THE SEARCH FOR PSYCHIC TRUTHS

The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant's Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational

The author cites the prominence of theories that locate serious adult psychopathology in the preverbal infant's inability to formulate or represent traumatic experience. The work of two such authors, H. Levine and D. B. Stern, is briefly considered. The frame of reference for this investigation is that clinical and academic research findings are highly relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. It is argued that when such findings are considered, a view of the infant with "primordial and unrepresented" states of mind has little evidence to support it. In fact, research findings summarized herein point to an opposite view: that of the "competent infant," one with highly accurate perceptual discrimination capacities and an innate ability to register and represent subjective experience in both procedural and declarative memory, even prenatally. Given the infant's competencies, it seems implausible to hold that representational deficits are at the heart of serious adult psychopathology, which is instead seen to be the result of defensive maneuvers against unknowable and unspeakable truth rather than the absence of a preverbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories that espouse "primitive mental states"; "unrepresented," "unformulated," or "unsymbolized" experience; or "nonconscious" states.

ATYPICAL DISCOURSES

This essay outlines novel ways of communicating with patients by altering semantics, syntax, word use, or sounds. Language is viewed as a tool for coping with problems rather than a medium with which to mirror external reality or internal human nature. This view of language emerges from a pragmatic critique of truth. The broader goal of this essay is to weave together the philosophy of pragmatism, especially as it has been articulated by Richard Rorty, with the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Clinical case examples are discussed.