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posits that enactments are intersubjective manifestations of neurally encoded attachment patterns acquired within the context of the primary relationships. This is an example of how seemingly unconnected areas, in this case intersubjectivity, attachment, and neuroscience, inevitably intersect with and illuminate each other. Bringing together the developmental neurobiological and developmental psychoanalytic studies, Otto Kernberg (2015) highlights the dynamic complexity of the earliest weeks and months of life, during which ‘affiliative’ affects and drives related to attachment, play-bonding and erotic stimulation fuel intense attention to the other. One of the possible findings points to bi-directional non-linear strivings for both symbiotic (dual) unity and differentiation of self and other, beginning in the first weeks of life . It appears that the neurobiological investigations substantiate a potentially inclusive view: right brain as lateralized, unconscious, affectively charged dynamic center of mind-body system, whose self-organization, growth and development unfolds in the inter-subjective context of bi-directional strivings for both unity with, and well as for differentiation from, the other(s). One of the areas where this potentially manifests itself in the psychoanalytic situation is an area of preverbal enactments, where the right-to-right hemispheric connections may facilitate preverbal unconscious communication, a precondition for further work of symbolization and representation. Specifically in Europe , further point of contact between centrality of intersubjectivity in clinical and developmental studies came from neuroscientific research carried out by the group of Giacomo Rizzolatti , in Parma (Italy), on mirror neurons (Rizzolatti et al. 1996, Rizzolatti & Craighero 2004). The discovery of mirroring mechanisms has opened up a new scenario for understanding how not only actions but also sensations and emotions grow in a we- centered dimension: when we observe someone performing an action, having a sensation, experiencing an emotion we understand him/her by re-utilizing the very neural circuits which ground our first-person experience with that action, sensation, emotion. This common functional mechanism – the ‘embodied simulation’ (Ammaniti & Gallese 2014, Gallese 2015) – provides a neurobiological foundation for grounding the self in the body, in accord with Freud’s assertion: “The Ego is first and foremost a bodily Ego” (Freud 1923, p. 26).
V. CONCLUSION
In North America , emphasis on the importance of intersubjective processes and configurations in the context of development and pathogenesis, of the psychoanalytic situation, of the development, of the capacity for representation, and related contemporary clinical emphasis on enactments are among the connecting elements of all approaches, even if understood, interpreted and theorized differently by different schools of thought.
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