The anatomy of a symptom: concept development and symptom formation in a four-year-old boy

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.

Unconscious Fantasy and The Priming Phenomenon

This paper is the third in a series of investigations into (1) the nature and development of unconscious fantasy, (2) its place in a contemporary model of mind that, parenthetically, suggests a possible solution to the problem of theoretical pluralism, and (3) its mode of operation in the mind. The aim of these investigations is to update the notion of unconscious fantasy, an indispensable construct in psychoanalytic theories that assume out-of-awareness mentation, and to situate that construct within contemporary views of mental functioning in disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and developmental psychology. At the same time, data accessible only through psychoanalytic work challenge these fields with findings that indicate the need for further investigation. This paper argues that experimental evidence on the phenomenon of "priming" lends support to one of the seminal claims in our field, one frequently attacked as an outmoded shibboleth: that is, that the past matters, whether encoded in declarative or in procedural memory. In common parlance, we are "primed" to respond to some situations in predetermined ways; the past primes us to experience the present in often unique and personal ways. There is evidence too that the priming mechanism and the encoding of subjective experience in declarative and procedural memory operate from very early in life.

Unconscious fantasy as a special class of mental representation: a contribution to a model of mind

Philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists have proposed that "mind" consists of myriad mental representations, namely, conscious and unconscious representations of belief/desire intentions. It is argued here that unconscious fantasies constitute a subset of the domain of mental representations, those concerned with conflicting wishes, affects, and defensive maneuvers. This proposal anchors the unconscious fantasy construct in a model of mind that accords with contemporary academic views in cognitive and developmental psychology and philosophy of mind, thus allowing psychoanalysts to enter into dialogue with those disciplines. Given this formulation, unconscious fantasy might well serve as a theoretical construct that applies to a large group of theories that share certain criteria regarding mentation. An analyst would then be at liberty to commingle insights from a menu of different theories without committing metatheoretical malpractice, resulting in a principled version of theoretical pluralism. Published case material from Kleinian, close process monitoring, and self psychological perspectives demonstrates how this redefined unconscious fantasy construct can encompass two major types of interventions that analysts make: content and process interpretations.