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Il bambino competente: la mente infantile non è primitiva né pre-rappresentazionale
Abstract
Di fatto, oggi sono in voga delle teorie che collegano la psicopatologia grave dell'adulto all'incapacità del bambino nella fase preverbale di formulare o rappresentare le esperienze traumatiche. A questo proposito, vengono analizzati i lavori di Howard B. Levine e Donnel B. Stern, partendo dall'idea che i risultati delle ricerche empiriche siano decisamente rilevanti per la teorizzazione psicoanalitica. Da questi risultati emergono scarse evidenze a supporto dell'ipotesi di un neonato con stati mentali "primitivi e non rappresentati". Di fatto, i risultati delle ricerche suggeriscono proprio il contrario: l'idea di un "neonato competente", dotato di una capacità di discrimina-zione percettiva estremamente accurata e di una capacità innata di registrare e rappresentare l'esperienza soggettiva, a livello di memoria sia procedurale sia dichiarativa, persino nel periodo prenatale. Non sembra quindi plausibile sostenere che i deficit di rappresentazione siano il nucleo della psicopatologia grave nell'adulto, la quale invece è il frutto di manovre difensive nei confronti di verità inconoscibili e indicibili e non dell'assenza di una capacità rappresentativa preverbale. Le ricerche pongono un'importante sfida alle teorie psicoanalitiche che postulano cosiddetti "stati mentali primitivi", esperienze "non formulate", "non rappresentate", "non simbolizzate" o stati "non-consci".
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Extending the Jacksonian principle of the hierarchical development and dissolution of function to the development and dissolution of memory, researchers have concluded that implicit (procedural) memory is a primitive system, functional shortly after birth, that processes information automatically, whereas explicit (declarative) memory matures late in the 1st year and mediates the conscious recollection of a prior event. Support for a developmental hierarchy has only been inferred from the memory performance of adults with amnesia on priming and recognition–recall tests in response to manipulations of different independent variables. This article reviews evidence that very young infants exhibit memory dissociations like those exhibited by adults with normal memory on analogous memory tests in response to manipulations of the same independent variables. These data demonstrate that implicit and explicit memory follow the same developmental timetable and challenge the utility of conscious recollection as the defining characteristic of explicit memory.
Psychoanalytic treatment is often indicated when trauma and its psyche/soma companion, dissociation, severely disrupt symbolic functioning and associative linking. After Freud’s initial thinking on these matters, repression replaced rather than supplemented dissociation (which occasions segregating units of experience) as the primary defensive response to severe trauma. Because psychoanalysis had “repressed” the salience of dissociation as actively motivated (though passively experienced), an unnecessary schism has occurred between trauma theories and mainstream North American psychoanalysis, and within psychoanalysis itself. To fully restore dissociation’s role in primitive mental states and provide a more integrated approach to technique, it is necessary to comprehend the triadic nature of trauma, which entails economic/drive, structural conflict and deficit, and object-relational factors. For a treatment model that addresses defensive dissociation in the here and now, primary and secondary dissociation must be distinguished, with each differentiated from splitting and repression. Technique requires addressing unconscious, repressed fantasies associated with the “trauma,” object-relational patterns that interfere with linking, and psycho-economic issues that have disrupted ego functioning. A clinical example illustrates both the analyst’s persistence in suffering the dead, eerie space of dissociated trauma and efforts to find language that helps structure the patient’s somatic and enacted expressions (and accompanying dissociative and repressive processes) by which traumatic experiences are registered and conveyed.
Infantile amnesia, the inability of adults to recollect early episodic memories, is associated with the rapid forgetting that occurs in childhood. It has been suggested that infantile amnesia is due to the underdevelopment of the infant brain, which would preclude memory consolidation, or to deficits in memory retrieval. Although early memories are inaccessible to adults, early-life events, such as neglect or aversive experiences, can greatly impact adult behavior and may predispose individuals to various psychopathologies. It remains unclear how a brain that rapidly forgets, or is not yet able to form long-term memories, can exert such a long-lasting and important influence. Here, with a particular focus on the hippocampal memory system, we review the literature and discuss new evidence obtained in rats that illuminates the paradox of infantile amnesia. We propose that infantile amnesia reflects a developmental critical period during which the learning system is learning how to learn and remember.
