3
The Cultural Construction of Affect

IN THIS CHAPTER, I DO NOT ATTEMPT A COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF THE topic of affect, which is obviously huge and partakes of many disciplines. What I would like to explore is the perspective on affect as symbolic, that is, as culturally constructed and transmitted. In this sense, it becomes an important mediating vehicle between the private psychobiological subject and the world of other subjects in which he or she must find her place. The notion of the symbolic construction of affect emphasizes the shaping and differentiating of emotion as "signifier of the flesh" by culture, as many contemporary anthropologists insist (Levy 1973; Rosaldo, 1984; Lutz, 1988; Schweder, 1991). Emotion, wrote Lutz (1988) in an important study, is not simply a psychobiological given of human life but reflects complexly evolved systems of belief and acculturation. This was basically Lacan's point in the aforementioned quotation. Affect is not "a special density"—presumably meaning a kind of phenomenon discrete from other expressions of mental life. It is not an expression of the body independent of or beyond the symbol, but is structured like every other manifestation of human behavior and thought. For Lacan, affect cannot be separated from the unique place of desire in the constitution of the subject.

Of course, Lacan as usual disposed of the problem a bit too brusquely in his haste to move on to the "meat" of his presentation, which, as we know, featured the signifier as the central element of subjective experience. We should not repeat this error, as the signifier cannot be considered without emotional valence, and speech and feeling are inherently embodied. Words are constantly entangled with bodily metaphors and sensual connotations, and emotions cannot be divorced from their bodily roots. There is certainly something affectively charged about the signifier in general (there is no speech without an accompanying affect and a set of messages about how to feel about what is being said), and affect, although captured in the net of symbolic meanings, remains a universal biological property of the human species. We know, for instance, that similar situations elicit common emotional responses and that certain facial and bodily gestures are indicative of those responses across the great majority of the world's cultures. Probably these linkages are greatest in early childhood, again suggesting a "hard-wired" basis for some manifestations of affect. As Schweder (1991) argued, however, the polarizing debate about nature versus culture that has animated both anthropologists and psychoanalysts has never been more sterile than in dealing with the problem of affect. Although the "psychobiology" of emotional states seems undeniable, it is equally obvious that words and concepts for emotions, conceptions of appropriate contexts for affective expression, and private meanings of emotions and their implications for self and others vary widely across cultures and are shaped enormously by cultural experience.

If affects then are not simply "natural" responses of the organism to its environment nor direct manifestations of inborn drives, yet are omnipresent accompaniments of human interaction and private reflection, we need to inquire more deeply into their form and function in human experience. Psychoanalysis, as Green insisted, must grapple with the clinical problem of a painful lack of affect or of a sense of deadness in patients (notably those complaining of their nonexistence), as well as the more general, overarching question of how people are able most of the time to sustain a sense of vitality and aliveness, while going about their highly patterned routines and socially constructed roles. Schweder (1991) proposed the extended metaphor of "soul loss" as a comprehensive description of the multiple ways in which depression is manifested across different cultures. He noted that the experience of absence of a vital part, leaving the subject empty, sad, and frightened, with somatic symptoms, is a universally known condition, although explained in various ways by different societies. Analysts speak in terms of a loss of emotional investments, leaving the world a flatter, more barren place and depleting the ego of nourishment, while psychiatrists of our time refer to chemical imbalances and neurotransmitter deficits to describe a medical problem of depression.

Other cultures make reference to witchcraft or to a violation of spiritual principles to interpret the depressive loss of self. Schweder chose the term soul to refer to what he considered an observing inner self common to all peoples and societies—a piece of the human endowment, as it were—a self that can lose its sense of vitality and feel emptiness. To be sure, he also underlined the variability in the constitution of this inner self across cultures, in what sustains and defines it, and it was around this point that he finally situated the undecidable debate over the universal applicability of psychoanalytic constructs for understanding human behavior. In essence, he asked, is the inner "soul-self" basically organized, as psychoanalysts have theorized, regardless of context, with equivalent affective states, object-relations structures, and defensive operations, or does the shaping of human behavior by culture extend to the creation of different selves for which familiar Western concepts are not strictly applicable?

