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The area of Unrepresented, Unsymbolized Unconscious: The vagaries of bodily experience during development and as a result of illness and trauma are considered a crucial impetus to, and limitation of, psychic metabolization and development. Interest in the non- repressed unconscious has been strongly reinforced thanks to the group of analysts who see substantial interdisciplinary convergences with new work on non-conscious processing in neurobiology, developmental and affective neurosciences and neuropsychonalysis. The ongoing discussion over the dynamic nature of first unrepressed implicit imprints remains an enduring controversy. The difference between the dynamic and non-dynamic interpretations of the neuroscientific findings seems to be related to the inclusion or exclusion of the dynamic interplay in the inner representational world, a hallmark of the psychoanalytic perspective. The query, initially raised by Freud himself, about why interpretation triggers insight and change in some patients and not others, and why this qualitatively different response to the classical situation does not necessarily coincide with traditional or even contemporary psychiatric diagnostic distinctions, has continued to stimulate theoretical investigation across regions. From a first formulation in terms of a “deficit” in the early provision of basic needs, interest across regions has branched out into intense study of the different steps in developing the capacity to represent and symbolize, to recover and expand the unconscious symbolic functioning and thus capacity to ferry without undo anxiety the intimate and idiosyncratic luxuriance of unconscious material. Reversibility-Permeability: Many schools of thought today stress the creative enrichment to human life that two-way permeability between the different parts of the mind permits. Psychic health seems to be associated with the capacity to flexibly access multiple co- existing levels of unconscious psychic organization and processing. A number of models have elaborated parallel insights regarding the requisite psychic fluidity and capacity for regression in the analyst as tools for psychoanalytic work. Field perspectives : The fundamental inter-subjectivity and inter-dependency of human development have led many analysts to attend to the “dynamic bi-personal” field between analyst and patient, a meeting where new elaborations/extensions and not simple repetitions of the individual unconscious issues for each partner of the dyad can emerge and to which the analyst’s presence and mind significantly contribute. This thinking dovetails with the clinical experiences and conviction by many that there is a lifelong potential for more inventive and creative expressions of previously excluded or otherwise un-integrated psychic content. Narcissistic and identity issues in psychic equilibrium: Many authors have furthered the understanding of the healthy and pathological aspects of narcissism, in psychic development and intra-psychic separation from internal objects, but also as a process of lifelong individuation and struggle to maintain self-cohesion. Group unconscious: As seen in clinical, institutional as well as macrosocial contexts, both the destructive and creative potential of the group’s irrational and regressive, yet enlivening and regenerating, unconscious contents and process , is inexhaustible.
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