Introduction. Collision of affect and intellect determines the course of human psychic evolution and sets a system of coordinates for personality development. Throughout life, every person has to reconcile his or her desires with the requirements of reason. Objective: to study the development of the psyche from the perspective of the relationship between affective and intellectual forms of object-oriented activity. Methodology and methods: the principle of activity and the cultural-historical approach. Results of the research. The study starts with finding out the role of affects in the communication processes, where the psyche deals with another psyche: they are exchanging affective signals, the affective waves collide and form associations, etc. In the simplest case, the affective and expressive reaction of a living body A serves as a signal for action of a body B. The regular exchange of affects coordinates the activity of bodies A and B in such a way that they form a single organism or community. The highest, universal psychic form of communication is speech, which allows us to express any affect and to form complex communities with the help of stereotypical signals. Natural speech is an emotional “contagion” (Vygotsky) that ensures coordination between community members. Human sign language, including the verbal one, emerges from the fusion of thought and language processes – the synthesis of affects with concepts. Vygotsky established that in the behaviour of animals, and first in children too, thinking and speech “completely destroy” each other, while in cultural person, thinking becomes inseparable from speech. In the article, this transformation is explained based on understanding of thinking and speech as the contrary forms of object-oriented activity. Affective speech turns into rational language as the individual assimilates ideas and meanings embodied in cultural artefacts. This assimilation takes place in the course of jointly-divided activity with the artefacts. Concept is an internalised idea of a thing. Vygotsky rightly saw concepts as “the key to all genuinely human” and the source of our freedom, interpreted as “the affect in the concept”. Following Spinoza and Vygotsky, the author considers the affect and the concept as two coordinate axes of the human psyche, and cultural-historical psychology should study the concrete forms of synthesizing the affect with the concept in cultural history and in the process of forming the child’s psyche.