A closed workshop which aims to link to work across disciplines on social applications of affect and drive.
The aim of the ISRF political affect group is to map out the ways that psychoanalytic thought about affect can enhance understanding of social behaviour and institutions, especially when these are political. The project traces out two main lines of enquiry. One is theoretical and aims first, to parse the expression ‘political affect’ into its different senses and second, to connect these to the concept of affect as it arises and is employed in psychoanalytic thought. It can be argued that for Freud, writing in German, the concepts of drive and affect designate the same phenomenon. However, in the English language Standard Edition of Freud’s work, Strachey’s unfortunate translation of Trieb as ‘instinct’ rather than ‘drive’ confused the issue, so that drive was then interpreted in biological terms. At the same time anglophone experimental psychology, by allotting affective labels to systems of inherited or, ‘instinctual’, animal behaviour patterns (now called drive systems) confused things further by equating affect with instinct, while different post-Freudian psychoanalytic schools also contributed to the conceptual drift of both affect and drive. However, it may be argued that psychoanalytic object relations theory has provided a return to Freud’s original formulation of affect as the phenomenological manifestation of drive in the mind. Object relations theory also gives a purchase on the way changes and transformations of affect arise, in response to internal psychological pressures and to external social events while, equally, such transformations come to have an effect in the world. With due attention paid to the conceptual issues outlined, the main line of thought pursued by the political affect group is empirical, and looks at the different ways and places that affect is posited or thought to manifest itself in the social world. In this approach the political affect project aims at a broad interdisciplinarity that will benefit from links to work in other disciplines on social applications of affect and drive. It is expected that learning from social anthropology will significantly contribute to this goal.
