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form of symptoms, transference or dreams; or, alternatively, early unrepresented experiences, typical of early trauma, environmental failures, and primitive states of mind. In the latter case, the problem consists in managing to bring such experiences into psychic representation, or thinkability ; otherwise, what remains unthought is replaced by impulsivity, acting out, or somatization. When, within the analytic process, the patient gains access to the representation/thinkability of these early experiences, they can then be ‘subjectivized’’ and integrated. Another perspective through which Roussillon addresses the theme of representation concerns the relationship with the absent or separated object. He provides the example of a newborn grappling with the constancy of representation when the object is absent. According to the author, such constancy is ensured by the persistence of the investment in the object and presupposes a ‘specular’ representation of the infant’s own permanence in the mother’s mind. The infant realizes that during the absence the mother has not ‘forgotten’ him; this realization allows, through a process of mirroring, the permanent investment of the object and its representation. Conversely, when the object is present, its internal representation overlaps with its current perception and therefore does not appear or reflect itself as representation, unless the subject perceives a discrepancy between his internal representation of the object and the representation that the object reflects back to him of himself. Particularly relevant in this regard is the experience the child undergoes in the relationship with the mother when a dissonance or a gap arises between his internal representation—emerging from the encounter between drive- related forces, mnemonic traces, and fantasies—and what he perceives in the object. In such cases, violence develops as a reaction, and the sense of Self does not organize itself around the process that, for Freud, constituted the child’s first subjective position of being identified with the breast.
VI. FURTHER AND CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS IN NORTH AMERICA
VI. A. North American and International Authors influential in North America in 1950’s - 1960’s VI. Aa. Heinz Hartmann Taking as a starting point Freud’s paper “On Narcissism” (Freud 1914), Hartmann (1950) differentiated the self as a whole person, personality or organization, including psyche and soma, from the ego as a system or psychic structure: “…in using the term narcissism, two different sets of opposites often seem to be fused into one. The one refers to the self (one’s own person) in contradistinction to the object, the second to the ego (as a psychic system) in contradistinction to other substructures
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