Because I cannot very well avoid this issue, I declare my own preference for the fuzzy middle ground, one that rests on a foundation of intrinsic human potentialities and universals of life (birth, injury, pain, comfort, loss), while leaving plenty of space for the differential organization of these givens. Because psychoanalysis has tended naively to favor and assume psychobiologic explanations for the "natural" appearance of emotions, my emphasis in this discussion is on the anthropologist's (and Lacan's) point about the symbolic construction of affect. "Emotion," said Lutz (1988), "is about deep commitments to particular other persons and to seeing events in certain ways" (p. 216). What distinguishes affect from a "cold" cognition, Rosaldo (1984) concluded, is the sense of engagement of the actor's self. "Emotions," she wrote, "are about the ways the social world is one in which we are involved" (p. 143). As Schweder (1991) observed, children have to learn, not the basic vocabulary of emotion, which may be innate, but its syntax. The variegated hills and valleys of a four-year-old's emotion to which he alluded will become smoothed out and structured in development, so that an adult tends to live his affects in a manner recognizable, communicable, and acceptable to the social world of other subjects to which he belongs.

An important subcategory of this discussion in anthropology of particular interest to Lacanians concerns the differential construction of self within different linguistic systems. Rephrased in these terms, the question becomes whether there is one basic human self articulated differently by each linguistic community, or whether the structure of each language dictates an alternative form of self? No doubt this alternative is once again too stark. Human beings cannot be all that different, after all. And yet anyone who has spent time abroad and attempted to penetrate another culture knows that there is always, even in the most similar societies, a residue of otherness from which the visitor feels excluded (see Whorf, 1956). Anthropologists, for example, have noted the extent to which many cultures are strongly sociocentric, deemphasizing individuation in favor of powerful group identities from which the self cannot be separated (see Kurtz, 1992, for a strong presentation of this nonuniversalist argument). Lutz, for instance, described a situation in which she requested a group of Ifaluk women on the small Pacific island where she was living to accompany her to the local well, only to be rewarded with a set of blank, dropped faces for her inappropriate use of the first person singular pronoun to suggest a shared event. Ifaluk society represents a variation on a common theme of submersion and submission to a group identity that is characteristic of many cultures and represents a limiting case for the application of Western notions of individual motivation and responsibility. This perspective was well expressed by Geertz (1974) who wrote:

Even within our own heterogeneous culture, we know that psychic life is organized variously for different persons and that our psychoanalytic assumption of a shared reality across the range of fellow colleagues and patients is an optimistic and generous gesture, bridging great differences. More pertinent to our discussion, how and when a person experiences affect and the significance it carries for her will depend on features unique to that individual, her life history, and the microenvironment of her family of origin. Along with Schweder, I agree that the common feeling of emptiness and loss is probably similar and infectious across a range of personalities, yet its force, meanings to the person, and consequences are inevitably different and not totally sharable. In the most general terms, we can hypothesize that these variations in quality and structuration of affect represent differential outcomes of the process of symbolization of primary life experiences. That is, intrasubjective psychic experience, beginning preverbally and corporally, undergoes a process in the course of which it becomes "mentalized" or mediated by symbolic processes, and these representations permit intersubjective communication about inner experience to others. The representations and symbols, of course, come from without, from the fund of languaged narratives available in the surounding culture as they are passed on, primarily by parents, beginning soon after birth. These signifying narratives belong to the Other, to the field of language shared with other members of the relevant social universe to which the subject belongs. They are also private, by their unique links (metonymies) with personal experiences. As Bucci (1985) wrote in this context, "Children learn to 'name,' to attach words to experience, in an interpersonal context in which experience is shared" (p. 594).

The burgeoning and complex field of narrative within psychoanalysis addresses this point (see Shafer, 1992, for a model in many ways relevant to a Lacanian approach). Nothing can be understood or known until it becomes part of a story, and the stories we learn are delivered to us by many hands. Naturally we can only make incomplete sense of much of what is told us, but we pursue coherence, comfort, and satisfaction of various desires in interpreting the narratives available and in creating new ones. The interpersonal context is charged with often enigmatic emotional energies that give their stamp to the language employed. From a Lacanian perspective, there is a materiality to the signifier, a concreteness bound to uniquely personal bodily sources that undermines the rational, intersubjective meaning by which we attempt to contain private experience. Nonetheless, we have no recourse outside the narratives available to us and are obliged as languaged creatures to use them in giving voice to affects as shareable expressions of personal existence.

