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This emphasis on feeling states was developed in several other Sandler’s publications (Sandler 1987; Sandler and Sandler 1999) and created a link between classical drive theories and object relations theories.
V. C. Contemporary Theoretical Developments And Clinical Applications Including Developmental Research & Child Analysis Within the development of psychoanalytic theory, the concept of representation has acquired multiple meanings and is widely applied in developmental research, and child and adult clinical practice. V. Ca. Daniel Stern A North American trained analyst, active in both Europe and North America, Stern (1985) has elaborated a model of the development integrating the insights of the infant research with psychoanalytic theory. Specifics of this model are described in the North American section where his research gained special significance in the context of further evolution of Margaret Mahler’s developmental model of Separation-Individuation, integrating it with the Attachment studies. Pertaining to the usage of the term representation in child psychoanalysis, Stern (1985) and others use the term to denote both conscious and unconscious maternal expectations during pregnancy or the conscious images parents form of their child—of behaviors and resemblances. In this context, the term representation is considered more accurate than fantasy , idea , or thought . In fact, the representations arise from the past experiences of the parents, from micro or macro trauma of their childhood, and from non-resolved conflicts in the relationship with parents or siblings. Generally, these experiences are removed (dissociated and/or repressed) from conscious mind during growth and the transition to adult life, but they are reactivated by parenthood and transformed into actual representations of the newborn. If past experiences are burdened with an excessive amount of psychic pain, the representations will be pathogenic, will negatively interfere with the parents’ relationship with the child and with his emotional development. The symptomatic interaction is a staging by the child of a representation that derives from an unresolved conflict in the parent's past. V. Cb. Rene Roussillon Roussillon (2010, 2014, 2015) uses the psychoanalytic concept of representation as a central axis for distinguishing different levels of psychic functioning and analytic work. In particular, within the analytic process and through working through , he explores various modalities of access to representation, understood as access to consciousness of psychic contents. These contents may concern experiences that in the past had already gained access to representation but were subsequently repressed and re-emerge in the analytic process in the
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