Back to Table of Contents
divides, especially in areas of analogues drawing on nonhuman subjects, and inferences drawn from behavioral observations vs. internal representations and unconscious fantasy. At the same time, the neuroscientific advances in early brain development, neuroplasticity and neuro- connectivity seemed to provide potential validation of the psychoanalytic theory of personality and its clinical methodology. IV. Aa. Dynamic Unconscious in Neuroanalysis: Unconscious Conflict, ‘Repressiveness’, Memory and Early Development Shevrin et al. (1992, 1996) reported the first known neuroscientific study of a dynamic unconscious, in which brain response in the form of event-related potentials provided neurophysiological markers for unconscious conflict in a group of patients suffering from social phobia. Shevrin et al. (2002) correlated the responses to subliminally and supraraliminally presented set of words, with a measure of ‘repressiveness’ and found that that repressive process was inhibiting responses to the words judged by analysts as having an individualized conflictual meaning for specific patients (Shevrin, 2002, p. 136). A series of follow up investigations from what became known as the Shevrin group of subliminal perception studies (Brakel, L., Kleinsorge, S., Snodgrass, M. & Shevrin, H., 2000) addressed a number of phenomena regarding primary and secondary process mentation, including physiological markers of unconscious conflict, affect, defense, and the attributional vs. relational nature of these two modes of processing. This body of research earned Shevrin the Sigourney Award in 2003. Villa, Shevrin, Snodgrass, Bazan and Brakel (2006) focused on the nature of language processing in the unconscious. The findings highlighted the importance of a connectionist conception of ‘spreading activation’, the neurophysiological equivalent of the Freudian notion of ‘unbound cathexis’ characterizing the primary process. Comparable to the classical psychoanalytic conceptualization of the primary process, the connectionist account, too, found that bound and unbound cathexes were tied closely to the status of motivation and defenses. The more instinctual and ‘drive-like’ a motivation, the more likely it was to mediate ‘spreading activation’ or unbound cathexes. The more defenses failed and the greater the anxiety, the more unbound cathexes prevailed. Another area of intense interest in both Europe and North America continues to be investigation of memory in the context of early pre-oedipal/preverbal development. Neuroscience has delimited not only the existence of a long term explicit, ‘verbalisable’ memory, but also a subterranean, implicit memory which can neither be consciously recalled nor verbalised. Such a discovery allows us to hypothesize that all infantile experiences of the first two years of life are located in this latter kind of memory, which is managed by the amygdala in its function of the processing of emotions. The hippocampus, in fact, which is indispensable for the explicit memory system, does not reach complete maturation before the infant is two years old. The study of implicit memory, subsequent to its enunciation by Warrington and Weiskrantz (1974), widens the concept of the unconscious and shifts it to a new place: from the realm of the repressed to an arena of biologically determined
1006
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online