In this readable meditation on the nature of emotional
experience, Joseph Jones takes the reader on a fascinating
walking-tour of current research findings bearing on emotional
development. Beginning with a nuanced reappraisal of Freud's
philosophical premises, he argues that Freud's reliance on "primary
process" as the means of linking body and mind inadvertantly
stripped affects of their process role. Further, the resulting
emphasis on fantasy left the problem of conceptualizing the mental
life of the prerepresentational infant in a theoretical limbo.
Affects as Process offers an elegantly simple way out of this
impasse. Drawing in the literatures of child development, ethology,
and neuroscience, Jones argues that, in their simplest form,
affects are best understood as the presymbolic representatives and
governors of motivational systems. So conceptualized, affects, and
not primary process, constitute the initial processing system of
the prerepresentational infant. It then becomes possible to
re-vision early development as the sequential maturation of
different motivational systems, each governed by a specific
presymbolic affect. More complex emotional states, which emerge
when the toddler begins to think symbolically, represent the
integration of motivational systems and thought as maturation
plunges the child into a world of loves and hates that cannot be
escaped simply through behavior. Jones' reappraisal of emotional
development in early childhood and beyond clarifies the strengths
and weaknesses of such traditional concepts as infantile sexuality,
object relations, internalization, splitting, and the emergence of
the dynamic unconscious. The surprising terminus of his excursion,
moreover, is the novel perspective on the self as an emergent
phenomenon reflecting the integration of affective and symbolic
processing systems.
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