To the extent that Lacan's concept of the symbolic register is synonymous with culture, it consists of organizing rules and structures that act as a template for the nascent subject. The specific linguistic universe surrounding the child from the moment of birth defines the possible forms of self-organization and thereby at once enables and constrains the possibilities for the expression of core inner experiences, coded, according to Bucci, in concrete, nonlinguistic representations. This brings us to the crucial question of desire raised by Lacan. As a key term in the Lacanian framework for any discussion of vitality and subjective "aliveness," desire describes an essential human characteristic that takes man beyond the purely biological level of the drive or of phylogenetic emotion. Lacan's conception of desire has philosophic roots, notably in Hegel, and he was, at least for the middle period of his theory construction, drawn to the philosopher's parable of the encounter between master and slave as a metaphor for the clash of human desires. In Hegel's mythic story, two subjects each seek an absolute recognition of their own unique individualities from the other. It is in a way a description of the narcissistic dilemma as formulated by Modell (1980) that the self needs the other for affirmation of its existence, yet constantly risks being injured or destroyed by the other's negation. Lacan (1964), influenced by Kojeve's interpretation of the story, wrote, "Man's desire is the desire of the Other" (p. 38). This means that in a two-way dialectic, man desires what the other wants (he wants to assume the other's desire and possess what is coveted by the other), but, at the same time, he desires to be desired by the other (to be the object of the other's desire). Hegel's portrayal of this encounter was a stark one: Either one subject accepts total submission to the other as a slave or he possesses the other in a total, exclusive way that confirms him in his glorious uniqueness as the master. The narcissistic dilemma described by Modell (1980) is the wish to obtain confirmation of an ideal, diose self while risking in the process a total collapse of self. As he observed, the other is necessary to confirm the imaginary self but is also a threat to its existence.

Lacan's major theoretical move in the mid-1940s was to attempt a resolution of the Hegelian impasse by recourse to a new principle of the symbolic order, derived from the work of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. From this perspective, master and slave are defined mutually by a symbolic field external to them that organizes and structures their relationship. Language with its rules and cultural formulas exemplifies this field, which Lacan also called "the big Other," the third element in any intersubjective encounter. The symbolic field of the Other sets limits and defines the place of each individual subject in the world, obliging the participants in any intersubjective relationship to subsume or modulate their narcissistic desires. Whatever fantasies of greatness or oneness a person may entertain, as a speaking subject he is ultimately constrained by secondary process logic and the reality principle, whose violation brings serious symptoms of psychic disarray. Within the symbolic transference, the Other is represented by the position of the analyst.

For Lacan, the symbolic order does not change the fundamental desire of the subject, which is unconscious, but directs it away from a dyadic, mirroring situation into speech. Desire must now pass through "the narrow defile of the signifier." Lacan defined it as a fundamental demand for love and recognition that arises from the unusual situation of prolonged dependency and helplessness in infancy and the secondary "birth" by separation-individuation from the mother-child matrix as a unique, named subject of language. From a slightly different vantage point, desire is an effect of primordial object loss and the retroactive symbolization of the lost object within language that forms the substrate of the emerging self. The object is longed for but can never be restored as such, only called to within speech. For this reason, desire can never be totally fulfilled within the limits of human communication. At the same time, along with its highly abstract, symbolic features, desire, as Lacan stated, always has libidinal consequences. The notion here is that the human yearning for completeness, beginning when the infant first differentiates the mother as a subject from her function as the object of physiologic, drive needs, never becomes totally divorced from those bodily roots but attaches itself to a pressing physical urge that, unlike desire itself, does hold the possibility of satisfaction. Thus the demandingness of a frustrated toddler for various, seemingly arbitrary objects indicates his painful struggle with desire, when the means of expression are limited. This example, discussed by Lacan (1956-1957), suggests that the toddler's amalgam of need and desire manifests itself in an affective form that takes shape within the infant-mother interaction. Over time, it becomes an increasingly differentiated communication about what the child can say he wants. Given the wide disparity of mothering practices across cultures, it stands to reason that the grammar of this communication will be constructed rather differently. To cite just one example, Kurtz (1992) contrasted the Hindu mother's custom of carrying infants on the hip with the middle-class American style of intermittent, intense, face-to-face gaze. Still other cultures keep a young child on the mother's back. Each of these behaviors has substantial effects on the embodied qualities of early intersubjective experience. More important, the specific dyadic interaction may not go smoothly for many reasons, and the grammar may be inadequate or obscure, so that need and desire fail to be structured in any communicable manner for some children. This can be described in Bucci's (1985) terms as a failure of translation into the linguistic code.

