Everyone's affective posture actually emerges in his or her behavior. There is probably no better way to demonstrate this observation than to examine the affective posture of our three therapists – Rogers, Perls, and Ellis – all with the same client, performing the same tasks. Of course, we will also want to know something about the affective posture of the client. Surely her unique characteristics will call out specific reactions from each therapist. The Shostrom film of Perls, Ellis, and Rogers with Gloria, a client, though not intended to be examined for affective interactions, is actually quite perfect for this task. We can compare the behavior of the therapist with his goals in therapy – his philosophy or theory of therapy, if you will, as well as compare how each therapist gets along with this particular client.

In this chapter we try to bring Gloria as a client more to life in the written text both as a figure in her own right and as an integral part of our discussion of the affective postures of each therapist. Even though we continue to focus primarily on Rogers, Perls, and Ellis, and do not have enough material to do justice to Gloria as a whole person, the unique ways that she expressed her thoughts and emotions reveals a depth to hidden aspects of the emotion system that cannot be sensed except in the dynamic interaction of people.

In this book we use concepts from emotions theory, dynamic systems theory, complementarity, and attachment theory to model the complex process of personality development and change. Like other accounts of complex systems from the time of Freud and Allport, through Skinner, Erikson, and Block, we use the individual as the unit of discovery and understanding. In the introductory chapter, we examine the thesis that affect is the central organizing force in individual personality and the integrative link between domains of psychological functioning. In doing so, we briefly present the historical context of research on emotion.

Even though the field of psychology has seen many recent and significant advances in emotions theory over the last two decades, much of the contemporary work on human development, clinical work, and personality development is still fragmented. In this book, we take advantage of the new understandings from emotion theory and research to forge a more integrated view of human development. Additionally, there are lessons to be learned from the hermeneutic, the postmodern, and dynamic systems approaches to knowledge that have arisen in recent times to challenge Cartesian methods of thought and analysis. Years ago, John Bowlby dared to integrate the seemingly disparate theoretical paradigms of psychoanalysis, ethology, and general systems theory in building a model of how and why humans form attachments. It has proven to be a richly generative theory that has grown beyond its own beginnings. Similarly, psychology might well profit from perspectives from today's newer epistemological and scientific models.

In the next sections of the book we turn from the large sweep of life as it has been portrayed in the socioemotional analysis. Now we examine some smaller emotional behaviors, the habits of expression in writing and behavior. We show that these are much more than disconnected habits; they form meaningful bits of the structure of personality. They are like fractals – small versions of elements with similar forms making up a larger form. Some critical behaviors are like crystals in that they are made of elements that resemble each other and then form a larger structure. The larger form resembles the elements, and, psychologically, the resemblance may be both meaningful and symbolic. These small pieces of behavior are what the broader categories of attachment are composed from or result from. We have already been integrating the forms of specific emotions such as shame or anger into the portrayal of attachment styles, but now we will go in a different direction with the same intent.

It is in the small, significant bits of behavior that people such as Silvan Tomkins, a founder of emotional analysis, or Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, erratically form their often surprising insights about the larger wholes. From subconscious uses of expressive emotional words to the larger patterns of intellectual organization, the tendency toward emotional wholeness of the person is always building, adapting to new circumstances, and then rebuilding on the old foundations.

The Affective Connection

Knowledge of emotional processes can give a person a sense of second sight or even magic. Years ago a young man was being introduced to his new professional colleagues in the department of psychology; among them was Silvan Tomkins. As the young man elaborated on his many interests, views, and intellectual dilemmas, he quite exceeded the time that other speakers had taken. Silvan turned to a colleague, lowered his voice, and said, “That young man lost his beloved mother at an early age.” In fact, he had. But when Silvan was queried about his acquaintanceship with the young man, he replied, strangely enough, that he had never even met him.

This story is emblematic of the Silvan mystery. Tomkins seemed endowed with a supernatural knowledge of the human mind and its longings. He always seemed to know more about people than was discernable from the observable facts. Indeed, at the memorial service held for Silvan in 1991, not only did renowned psychiatrists single out his uncanny ability to fathom the essential elements of people in a way that few could, but even his garbage man described him as a “yoda” – a wise man.

Sometimes Silvan would explain his inductive process, and one could follow it, but it took a long time to absorb and understand just what was taking place.

In undertaking this work, we have immersed ourselves in the splendid, unfolding, and confounding detail of three men's lives. Each man's life, his loves, his ambitions, his accomplishments, and his defeats have become not only a part of our work, of how we view emotion, but also of ourselves. The paths of their lives have altered the paths of our lives. Of course, in a mundane sense, it is always true that what you work on becomes you, means become ends, as we have said before. Because of that, we are even more thankful that these three lives are easy to respect, that the men are easy to be charmed by and attracted to, and that the ideas they leave behind are so compelling and still sometimes refreshing.

At the beginning of this psychological examination of three individuals' personal and work lives, we were fixed largely on adding information about emotion to the major developmental theories of our time – we were fixed on filling in the emotion gap. We began our project thinking about emotion almost as a distinct part of the human being. To be a genius at emotion, we thought, was to have mastered that compartment of life. One would detect emotion, understand emotion, manage emotion, and manipulate one's own and other's emotions efficiently. However, the emotional data from just three lives speaks of and tells us far more than we expected. The management of emotion, while still interesting, is almost incidental.

The wealth of material available to us from the three cases of practicing clinicians – through the various ideographic venues – afforded an excavation of a depth seldom available to the developmental researcher, although it is more common in clinical practice. To the clinician's rich access, we add insights from affect theory and attachment theory, quantitative and qualitative analysis of emotional and intellectual process over time, and contextualization within a dynamic systems framework. In so doing, we have arrived at deeper understandings about developmental process and several interesting discoveries involving attachment relationships, affects as dynamic systems, the transformation of affects into values, and continuity and change. Those new understandings are summarized and elaborated upon in this chapter as we bring the observations of the three lives together and consider what we have learned about different spheres of development.

In Chapter 2, we introduced several concepts from dynamic systems. One concept was that personality works as a system that originally arises from chaos and becomes self-organizing. Such dynamic systems are thought to be characteristic both of nonliving systems such as tornadoes and of living systems with concepts of “self” and identity. In human life, we have proposed, emotions are the energy forces and the primary organizers of experience. Emotion saturates experience with vitality or dread, hope or despair, feelings of omnipotence or weakness – which are powerful motivational forces. Emotion provides direction and force.

Historically, developmental theory has been captivated by two central romances – the notion of “early experience” (pedogenesis) and the doctrine of “continuity.” Like most romances, both theories attempt to simplify lives and to make them a mythical whole, sometimes a heroic myth. And like most romances, there is a certain truth to them, but also a loss of complexity and depth that can border on untruth or at least limit the romance to a special case. To prepare the reader for our approach of examining lives with a new look at their complexity and depth, we need to present a short history of these compelling romances and then open the field of possibilities. This exercise will involve considering theories of complexity and chaos or dynamic systems and will require that the reader have some familiarity with the new vocabulary. Our analysis does not rely upon the mathematical intricacies of these new approaches; it, however, often relies on the hypotheses and explanations that are generated.

Both psychoanalytic models of development as well as contemporary attachment theory follow the early experience and continuity theories. In classic psychoanalytic theory, early experience and continuity through repetition are paramount. Personality is largely formed by the age of five, and early conflicts are played out successively in later relationships, with the individual in thrall to an unconscious but headstrong repetition compulsion. In attachment theory, continuity and early experience are required. Infants form highly specific, qualitatively differentiated attachments to primary caregivers.