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importance in shaping psychic development, action—tendencies remain as a primary mode of the child's thought processes. Consequently, Busch stresses, what is earliest and most primitive in the unconscious is stored in ‘action-thoughts’. That is why many characteristics of Freud’s ‘primary process’ thinking are similar to Piaget’s ‘action determinants of children's thoughts’. Thus, the closer one comes to what is unconscious, the more likely patients will express themselves via action; and the deeper one reaches into the unconscious (recognizing gradients of the unconscious), the more thought is equated with action. What is most unconscious is always enacted, like a reflexive ‘knee-jerk’ response. VI. Ch. Example of Contemporary Bionian-Field Theory Perspective: Howard Levin Influential in both Europe and the Americas, Levin (2012, 2014, 2020, 2021, 2022) offers an original creative synthesis, combining Freudian, Bionian, Field theory thinking with French accents. He is recognized for his contributions to psychoanalytic thought in various areas, notably for his texts on primitive mental states . Levin believes that primitive unrepresented states (outside of the symbolic order, including that what has never been put into words), can be found in every individual to a greater or lesser degree. He coined the term ‘ representational imperative ’, defining it as a pressure to form representation. He states: “ psychic activity is governed by an inherent pressure to form representations and link them into meaningful, affect-laden, coherent narratives. This pressure, which I shall call the representational imperative , originates in internal (e.g. drives) or external (e.g. perceptions) sources, exerts a ‘demand upon the mind’ for psychic work and ranges from catalytic to traumatic. If kept within optimal bounds, it has the potential to activate capacities for representation, which serve a vital protective role as they create, structure, and organize the mind. It is the creation and linking of representations that will in part determine whether or not any given pressure can be contained within the bounds of what is ‘optimal’ or will exceed those bounds to become ‘traumatic’…. traumatic disruptions of psychic organization can produce areas of psychic voids, de-cathexis, disintegration or other discontinuities in psychic organization” (Levine 2012, p. 609). In his numerous publications he describes the failures of representation that create not only ongoing pain but frequent impulsive and self-destructive outbursts. Rather than keeping to the dichotomy of external-internal pathogenesis of trauma, he states: “What earns the designation, ‘ trauma ’, is that which outstrips and disrupts the psyche’s capacity for representation.” (Levine 2021, p. 805). In his recent book “Affect, Representation and Language: Between the Silence and the Cry”, Levine (2022) returns to his creative ideas about processes of representation and focuses on clinical challenges faced by contemporary analysts in the treatment of non-neurotic patients, who, historically, would have been contraindicated for psychoanalytic treatment.
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