A Developmental Line for Affects: The Relevance of Contextualization of Affects for the Psychodynamic Treatment of Early Developmental Psychopathology

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present perspectives from clinical work, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology that together provide a useful framework to think about and work clinically with patients with early developmental psychopathology, in particular certain aspects of borderline personality structure. Our argument is that conceptualizing a line of affective development starting with basic, primary affects, and progressing to nuanced, contextualized, tertiary affects helps locate the origin of the affective instability and dysregulation of some patients. When this line of affective development is interrupted, a limited, inflexible self develops. When the development of tertiary affects is facilitated, it allows for a richer, more flexible self. We also argue that, separate from splitting as a defense, a black and white form of cognition often accompanies the early experience of primary and secondary affects. When development of more sophisticated, contextualized affects is interrupted, this binary form of cognition tends to persist, but when that development is facilitated, richer, more nuanced forms of cognition also contribute to a more robust self.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The fields of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience have until recently, been unduly focused on cognition, following a Cartesian split between mind and body. The cortex, the evolutionarily later, outer layer of the brain, is where cognition is supported neuroanatomically. Neuroscience has shown us in recent decades, that emotions/affects are generated from evolutionarily older structures below the cortex (subcortical), and are roughly homologous across mammalian species at this primal level (Panksepp, 2011). We come to understand that affects, rather than interfering with cognition, are critical to mammalian adaptation and, for humans, inextricably intertwined with and supportive of cognition. Various subcortical structures, such as the basal ganglia, for example, have been shown to be involved in core aspects of adaptation such as decision-making, suggesting a complex interaction between cognition and affects.

2. We use the term “acting out” to refer to a specific defense in which archaic, likely preverbal, unconscious mental processes are obligatorily put into action, acted out, as opposed to put into words or handled cognitively; we are not referring by this term to the more specific psychoanalytic meaning in which “acting out” is more related to avoiding some particular issue or conflict within the analytic work, by acting it out outside the analysis, although that definition could apply to this particular case as well.