each affect amplifies its own way

• Impediment by Margaret Blakely, 3/11/96
  • analogic amplification by Don Nathanson, 3/12/96
    • Analogic amplification by Margaret, 3/12/96
      
      

Every affect calls attention to its triggering source in its own peculiar way. Anger brings more steady-state pressure, joy makes acutely less pressure, but shame brings the kind of thinking that is experienced as interference with thinking. Each affect is responsible for one out of the nine forms of normal consciousness; nothing can be called conscious unless it has been amplified by one of these mechanisms. The style, the way, the mode, the feel of the consciousness brought to us by shame affect is exactly the sort of confusion you describe. Rather than a fault in the mechanism of consciousness, shame produces a highly specific form of consciousness every time it is triggered. We, in the therapy system, are just beginning to recognize it.

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