Affect-Based Diagnosis

• Distress vs. anxiety by Don Nathanson, 7/12/96
  • Distress/Anxiety by Margaret Blakely, 7/13/96
    • Affect-Based Diagnosis by Don Nathanson, 7/14/96
      
      

OKAY! I'll give it a try. Wish I could have been in Maine---that's the kind of diagnosing I could really get my teeth into. To me, affect-based diagnosis makes a bunch better sense than what we have. But then, I'm a feeling-type of person...the real cognitive types might heartily disagree.

Despite all the reading and studying I do, I still return to my own experience to get confirmation. I have been dwelling on shame as the result of an impediment to I-E and E-J. I really think that it is actually the result of an impediment to ANY of the other affects, rather than just to those two. In this sense, it is truly different from the others...and that is why you can't plot it on Tomkins' graph. It acts differently upon each of the primary affects, but the result is the same---along a continuum with optimum in the middle, the other feelings are either stifled on the one hand or intensified on the other---but either way, they move away from center.

Vick has said that (paraphrased---so correct me if I heard wrong) therapy (or relationship or whatever) should seek to maximize positive affect, minimize negative affect, and reduce the inhibition of affect. How about postulating that the effect of shame=the inhibition of affect? So that shame is actually the inhibitor rather than an affect in its own right? (Maybe guilt could take the place of shame in the array of archtypal affects---just a thought). I can see shame as a sort of cloud that surrounds another affect/feeling/emotion/mood/even script, and grows thicker and thicker in direct proportion to the amount and/or duration of abuse of the affect in question. The extreme, of course would be analogous to a wall )as in MPD).

If I proceed with this idea about shame, I can imagine plotting a lot of diagnoses on top of the compass of shame. Please let me know what you think, Don, in case I'm really heading in the wrong direction. Any thoughts or suggestions from anyone would be greatly appreciated!

• Getting there . . . by Don Nathanson, 7/15/96
  • Geography by Margaret Blakely, 7/16/96