Lacan (1959-1960) attempted to define the ethic of psychoanalysis as never to give up on one's desire (p. 321; ne jamais céder sur son désir), desire being idiosyncratic and irreducible. This principle would seem to take him into an exploration of how the thread of affective expression leads toward a better apprehension of desire, but such was not at all the case. A rereading of Lacan in this way might help us better understand the purpose of psychoanalysis, if we discard the reifications of early Freudian theory. The crucial problem for many patients is precisely a loss of contact with desire and an incapacity to be a subject of desire. At the most basic level, this reflects a serious difficulty in managing and expressing affect. When lived experience remains private and uncommunicable—if there are obstacles to symbolic integration—as in the case of Margaret Little, the outcome may be her sense of "total annihilation" in place of a conviction of existence as a person "acknowledged by . . . other people" (Little, 1985, p. 13). Green (1977) in his abbreviated article, "Conceptions of Affect," wrote that the fundamental task of affect is to supply content to what is experienced only in unrepresentable forms. In the presence of an inner void, he observed, intense affect may be the only proof of one's existence. In "Passions and Their Vicissitudes" (1980b), Green went further:

In Lacanian terms, desire that insists along the chain of speech must find its expression in affects, which not only embody the subject, but also convey his historical experience—the symbols he lives by—in language that can be sustained in the universal discourse with others. Affects, Green (1977) suggested, are not simply powerful discharges, but serve as symbolic mediators of inner processes, giving them a voice. Patients lacking this resource are left in the nonexistent position, out of life. Lacan's (1974) insight that the natural habitat of the body is language seems correct. In other words, the human body inhabits a symbolic cultural space that rules its functions to a very great extent. When and what to eat, how and where to sleep, whether to sit or stand, and all the other elementary behaviors of the human species are codified in abstract terms that have no other reality than language. Contra Lacan, however, I would argue that signifiers must offer access to implicit models of experience outside of language, concrete intersubjective experiences, which are no doubt founded in the preverbal, in kinesthesis, and in sensory motor life. In Bucci's (1985) dual coding model, "emotion is linked more closely to perceptual representations" (p. 128). She stated, "painful affect is likely to be associated more intensely with imagery than words. Much of this painful material may never be reproduced in verbal form." Nonetheless, she continued, "language is the means by which private experience, knowable directly only to the patient, can be transmitted to the analyst" (p. 128). Early bodily experiences of self with others (or "self with Other"), shape the organization of desire in specific ways, as Kurtz (1992) suggested. Signifiers are anchored to the body as a permanent dimension of life.

The coding of nonverbal representations seems difficult to subsume under Lacan's model, except as a feature of the imaginary realm of mirrors and images underpinning a false self. Winnicott held a broader view of self-formation, incorporating the holding environment as embodied and the mirror in its intersubjective connotation as the mother's face with the affects it conveys. I believe that this perspective best explains Kohut's concept of the selfobject—that is, an environment mother who sends messages and defines a field within which the subject can take shape. For Winnicott, the delineation of self from other, mediated and buffered by a transitional space, requires the omnipotent illusion of creating the object, which then survives to prove its independent existence. At this point there must be a step into the realm of verbal symbols. The subjective object of Winnicott is the child's creation, developing in concert with a complex set of perceptual and sensory experiences. In contrast, the separate maternal subject (as absent, as not where she was imagined to be) exists within the symbolic order. As a consequence, the origins of love and desire for the other are concurrent with the emergence of self and other in the symbolic realm. Green (1980b) added the element of passion to this formulation, making a connection between the symbolic order, which provides an identity, and "Eros," the love of life or the joy in existing as a subject. This is close to Lacan's (1972–1973) formulation, "we don't know what it is to be alive except for the following fact, that a body is something that enjoys itself" (p. 23). He repeated many times that this corporal enjoyment (jouissance) is something we don't know anything about. Jouissance, for Lacan, represents the self's longing for a state of being prior to its insertion into the symbolic order that creates the divided human subject, which is a function of the signifies The problem recognized by Green and Lacan is that Freud's notion of affect as instinctual derivative, thus a biological product, is inadequate. Affect mediates nonverbal bodily experiences by linking them to words. It dwells in the languaged world. In this way, in disagreement with Bucci (1985), I find it more precise to say that these experiences simply "are." In Lacanian terms, they exist in the real of the body, which can only be known indirectly through mediation (even imagery serves this purpose).¹

