Affect Pattern Chart

• Development of the human emotional system by K. Dring, 2/24/97
  • Affect and Autism by Don Nathanson, 2/26/97
    • Thank you for reply by K. Dring, 2/27/97
      
      

Just the other day a patient ended treatment, and I riffled through his file to find that he was the first person on whom I ran an Affect Pattern Chart in the initial phases of therapy. He's a therapist who uses it in his work, and the two of us were like little kids checking over the differences between him now and then. All of the affects save anger-rage had been at the upper limits, with anger almost absent. My initial diagnosis was that of a dissociative disorder, and treatment aimed initially at the explication and validation of every affective experience that occurred.

Yesterday he and I smiled as we realized that he lives in that harmony I call "the neutral state of no affect," the ideoaffective position from which we can spring into any affect as needed/indicated and to which we must return if we are ever to be able to live in the world with any kind of freedom. And yes, he does get angry when stimuli so push him.

I've done a bit of work with toddlers, validating the universal observation that toddler affect is global and usually at the high end of the scale; also I've been fascinated by the toddler-in-the-adult visible in some of my adult patients when you use the Affect Pattern Chart with them.

But to my knowledge, precious few child therapists have read Shame and Pride or Knowing Feeling, and no one is using the Affect Pattern Chart with them. Would you consider making up such a chart on the next group of child patients you see, then following up as the cases develop? I'd be happy to publish your results in an issue of the Bulletin of the Tomkins Institute.

Again, thanks for your insightful remarks.

• Affect pattern chart with children by K. Dring, 3/4/97