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retrieved. “Retrieval is never simply automatic and unmotivated…” (Shevrin, 2002, p. 137). Shevrin proposes that ‘procedural memories’, while not repressed and not unconsciously symbolized, are still not inherently automatized, but are rather subject to dynamic-conflictual transferential modifications each time they are retrieved. This view is compatible with dynamic concepts of psychic temporality and Freudian notions of Nachträglichkeit and screen memories. It is also compatible with the broadly defined contemporary Freudian and Object Relations’ (Bion, Winnicott) approaches to transference enactments, as subsymbolic but ‘symbolizable’ and therefore interpretable (Ellman, 2008; Grotstein, 2014 personal communication). The difference between the two interpretations of the neuroscientific findings seems to be related to the exclusion or inclusion of the dynamic interplay in the inner representational worlds, a hallmark of the psychoanalytic perspective. Giving up our long-held view of the unconscious as a repository for unwanted experience naturally entails a significantly different take on the analyst’s role in the consulting room. Understanding attachment as a behavioral correspondence of internalized object relations under the influence of the early mother-infant relationship (Diamond and Blatt 2007), other contemporary longitudinal studies aimed to capture early representational world. Toth, Cicchetti, Rogosch and Sturge-Apple’s (2009) study of Maternal Depression, Children’s Attachment Security, and Representational Development, found that the early negative representations of parents and of the self are carried forward over the course of development and are likely transmitted intergenerationally. Ellman (2008 citing Freud, 1915c) notes that the earliest representations are encoded as thing-representations without symbolic value. Activities are first associated with denotative as opposed to connotative value (Cassirer, 1953; Langer, 1948). Although non-symbolized, the thing-presentations can act as basic motivators for complex conflicted responses. They were, in this theoretical system, part of the reason for repetitions usually embedded in compromise formations. In a still another perspective, Weinstein (2007) sees the enduring effects of the attachment relationship not in creating templates of self-with-the-other (Fonagy and Target, 2002), but in leaving its mark on the infant’s neurobiological self-regulatory systems for stress and the deployment of attention; the attachment relationship will also shift the set points for the experience of pleasure and unpleasure. “If the attachment relationship is retrieved in memory throughout childhood, forming the raw material upon which the more fantastical constructions of infantile sexuality are based, so too will they be, to some extent, altered by increasing cognitive capacities and shifting zonal excitements. The …narratives about the self will further impact experiences of pleasure/unpleasure as well as alter the experience of the original attachment figures” (Weinstein, 2008, p. 181). Such theorization, together with Shevrin’s (2002) psychoanalytic interpretation of neuroscientific studies of Fabiani, Stadler, Wessels (2000) on ‘veridical memories’, which leave ‘sensory signature’, are consistent with the clinical findings that the earliest, pre-symbolic life experiences/happenings can be symbolizable through psychoanalytic (re)constructive work with language prosody, dreams, fantasies, transferential enactments, especially relevant for patients with posttraumatic symptomatology (Mancia, 2006; Papiasvili, 2014; 2015).
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