In this vein, Green (1973) remarked that both ego psychologists and Lacan shared a distrust of affect as an essential component of psychic life and tended to subsume it under cognitive operations (the signal) or the movement of the signifier, respectively. For the Freudians, the signal is a message generated by the ego as a warning about the appearance of a drive derivative. For Lacan, the movement of words (signifiers) carries affect (images and feelings) in its wake, but its causes lie elsewhere (in the Other, in the signifying chain that determines the subject). Lacan took this step because he saw the primacy of the symbolic mode of functioning in the human world and recognized that the existence of the subject depends "kit and caboodle" on some kind of suturing of fragmented inner experience onto symbolic structures, which are by their nature decentering and extrinsic to the individual human being with his idiosyncratic passions and fantasies. At the same time, the corporal juice that lubricates language, the desire that gives it substance and force, is neglected in Lacan's later writings, which seem to depict a disembodied and abstract subject, like an algebraic function. This leads me to suggest another Lacanian reading in which affect holds a signifying function, as the expression of a subject facing the limits of the symbolic order and the gap separating her from a full realization of desire. The prime example of this involves the sexual relationship. "There is no such thing as a sexual relationship," Lacan wrote in many places (for example, see Lacan, 1972-1973, p. 144), meaning that there is no way to symbolize a harmonious, complete relationship, which always falls short of its goal. Man's "exile" from the sexual relation, he proposed, creates the gap-generating affect. "Isn't that tantamount to saying that it is only owing to the affect that results from this gap that something is encountered . . .?" (p. 145). In these passages, Lacan appeared to be speaking about the affect of love, emerging on the level of an intersubjective relationship to fill the defect in realization of fantasy and of drive. The affect of love, like all affects, however, is always accompanied by a story, by models and images that can be expressed and shared.

In similar fashion, the affects highlighted by Kohut (idealization of the object, excitement in being seen, and so forth) point to an intersubjective desire. Although animated by passion in that sense, Kohut's conception of the "self" and its emotional states nevertheless seems abstract and disembodied, with an idealized aura. The child desires the mother's empathy, mirroring, and gleam in her eyes, but not, as Lacan might say, "her tits." It is as though a particular cultural version of the subject has been accorded a privileged status. In the larger scheme of things, the firm center of initiative and healthy narcissism of the beaming American self suggested by Kohut's descriptions may turn out to be an aberration. Here we may need an eventual anthropology of psychoanalysis to sort out these contingent elements. In the meantime, a conception of health or normality built upon control and self-realization may be damaging for the field. Affect, as Green never tired of reiterating, always tends toward overflow and disruption. As passion, it goes beyond the expressible and acceptable, even as it paradoxically may strengthen the self. According to Green (1973), in its role as "signifier of the flesh and the flesh of the signifier" (p. 332), affect cannot be severed from the real of its bodily roots.

In the clinical sphere, we often come up against an inability to express affects, perhaps like Margaret Little's silence on the couch. Her difficulty may have been in part the lack of specific mediating words and ideas that Winnicott eventually provided her, but it was also the failure or weakness of the internal intersubjective function that enables private states to be expressed in the presence of another. His belief in the necessity of a profound regressive experience in analysis may have been in part based on his intuition of her need to reestablish this function, which he understood as requiring a reliving of the physical and emotional mix-up of the primary mother-child relationship. A similar story to Little's is told in Winnicott's (1986) account of his analysis of a schizoid young man who was at times silent or asleep but, at other times, simply chattered on in a boring fashion. The patient's striking symptom of empty speech was emphasized in Masud Khan's discussion of the case. The young man, who was not given a name, at one point stated, "I remember a striking difference beween the desire to be silent last time and the desire to get away from chattering. Chatter has limitations. . . . I like the idea of chatter but pure chatter has no edge to it, no purpose. Chatter is talking to no person" (p. 143). Khan discussed the absence of play in this patient's speech and Winnicott refered to its defensive, false self functions. Presumably, the genuine desire to remain silent implies a true self that cannot be communicated. The problem of this man's nonpresence, however, was never linked explicitly with affect, which Winnicott may have felt was simply too dangerous for someone verging on psychotic decompensation. The patient stated, "I never became human ... I missed it" (p. 96). What Winnicott did assert was the need for deep regression to recapture the earliest demarcations of self from other, which he interpreted to this patient in what seems a surprisingly intellectualized way.

