Unconscious Affect

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (8)

1. #01

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.18

   Self > Preface

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that psychoanalysis, enriched rather than foreclosed by neuroscience, can theorize (if not always cure) neuropathological conditions, and proposes a novel neuro-psychoanalytic account of affective subjectivity built on a Hegelian-inflected tripartite distinction between affects, emotions, and feelings—culminating in the concept of "misfelt feelings" as distorted conscious registrations of unconscious affects.

   the seemingly paradoxical notion of unconscious affects (i.e., feelings that aren't felt as such)… certain observations pertaining in particular to individuals' guilt repeatedly nudge him over the course of his intellectual itinerary to speculate about the existence of affects affecting the psyche without being consciously registered

2. #02

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.105

   8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the question of whether affects can be unconscious is the central unresolved problem at the intersection of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical practice, and that Freud's introduction of the superego and second topography forces a reconsideration of the consciousness-requirement for affect—with guilt as the paradigmatic test case revealing the theoretical difficulties this creates.

   is it possible for someone to feel guilty without being (fully) conscious of feeling this way? If so, what justifies, both clinically and conceptually, supposing that one can feel without feeling that one feels, namely, that there can be, so to speak, unfelt (or, more accurately, misfelt) feelings?

3. #03

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.110

   8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's dismissal of unconscious affects rests on a misreading of Freud's 1915 metapsychology, and that the same logic by which Lacan insists one can think without knowing one thinks should compel him to entertain the possibility that one can feel without knowing one feels — opening the way for a Lacanian-neuroscientific synthesis that would dissolve the rigid signifier/affect dualism in psychoanalytic metapsychology.

   he nowhere, not even for the briefest of fleeting moments in connection with Freud's vacillations apropos whether affects can be unconscious, entertains the idea that maybe one somehow can feel without feeling that one feels.

4. #04

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.126

   9. > F r e u d a n d t h e U n r e s o lv e d P r o b l e m of Unconscious Guilt

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's repeated oscillations between positing and repudiating "unconscious guilt" reveal a productive theoretical impasse: guilt cannot be cleanly assigned to either consciousness or the unconscious, because it shades into anxiety (itself subject to the same topographical ambiguity), and Freud's own metapsychological definitions of guilt as ego-perception contradict his clinical appeals to unconscious guilt—a tension Johnston proposes to resolve by engaging neuroscience of the emotional brain.

   It's as though he's compelled to play a conflicted game of fort-da with the theoretical object called 'unconscious affect.'

5. #05

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.140

   10. > F r e u d 's M e ta p s y c h o l o g i e s of Affective Life

   Theoretical move: By carefully parsing Freud's 1915 German terminology (Affektbildung, Affektbetrag, Affekt-qua-Gefühl, Empfindung), the passage argues that Freud's metapsychology of affect is more complex and less consistent than both Lacanian and Anglo-American inheritors acknowledge, and that Pulver's clinical categories of "unconscious affects" and "potential affects" largely rediscover distinctions already latent in Freud—setting up a critique of Lacan's tendency to reduce affect to a secondary by-product of ideational-representational structure.

   Unconscious affects are those in which the affect is aroused and experienced, but kept from awareness through some defensive process.

6. #06

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.144

   11.

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that both Freud and Lacan are genuinely inconsistent in their theorizations of affect, and traces Lacan's shifting positions from an initial dialectical entanglement of the affective and intellectual toward an increasingly unidirectional priority of signifier-ideas over affects—a move Johnston critiques as a motivated misreading that subordinates affect to the ideational order of the unconscious.

   Most other Lacanians simply pass over in silence those numerous textual occasions in which Freud mobilizes the hypotheses that (certain) affects can be and, in actuality, are unconscious.

7. #07

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.183

   12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

   Theoretical move: Johnston argues that the Lacanian-Copjecian claim that affects are never repressed (only displaced) rests on a conflation of two distinct French terms—*honte* (shame as felt feeling, *Empfindung*) and *pudeur* (shame as affective structure/formation, *Affektbildung*)—and that properly distinguishing them undermines the standard Lacanian position and opens space for the existence of unconscious affects.

   if one identifies pudeur qua Affektbildung as an affect, then, contra the Lacanian line adhered to by Copjec, one concedes the existence of unconscious affects

8. #08

   Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.188

   12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

   Theoretical move: The passage uses Lacan's Seminar VII account of beauty and *pudeur* (shame) as parallel defensive veils over the Real of death-tinged sexuality to argue that Lacanian metapsychology implicitly allows for unconscious affect, a position the passage then bridges to Damasio's neuroscientific three-stage model (nonconscious emotion → nonconscious feeling → conscious feeling) as a framework for resolving Lacan's underdeveloped affect theory.

   whereas the notion of unconscious affect remains controversial in certain sectors of psychoanalysis—for many Lacanians, the phrase 'unconscious affect' is oxymoronic—Damasio... posits the reality of affective phenomena below the threshold of self-awareness.