A heuristic comment

    Shame and Affect Theory (Nathanson)
    • Introducing Shame Language to Clients by Brett Schur - Havertown, PA - bschur@msn.com, 3/12/96

    A heuristic comment
    by blynch, 3/20/98

    For heuristic purposes:

    I have found ,as I go along, that maybe classifying the affects into positive and negative might not be such a good idea right off the bat. They are in themselves all neutral, are they not? Thinking of them as positive and negative kept me, for a long time, from realizing that the positive affects could be used for ‘negative’ ends. Each culture develops scripts and assigns moral value to the action that follows form the use of those scripts. “Positive” scripts take on a morally “good” sense and “negative” scripts are associated with “bad”. Likewise the resulting actions of withdrawal, attack other and self and avoidance all have a negative connotation. This makes one, at the beginning, think of the compass as all bad even though it is clearly pointed out that the actions have a range from appropriate to non appropriate. My point simply being that the descriptive terms from the beginning influence greatly the course of learning the theory. I understand one has to start somewhere and that eventually it is very useful to divide them into positive and negative. I understand that they are neuro-physiologically different.

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