In the third trimester of pregnancy, the human fetus has the capacity to process perceptual information [1–3]. With advances in 4D ultrasound technology, detailed assessment of fetal behavior [4] is now possible. Furthermore, modeling of intrauterine conditions has indicated a substantially greater luminance within the uterus than previously thought [5]. Consequently, light conveying perceptual content could be projected through the uterine wall and perceived by the fetus, dependent on how light interfaces with maternal tissue. We do know that human infants at birth show a preference to engage with a top-heavy, face-like stimulus when contrasted with all other forms of stimuli [6, 7]. However, the viability of performing such an experiment based on visual stimuli projected through the uterine wall with fetal participants is not currently known. We examined fetal head turns to visually presented upright and inverted face-like stimuli. Here we show that the fetus in the third trimester of pregnancy is more likely to engage with upright configural stimuli when contrasted to inverted visual stimuli, in a manner similar to results with newborn participants. The current study suggests that postnatal experience is not required for this preference. In addition, we describe a new method whereby it is possible to deliver specific visual stimuli to the fetus. This new technique provides an important new pathway for the assessment of prenatal visual perceptual capacities.
The rediscovery of memory reconsolidation has brought the attention of many investigators to this field because the findings that a stabilized memory can return to a labile state have changed the way we view long-term memory formation and storage. Furthermore, it has provided important information for potentially developing novel therapeutic interventions for psychopathologies as well as cognitive impairments. As with all discoveries that change previous beliefs, many conclusions and interpretations about the novel data have been subjected to a great deal of debates and controversies. However, the studies on memory reconsolidation have undoubtedly led to the understanding that the processes of memory formation and storage are exquisitely dynamic. Elucidating the mechanisms and temporal dynamics of the biological changes that accompany memory encoding, storage, and retrieval is key to understanding many brain functions. In this chapter, we summarize studies from our laboratory that investigated the mechanisms and functions of memory reconsolidation using the inhibitory avoidance task in rats. Based on the results of these studies, we propose the conclusions that memory reconsolidation contributes to a lingering consolidation process and that memory is a highly dynamic process. We then discuss how we can use the knowledge acquired about memory reconsolidation to develop new therapies for weakening maladaptive memories and enhancing memories to combat cognitive decline.
Significant transformations have taken place in our understanding of evolution and development since the late nineteenth century, when the two seemed so closely related; at that time, the ideas of Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, and other biologists played a prominent role in Freud's creation of psychoanalysis. During the twentieth century, as biological research reached the molecular level, biological concepts of development and of evolution veered progressively further from each other and further away from psychoanalysis. Then most recently, in response to a flood of discoveries in the last two decades, the long-separated fields of developmental and evolutionary biology have come together in the creation of a new field, informally referred to as “Evo–Devo.” In this paper, I trace these remarkable changes, and discuss how these recent advances have returned biological concepts to a closer alignment with psychoanalytic principles regarding the role of early experience in long-term developmental change and the importance of the role that early parent-infant interactions play in shaping our lives and those of our children. I have illustrated the changes in our thinking that have taken place over the past half century by describing the different ways that I have thought about, puzzled over, and been enlightened by these changing concepts in the course of my psychobiological research on the roles of the mother-infant relationship in the development of a relatively simple model organism, the laboratory rat.
This study synthesizes current information from the various fields of cognitive science in support of a new and exciting theory of mind. Most psychologists study horizontal processes like memory and information flow; Fodor postulates a vertical and modular psychological organization underlying biologically coherent behaviors. This view of mental architecture is consistent with the historical tradition of faculty psychology while integrating a computational approach to mental processes. One of the most notable aspects of Fodor's work is that it articulates features not only of speculative cognitive architectures but also of current research in artificial intelligence.
Bradford Books imprint
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.