Today, many of us are uncomfortable with Winnicott's heroic measures, which seem at the least outside the range of most therapists—rightly so, in my opinion. I concur with Modell (1990) that the notion of a literal temporal and psychic regression in itself is questionable. What does seem plausible is that, for many patients, the symbolic function has been damaged; certain links have been broken; certain kinds of risks of communication will not be taken. Among other things, the problem of affect in difficult clinical situations of the type Green, Modell, and Winnicott describe requires reexamination of the function of the ego ideal. As Freud (1914) observed, the ego ideal is the product of internalization of transgenerational codes that regulate personal relationships, mediated through contact with the parental superego. It is the superego (largely unconscious) and not the ego (largely conscious) of the parents that provides the contents of the ego ideal. Lacan (1956–1957) attributed this set of functions to the paternal metaphor, which establishes "the Law." This Law can be identified with the symbolic order itself, which the father in his function as a symbolic object, a "third" of separation from the plenitude of the mother-child dyad, represents. I hypothesize that a failure of paternal mediation, a failure of transmission, is fundamental to disturbances of the ego ideal and its functions. Failure may result either from traumatic intrusion and an excess of parental presence or from absence and psychic death. The father, for example, can violate his symbolic function or abdicate from it. More broadly and accurately, one or both parents, even if physically present, can fail to transmit or uphold the symbolic order (Kirshner, 1992). The place of the father or of any third party is established in the first place by the mother, who recognizes that the child does not belong to her but has an independent legal and social status. Either parent may transgress this limitation by using the child narcissistically as a pure imaginary extension of self. The child's response to such exploitation may then be to construct a false self of his own, out of touch with vital desires and talking an empty and boring speech. This is another reason why the analytic relationship itself takes on so much importance for this type of case. Winnicott (1986) advised pastoral counselors, in fact, that boredom in the presence of a troubled parishioner was the best indication for referral to an analyst!

For patients with a fragile sense of existence and a serious narcissistic vulnerability to fragmentation, the central task of treatment can be reduced to reestablishment of trust in the analyst. One might speak of reaching a regressive position of holding or of a symbolic repetition of a core vulnerable state that reopens the question of basic trust, analogous to Balint's (1968) notion of the basic fault. The early relationship is not literally repeated, but the basic structural flaws previously covered by defenses against relatedness and affect are exposed. The analyst's task, of course, is to respond to this vulnerable self by containing and helping the patient articulate affective expression. In the end, the analyst must be seen as a person operating under a system of values (with an ego ideal), who fulfills a symbolic function, as presumably Winnicott did for Margaret Little (not without dangerous lapses). She must respect her own and the patient's essential limits and recognize the painful history subsumed in their encounter. Perhaps we could speak in this context of a restoration of transmission or of a repair of the intersubjective function of the ego ideal, in part by the analyst symbolizing, through words, her emotional experience within the countertransference. The objective is to contain affective communications until they can be verbalized and shared in the virtual space of the therapeutic relationship. In the next chapter, I make use of these concepts to explore clinical data from analytic practice, where we again confront the complaint of nonexistence.

¹There are two important issues here that lie outside my present focus. First, there is the question of the organization of imagistic thinking by linguistic structures and whether there is such a thing as nonlanguaged thought. Second, there is the problem of memory as Bucci (1985) posed it. Can there be nonverbal memories based on physical states of the body that are potentially verifiable? This formulation is close to Modell's (1990) position about affective experiences bound to the body, which serve as a reality check on memory. My hunch is that there probably are such imagistic, sensory traces from early life that underlie a few basic concepts like presence or absence and pleasure or unpleasure, and that, possibly, traumatic events are partially coded in this form.