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“unawareness” (Ginot, 2015), possibly related to Freud’s historical references to other than the repressed unconscious processes (Freud, 1923, 1930, 1940a,b). From the early stages of intrauterine-prenatal life, sensory experiences take part in the formation of a basic emotional and affective memory, a real cornerstone for the organisation of early representations (Mancia 1980; Le Doux, 1992). Herein might be a mechanism bridging the neurophysiology of memory and the concept of Freudian unconscious. Moreover, with the remarkable widening of the original concept of the unconscious into “nonconscious” domains, other substantial interdisciplinary convergences with cognitive science, neurobiology and neuroscience have also been postulated (Bucci, 2001). The current huge brain research database on unconscious processes and representations has subsequently influenced the way the unconscious is conceived within psychoanalysis itself. Hence, when analysts deal with a kind of knowledge that is out of awareness but not caused by repression, they use more and more the expression borrowed from those disciplines: ‘implicit procedural knowledge’ (Clyman, 1991; Fosshage, 2005). At the heart of this conceptual territory – which is about relational, implicit or enactive procedures and representations – there is a model of development (as well as a model of therapeutic change) which is consistent with recent findings in attachment research, early parent-infant interaction and affective and cognitive neuroscience (Gabbard & Westen, 2003; D.N. Stern et al., 1998). Along with it, the model of therapeutic change in some quarters might be shifting from reliance on translation of unconscious representations into reflective and symbolized knowledge (or insight), or from procedural coding to symbolic coding (primary process to secondary process, preverbal to verbal forms of thought), to new emphasis on allegedly non-conflicted, non-symbolized, implicit or procedural, knowing (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2007; Lyons-Ruth, 1998, 1999). This unrepressed unconscious is connected to the biological endowment of the person: it leads from early infantile experiences, which cannot yet be repressed, to the structuring of a nuclear self and the ample ‘subjectal’ domain of the individual. The basic features of the implicit memory system open up connections with the basic assumptions of clinical work hence stressing the central role of the relational experience in psychoanalysis (Barnà, 2007b, 2014) and have greatly transformed the conception of transference/counter-transference workings as far as transformations through dream symbolization, enactments and attunement to the prosody of language are concerned (Mancia, 2006). These findings reaffirm the “constructive” aspects of the analytical relationship (Freud, 1937a): especially the work related to the verbalisation of unconscious phantasies which can be inferred from the empathic listening and attuning of the analyst. This construction can also occur through the negotiation of meanings and the language used to express them (Barnà, 1990, 2007a). Following Le Doux’ investigation of the implicit interplay of the multiple memory systems under conditions of acute trauma in adults, several longitudinal studies continued to expand knowledge of the neurobiological consequences of early attachment related experiences (Balbernie, 2001; Siegel, 1999; Schore, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) in children with and without early traumatic histories. Generally, the findings were consistent with Bowlby’s
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