The concept of Trauma in psychoanalysis has suffered from overuse and inconsistent use. A review of Freud's writings beginning with the Project indicates that from the perspective of the impact upon psychic processes, Freud held a more consistent view of the concept that, if recognized, can help avoid the often fruitless etiological debates of internal vs. external cause, intrinsic (drive) vs. extrinsic (reality) factors, etc. What is more helpful from a clinical perspective, is to view the various challenges that a given set of potentially trauma-inducing circumstances might pose for an individual, consider each individual's highly subjective mode of experiencing and responding to those challenges and take into account the supports offered in any instance by the specific familial, social or cultural surround. Each set of experiences that will be qualified as ‘trauma’ that any of us undergoes will to some extent be understood and integrated into our particular subjectivities according to our unique, subjective organizations of self, understandings of and position in the world.
Vengono discussi alcuni problemi teorici riguardanti la concezione della natura sociale della mente secondo le teorie relazionali e intersoggettive della psicoanalisi contemporanea. Le posizioni intersoggettive e socio-costruttiviste radicali vengono criticate e ne vengono messe in luce alcune autocontraddizioni. In particolare, sono discusse criticamente le posizioni di Robert Stolorow, Stephen Mitchell e Donnel B. Stern, e vengono trattati, tra gli altri, i seguenti temi: la mente come costruzione sociale oppure come prodotto congiunto di fattori innati e ambientali; l'intersoggettivismo di Stolorow e collaboratori; l'approccio relazionale di Mitchell; il situazionismo nella psicologia della personalitŕ; il comportamentismo sociale; le posizioni di Sullivan, G.H. Mead e Cooley; i concetti di "vero Sé" e "falso Sé" di Winnicott; i contenuti mentali inconsci e la motivazione; la "esperienza non formulata" di Donnel B. Stern; comunicare versus esperire; ecc.
Psychoanalysis has seen a shift in emphasis regarding therapeutic action and technique. A predominant focus on the uncovering or reintegrating of repressed, disguised, or split-off contents has moved to include the intersubjective creation, development, and strengthening of psychic processes and capabilities. The analyst’s role in this process has been analogized to that of the primary maternal object in the origins of psychic life. This metaphor illuminates the movement from unrepresented to represented psychic states in treatment, as seen in a clinical example from the analysis of a particularly withdrawn young adult.
Significance
Humans naturally entertain complex representations of the world based on various symbolic systems, from natural language to mathematical or musical notation. They recode the input into abstract symbolic representations that can be internally manipulated and projected back onto the external world. We show that preverbal infants can redescribe complex percepts into abstract mental variables, which they can readily map onto arbitrary labels. Importantly, we show that, beyond associative learning, infants can readily infer a bidirectional relation between the abstracted representations and the associated labels, a capacity that animals do not spontaneously exhibit. Our findings buttress the hypothesis of symbolic representations in preverbal infants, which may serve as a foundation for our distinctively human learning abilities.
The internal void or absence is often formulated in terms of the ongoing structural consequences of a profound lack in early maternal care resulting in a deficiency in psychic structure, an area of weak or non-representation. Rather than defining the psychic void solely as a lack of inner development leaving a passively experienced impoverished inner world, this paper highlights the phenomenon of libidinal investment in the original black hole in the early care-taking environment, creating an allegiance to absence, an emotional investment in a state of nothingness that actively impedes psychic growth and shuts down elaboration of the generative unconscious. Because the type of early absence comes about at a time when the difference between self and non-self is still developing, language and other types of communication that clearly define self and other may not be the most useful methods of broaching these early unformulated states. Treating an allegiance to absence requires that the primary attachment, or absence thereof, becomes actualized in the relationship between patient and analyst, the unique manifestations of which bring to life the absence in the here and now where it can be experienced and transformed.
The psychotic part of the personality is seen as a multidimensional mental realm that may be approached through intuition and tolerance of approximations, transience, and the notion of infinity. It is suggested that a major differentiating factor between psychotic and non-psychotic functioning is the capacity to tolerate the infinite complexity of the human mind. With the use of mathematical concepts, Bion tries to describe the state of mind required of the analyst who endeavors to tread on psychotic territories of the personality. Bion is in effect trying to describe the intensity, violence, and fortitude of the transformation of the emotional experience generated by psychotic as opposed to non-psychotic functioning. Viewed from this vertex, transference is the path by which the unrepressed and unrepresentable unconscious can evolve and express itself. It is the function by which the individual can live through for the first time aspects of his mental life that have never been experienced. This is illustrated with a number of clinical vignettes highlighting different aspects of our capacity to get in touch with this nonsensuous realm of the psychoanalytic encounter.
In Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis, alongside its companionpiece Core Concepts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Morris N. Eagle asks: of the core concepts and formulations of psychoanalytic theory, which ones should be retained, which should be modified and in what ways, and which should be discarded? The key concepts and issues explored in this book include: Unconscious processes and research on them - what evidence is there for a dynamic unconscious? Is there a universal Oedipus complex? The importance of inner conflict. The concept of defense. Unlike other previous discussions of these concepts, this book systematically evaluates them in the light of conceptual critique as well as recent research based evidence and empirical data. Written with Eagle's piercing clarity of voice, Core Concepts in Classical Psychoanalysis challenges previously unquestioned psychoanalytic assumptions and will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists, and anyone interested in integrating core psychoanalytic concepts, research, and theory with other disciplines including psychiatry, psychology, and social work.
Traditional psychoanalytic theories of development hold that the adult neurotic can regress, or has already regressed, to the childhood arrests and/or fixations in which his pathology originated. More recent critiques have called this possibility into question. It is unlikely that anyone can roll back the additions and modifications of lifespan development in a full-fledged return to the needs, wishes, and anxieties of childhood. By regression, though, some analysts mean not a full-fledged return to an earlier developmental phase, but a non–phase-specific slip into primitive fantasies and defenses. The operational term, in this particular variation, is not regression but primitive. The shift from the depressive to the paranoid-schizoid position is, for instance, considered not a phase-specific regression but a regression to primitive forms of mentation. The psychoanalytic conception of the primitive originated in Freud’s reading of late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology. Freud and later Klein believed that the neurotic regresses to a psychological childhood, which in turn preserves the thought patterns of our prehistoric ancestors. Although this proposition and the underlying principle of recapitulation have been disproven, its traces are nonetheless preserved in what are termed the primary processes and primitive defenses. A tradition of theoretical critique and developmental research, however, shows that the primary processes and primitive defenses are not in fact primitive. That is, they are neither evolutionarily nor developmentally primary in human life. By implication, psychoanalysis should discard the term primitive and adopt a lifespan approach to the processes it describes.
This essay is concerned with the epistemological complications of the interface between psychoanalysis and “scientific” disciplines and methodologies—in particular, with respect to theories of knowledge and conceptualizations of subjectivity appropriate to psychoanalysis. The author suggests that there is in such interface the potential for an untheorized scientism in empiricist prescriptions for the reform and rescue of psychoanalysis, and revisits the notion that subjectivity as conceived psychoanalytically, grounded in lived experience, is irreducible in ways that are unique and existentially abiding. The author explores the problem through the lens of philosophical hermeneutics and cautions against merging psychoanalysis, under the guise of a salutary pluralism, with disciplines guided by a systematized empiricism and its attendant epistemological commitments.
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.
In no other time and place was Freudian psychoanalysis more successful, and psychiatry more psychoanalytic, than in the first two Cold War decades in the U.S. This was also a time and place when psychoanalysis was intensely conservative - especially sexually conservative. This was not merely a product of generalized Cold War trends, but rather a major side-effect of massive, widely broadcast battles over the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis that marked the years 1947-1953 in particular. The "Jewish science" of psychoanalysis underwent a process of "Christianization" in the post-war U.S. - even as religion became "psychologised". In addition, the paper shows how deep ambivalence about the status and the very meaning of the concept of "libido" was at the heart of a succession of fierce controversies and rivalries that helped determine the directions taken by post-war psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
Experiences with autistic and primitive mental states have significant implications for our understanding of obsessionality. Consequently, obsessionality is seen as an attempt at a massive simplification of experience, in order to deal with the pain inherent in the encounter with intense emotional experience and with the separateness of an enigmatic object that eludes one’s omnipotent control. Moreover, early loss and a precocious awareness of separateness often play roles in the withdrawal to obsessional thinking and verbosity, and to an illusion of omnipotent control of the object. Interpretations focusing on conflicting desires, or linking repressed and displaced parts of the personality with the defenses against them, do not reach these patients in a way that facilitates psychic change. An alternative approach, it is suggested, is to work at primitive, nonsymbolic levels of mental functioning, where experience cannot be verbally communicated and dynamically interpreted, but must first be lived in the here and now of the analysis. This is illustrated through the analysis of a person trying to cope with the experience of early loss by deadening emotion and finding shelter in obsessionality.
