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processes like affects, with their various qualities and infinite gradations of intensity. Intensity is crucial to emotion concepts because it changes the very content and quality of the experience to be conceptualized. Idea, form, quality, content, affect tone, and intensity can interact more easily, with infinite gradations and greater complexity in plastic, sensory thing presentations than in word presentations. Thing presentations are thus an integration phenomenon. They are sensory condensations of psychological conflict” (Marcus 1999, p. 859). VI. Cc. Harold Blum: Mother’s Mental Representation of her Infant Blum (2017) described how the mother’s intrapsychic mental representation of her infant begins before pregnancy and is modified during pregnancy and thereafter. Both parents have conscious expectations and unconscious fantasies about their infant, which are all often not consistent with reality. Early intervention in infant–parent disturbances is important for repair of the relationship and prevention of later pathogenic development. Blum uses mental representation to refer to the internal representation of self and/or object. Intrapsychic mental representations are subject to ego maturation, wishes, and defenses. Never identical with the real external self and object world, representations are affective, cognitive, sensory schemas derived from object relations and identifications. Blum cautions that Freud’s statement about the ego being “first and foremost a body ego” (Freud, 1923, p. 26) should not be confused with the ego as a structure or agency with many essential functions. The body ego is the schema on which the self-representation is modeled in connection with object-related experience. Self and object representations, developmentally inter-related to each other, are components/substructures of the ego, and they are important components of personality organization. In a parallel framework, self and object representations correspond approximately to internalized object relations (Sandler & Sandler, 1999). Self and object representations of parents and fetus, and later of the infant, are critical aspects of the psychology of pregnancy and parenthood (Raphael-Leff, 2005). Some women fantasize of themselves as pregnant, and during the actual pregnancy their fantasies may include a self-representation encompassing the fetus. The actual intrauterine symbiosis of fetal life has contributed to maternal fantasies, experiences and theorizations of symbiosis continuing after birth. Conscious and unconscious mental representations of mother–infant are influenced by the stage of pregnancy, ultrasound and other tests revealing fetal development, for example sex, heartbeat, movement, and so on. The mental representation of the fetus may be fused with parental representations, but also may be independent, as the mother prepares for birth and eventual external and intrapsychic separation. Parents may also represent mother, father, and fetus, in a triadic configuration (Ammaniti, Tambelli, & Odorisio, 2013). In addition, parents have separate mental representations of their own parents, which are among the determinants of their parental attitudes and roles.
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