Erotism and chaos.
There is a continuum from primitive, undifferentiated feelings that are simply the manifestations of homeostatic balance and imbalance to highly differentiated, pleasurable erotic feelings that characterize mature, intimate love relationships. Sensory reactions are elevated from simple reflex levels to highly complex, sophisticated affects that involve wide areas of the psyche. Thus, affects are associated with integration and organized psychic structure. Consequently they may function in various ways. Freud developed a continuum for anxiety as initially functioning as a conversion reaction enabling sexual feelings that cannot reach mentational levels or be consummated in erotic activity to be discharged. It reaches a final level of organization where it serves as a signal calling various defenses into play as emerging instinctual impulses threaten to upset psychodynamic equilibrium. I have focused on how affects, erotic feelings in particular, have an organizing function that binds a primitive inner agitation that occurs during what is called a prementational stage of the neonatal period. This is a stage that precedes psychological processes. Sexual feelings are generated as an attempt to bind inner chaos that stems from an amorphous, inchoate psychic state. Erotic feelings are experienced in order to smoothe inner tension. The patient tries but seldom achieves calm because the affective binding and structuralizing process, in itself, becomes painful and disruptive. I present several clinical incidents and also refer to so-called treatment relationships where the therapist absorbs the patient's chaos and then acts out sexually which leads to a total breakdown of the therapeutic setting.