Three important areas of current inquiry concerning early trauma-the respective roles of reality and fantasy, age-related capacity for the symbolic representation of trauma, and attachment status-are approached through clinical case reports of three children seen initially at very early ages. The findings are relevant to the issue of whether preverbal infants can experience traumatic events that later are available to interpretation. The focus is for the most part on event traumas-single harrowing, life-threatening experiences-occurring at quite early ages. Three main points are emphasized. First, toddlers and infants (including neonates) can experience intense pain and show symptoms of traumatization. They are capable of experiencing an event as harrowing and life-threatening. Second, these events are capable of being memorialized or symbolically represented, that is, stored in memory in a way that can affect later behavior and learning. Third, how that traumatization resolves itself, or fails to, can be decisively affected by the functioning of the attachment system.
In responding to the question of whether truth in psychoanalysis is relevant today, the author presents what she refers to as a traditional Freudian-Kleinian perspective. According to this perspective, truth is not only relevant, but rather the quest for it is the alpha and omega of psychoanalytic practice. The author reviews Freud's approach to truth and then discusses Klein's essential contribution to its understanding, grounding, and enrichment, highlighting Klein's thinking about phantasy and the life and death instincts. Finally, the author contends with the opposing view that the quest for truth is no longer relevant to contemporary analytic practice.
Emphasizing psychic truths as the major domain of psychoanalysis, the author explores the complexity of defining such psychic truths. It is suggested that thinking of levels of psychic truths is the most useful approach. How to understand trauma and historical truth within this context is examined. The role of the analyst as aiding the search for psychic truths, rather than functioning as psychic "truth teller," is discussed within the context of paradigmatic changes in the psychoanalytic method that form an emerging common ground.
The landscape of psychoanalysis has changed, at times dramatically, in the hundred or so years since Freud first began to think and write about it. Freudian theory and concepts have risen, fallen, evolved, mutated, and otherwise reworked themselves in the hands and minds of analysts the world over, leaving us with a theoretically pluralistic (yet threateningly multifarious) diffusion of psychoanalytic viewpoints.
A new developmental model of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and its treatment is advanced based on evolutionary considerations concerning the role of attachment, mentalizing, and epistemic trust in the development of psychopathology. We propose that vulnerability to psychopathology in general is related to impairments in epistemic trust, leading to disruptions in the process of salutogenesis, the positive effects associated with the capacity to benefit from the social environment. BPD is perhaps the disorder par excellence that illustrates this view. We argue that this conceptualization makes sense of the presence of both marked rigidity and instability in BPD, and has far-reaching implications for intervention.
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.
© 2015 by the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive-an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.
© 2015 The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Inc.
Developed from established psychoanalytic knowledge among different psychoanalytic cultures concerning unconscious interpsychic communication, analysts' use of their receptive mental experience-their analytic mind use, including the somatic, unconscious, and less accessible derivatives-represents a significant investigative road to patients' unconscious mental life, particularly with poorly symbolized mental states. The author expands upon this tradition, exploring what happens when patients unconsciously experience and identify with the analyst's psychic functioning. The technical implications of the analyst's "instrument" are described, including the analyst's ego regression, creation of inner space, taking mind as object, bearing uncertainty and intense affect, and self-analysis. Brief case vignettes illustrate the structure and obstacles to this work.
Previous studies of face perception during early infancy are difficult to interpret because of discrepant results and procedural differences. We used a standardized method based on the Teller acuity card procedure to test newborns, 6-week-olds, and 12-week-olds with three pairs of face and nonface stimuli modified from previous studies. Newborns' preferences were influenced both by the visibility of the stimuli and by their resemblance to a human face. There appears to be a mechanism, likely subcortical, predisposing newborns to look toward faces. Changes in preferences at 6 and 12 weeks of age suggest increasing cortical influence over infants' preferences for faces.