Lesson plan
Disaffectation
The term disaffectation was coined by French psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall as a strictly psychoanalytic term for alexithymia, a neurological condition characterized by severe lack of emotional awareness. McDougall felt that alexithymia had become too strongly classified as a neuroanatomical defect and concretized as an intractable illness leaving little room for a purely psychoanalytic explanation for this phenomenon. In coining the term McDougall hoped to indicate the behavior of people who had experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity. Such individuals, unable to repress the ideas linked to emotional pain and equally unable to project these feelings delusively onto representations of other people, simply ejected them from consciousness by "pulverizing all trace of feeling, so that an experience which has caused emotional flooding is not recognized as such and therefore cannot be contemplated". They were not suffering from an inability to experience or express emotion, but from "an inability to contain and reflect over an excess of affective experience." 'Disaffectation' conveys a deliberate double meaning.…
Article summary
The term disaffectation was coined by French psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall as a strictly psychoanalytic term for alexithymia, a neurological condition characterized by severe lack of emotional awareness. McDougall felt that alexithymia had become too strongly classified as a neuroanatomical defect and concretized as an intractable illness leaving little room for a purely psychoanalytic explanation for this phenomenon. In coining the term McDougall hoped to indicate the behavior of people who had experienced overwhelming emotion that threatened to attack their sense of integrity and identity. Such individuals, unable to repress the ideas linked to emotional pain and equally unable to project these feelings delusively onto representations of other people, simply ejected them from consciousness by "pulverizing all trace of feeling, so that an experience which has caused emotional flooding is not recognized as such and therefore cannot be contemplated". They were not suffering from an inability to experience or express emotion, but from "an inability to contain and reflect over an excess of affective experience." 'Disaffectation' conveys a deliberate double meaning.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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