolves, just as cognition does, enabling the individual to experience more differentiated affective states. Development progresses through the following stages: distress vs. lethargy; pleasure vs. unpleasure; full range of adult affective repertoire. Degree of affective complexity is an indication of mental health. Affect is considered a major motivating force in psychic activity and patterns of affective experiencing and responding are more difficult to change than their cognitive analogs. The affective patterns can distort cognitive and perceptual activity, causing maladaptive behaviors. Treatment focuses on first activating and then correcting these distortions in the context of the therapeutic relationship (transference).
  Blanck and Blanck, 1974; Greenberg and Safran, 1987.
  
• Object-relations/Self Psychology/Interpersonal
  Emotions are viewed as primary motivational mechanisms linked with satisfying biological needs through interpersonal interactions. Affect is not associated with the discharge of drives but rather a means of communicating with the world and as adaptive signals about the relative state of satisfaction or frustration of basic needs.
  
  These psychodynamic schools of thought are grouped together because of their emphasis on the development (and pathologies) of internal representations of self and others and their emphasis on the importance of interpersonal relationships. Object relations theorists such as Kernberg, Fairnbairn, Winnicott, and Klein begin to speak about internal structures representing self and others and identify the integration of these structures as one of the roles of emotions. These representational theories can be thought of as precursors of the more modern notions of cognitive-affective schemas - complex combinations of representations and affective evaluations. Interpersonal theorists consider emotions to be integrating tendencies and divide them into satisfaction tendencies, which motivate towards the satisfaction of basic biological needs, whose exact patterns is individual-specific, and security tendencies, which motivate towards acceptance by others (Sullivan, 1956). Psychopathology results from suppression of the basic biological needs, whose exact nature is a function of the personality (Horney's "true self"), in order to gain acceptance from others (via an "idealized self"). Emotions, both positive and negative, arise in response to the satisfaction or frustration of basic needs. Emotions are thus important signals indicating the nature of the true, authentic self, and have a critical adaptive value. The role of emotions as a means of communicating is particularly critical in the early infant-mother communication and the establishment of the initial attachment, which provides a foundation for later interpersonal attachments and internal mental representations of self and others. Self-psychologists (Kohut and Basch) focus in particular on the internal representations related to the self, the level of their integration, and the degree to which they enable objective, adaptive perceptions of self and others.
  Greenberg and Safran, 1987; Basch, 1976

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