My unease about Language's preeminence

Something that has been troubling me under new names or new instances for some time now has to do with how language is used in lacanian theory.  The way the story goes is that the squalling little infans, the biologically human and pre-linguistic child is nearly another being entirely from what it will be once it accedes to language, to the No that grounds signification, after which it will always mean rather than be. Now, I am persuaded by so much of this argument and so comfortable in its basic parameters that I sometimes have difficulty formulating my unease with it.

But, due in part to last semester's intellectual escapades (Ernesto Laclau, William E. Connolly, also The Affect Studies Reader) I find myself feeling that something significant is lost in the psychoanalytic accounting of these matters... and that something either is or has something very much to do with affects.

My thoughts run as follows...

It seems that there is a lot of research and documentation about the infans' relation to others and in that research much indication that before using language at all, that those squishy little ones are more than able to signal with affect and receive affective signals. Then given the broad continuity of affect signals, whether one is a speaker of any language or not, it seems that while language may very well retroactively overcode those things, those affective signals or expressions... but that they retain their form in large part. As such it seems that to make the moment of learning to speak a language such a divisive cut is to ignore those factors and how they impact how we live, relate, love and hate, and most pertinently how we mean and interpret. On a particularly moody and glum day, a joke may not make me laugh, an idea may strike me as inert, a poem I have loved before may seem lifeless and dull.  On a particularly ebullient day, I may find large significance in small, everyday things, hear the poetry in the kids massing for the bus, etc. But if affective relations show this continuity from before we spoke to now, isn't it somewhat non-dialectical to assume that once language is uploaded that those factors are simply taken in, absorbed by language? Would it not seem more apt to assume that their continuity across that boundary of speech (the laugh of the infans and the laugh of the octogenarian being mutually recognized & recognizable) is an indication of their persistence either 1. alongside each other without significant mutual impact, or (as I think is the case) 2. in an evolving dialectic, perhaps (and only perhaps) in which learning how to manage their overlap involves finding each already at work in the other? Isn't the clinical process of the 'talking cure' in part about finding the words for the affects - and isn't that finding also a way of feeling the affect in question for what it actually is in its connections with one's life? If I am plagued by some floating and unshakable guilt whose justification I cannot name, and by whatever means I do manage to find its name, to comprehend what it is that I feel guilt about, do I not then have the chance to feel the guilt for what it really is, meaningfully connected to it object?

That this - what Freud means (or so I understand him) by the idea of 'working through' - linking of the affect with the words that name it adequately is not simply a furthering of my alienation in the realm of the signifier?

Anyway, such run my thoughts. & saying so, repeatedly (as this is not the first time I have tried this line of thought) as a process of working through has lessened the unease in some ways, in that at least I am inching toward a clearer notion of precisely where and with what I am uneasy. Not a very big step perhaps, but progress (or so I console myself).