The importance of basic affects

• Script Question to Mssrs. Nathanson and Kelly by Chuck Yopst, S.S.T.I. Member, 1/4/99
  • Changing Scripts: the poorly impeded interest-excitment version by Jonathan L. Grindlinger, M.D., 1/7/99
    
    

Jonathan,

I want to be the first say this is a very clear and cogent piece and congratulate you for it. I learned much and was validated in much of my thought. Your piece is already deposited in several e-mail mailboxes. Thank you.

"The clinical relevance of this fact is that scripts (at least the ones that we deal with in psychotherapy) are held together by intense and enduring affect and therefore, require counterbalancing intense affect to enable modification. "

So "intense enduring affect" would be Mood.

My only comment here is that we must not minimize in anyway the importance of the alphabet. I am in no way saying you are doing that nor is this even a criticism , say more of a gloss encouraging people not to leave the affects behind. Scripts and affect are simply different. Both are necessary conditions for adult cognitive life. I say this because in my experience, and admittedly that experience is limited to the last year, hammering away at an understanding of the nine affects and getting the patient simply to identify those feelings gets one a long way . The logic of the relationships of the affects and the consequences of them : scripts, become manifest logically and often on their own the more they see the power of identifying the nine words. The affects may be complex in adult life but the words are certainly cognitively powerful and immediately understandable for the most part(one of the more interesting observations is how often Distress is not understood). We should not think that those nine words are not the place to start or a place to leave quickly and we should certainly return to it over and over again. It is always the place to go if either the patient or us is getting lost. This view certainly has a lot to do with he fact that I am mainly dealing with people that are extremely insular(schizophrenics). This view also has a lot to do with my inexperience of even getting to the level of dealing with complex scripts except on a few occasions. This should not be surprising having dealt with few patients for more than 6-8 months. Finally the only way the patient gets form A to B is to identify the ‘feeling’, the physicality of the intense affect and by identifying it, no easy task, the patient cognitively begins to understand that in the very act of understanding the physicality of the affect they cognitively start to realize the implications of that and new cognition start to logically come into play. They teach us what the script is. At that moment they have to see the world differently which in itself can be very frightening and so it is our job to be there to modulate that affect and direct the patient back to Interest in themselves instead of reacting to and amplifying that internal negative affect.

Mainly Johanatan, thank you for the opportunity to engage in an exercises of clarifying my own thinking. Which if in error I trust will be corrected by some good soul out there.

Brian Lynch

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