Freudian Passions: Psychoanalysis, Form and Literature

Freud's thinking about the unconscious has always been seen to be more about representations than affects. When it came to the passions of the transference and the demands of his hysterical patients, Freud was always more interested, wanted to move the focus away from the transference, and onto dreams. Hidden wishes more than manifest ones were what captured his imagination and style.

This book returns to the repressed theory of passions in Freud's own thinking, arguing that the repression, fixation and rhythmic movement of affects make up the roots and branches of psychoanalytic thinking. We can think of Freud's unconscious affects as a tree, with the most passionate and primitive affects that make up the core of our psychic life, moving and branching out into more elaborated emotions and representations. How we move the tree of our affects, or leave it, is integral to Freud's understanding of sexuality and the Oedipal Complex. Sexuality is the life force of our affects, the flows and the forms that connect us to other people, elaborating our egos. Contrary to many current theories of affect within sociology or psychology, psychoanalysis makes us understand that there is no such thing as affects without form. Or if there were such passions, we could know nothing about them. This is where this books starts, with the premise that affects are always in search of forms, but so often our affects are a return to earlier forms, to the first ones that dressed our passions.