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She posits that psychoanalytic theory has thus far focused on the press of the body on representation. However, she argues, it is as important to see the impact of representation on body scheme. Gender is configured, expressed and ‘taken in’ in the context of multiple relational matrices. Gender designations like boy or girl are more than cognitive categories. Body schemas, including the experience of genitals, interrelate with gender consciousness in evolving and nonlinear ways. There are complex and multiple relationships that category knowledge has to bodily awareness and the representation of genitals. In considering a complex phenomenon like gender to be a softly assembled system, Harris views gender's meanings within any individual and familial system (along with its function and form within specific tasks in specific environments) as encompassing behaviors that have conscious, unconscious, and social interactional properties. She theorizes that gender, desire, and sex come into their unique and particular forms only in a very widely construed context, inseparable from the interpersonal fields in which they are embedded. VI. Cf. Arnold Modell – ‘Early Freudian’, Winnicottian and Self Perspective : Representation as a Transformative Metaphoric Process Drawing on the notion that unconscious processes cannot be observed directly, they can only be noted by inference and analogy, and recalling that Freud (1900, 1923) understood that the metaphoric processes observed in dream formation was the same unconscious process that contributed to symptom formation in hysteria, Modell (2003, 2005, 2009) theorizes that metaphor is a fundamental cognitive tool that is central to unconscious mental process. In his view, the transfer of meaning between different domains and the multiplicity of different meanings that can be attributed to a single dream element, what Freud described as condensation, attests to the ubiquity of the metaphoric process in dreaming. In his own seminal metaphoric statement, Modell pronounces metaphor as the currency of the (unconscious) mind (Modell, 2003). This means that unconscious thoughts, whether in the dream or whether in response to sensory inputs in current time, are cognitively organized through the use of metaphor. In his “Imagination and the Meaningful Brain” (Modell, 2003), Modell suggested that a metaphoric process analogous to dreaming is operative in the waking state. Expanding on the Nobel Prize laureate Gerald Edelman’s (1998) research on memory carving both the inner and outer world into categories, which are recontextualized through experience, Modell adds his own observation that emotional memory is categorized by means of metaphor. In health, these memorial metaphoric categories oscillate between similarities and differences. However, in the face of trauma, this play of similarity and differences between time past and time present is lost and the metaphoric transfer of meaning from past to present becomes invariant (Modell, 2005, 2009). In health, metaphoric process facilitates the recontextualization of autobiographical memory, whereby old memories are continuously reinterpreted in the context of new
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