Back to Table of Contents
VIII. Ab. Developmental neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis In view of recent neuroscientific discoveries of Wright and Panksepp (2014) of the SEEKING system, Kernberg (2015) updates the Freudian dual-drive theory, referring to it as a supraordinate integration of the SEEKING system, which he now sees as a basic drive that couples with both rewarding and aversive affective systems. Within Kernberg’s complex developmental system, the self–object–affect/drive units are the building blocks from which the earliest internalized psychic structures are constructed during the “attachment era” of the first year of life. However, even before the ‘attachment era’, from the early stages of intrauterine- prenatal life, sensory experiences have been found to take part in the formation of a basic emotional and affective memory, a real cornerstone for the organisation of early representations (Mancia 2006; LeDoux 1996, 2000). The connections between the right orbitofrontal cortex and the limbic system structures, activated during the first year of life, have been repeatedly found to be a site of imprints of the first attachment-related experiences, laying down the template for unconscious expectations in future relationships (Schore, 2011; Siegel, 1999). The current controversy over the nature of such unconscious expectations, formed when the hippocampus, the limbic structure for affectively contextualized memory, is not fully developed, has been interpreted in several ways. One perspective (Clyman, 1991; Fonagy, 1999; BCPSG, 2007) sees the earliest imprints as cognitive procedural encoding of ‘self-with-other’, analogous to riding a bicycle: “We view implicit relational knowing as one variety of procedural representation. Procedural representations in cognitive psychology are representations of how to proceed, of how to do things. Such representations, like knowing how to ride a bicycle, for example, may never become symbolically coded” (BCPG 2008, p. 128). The dynamic view (Shevrin, 2002) proposes that procedural memories are later drawn into conflictual configurations and are subject to motivated retrieval. This view is compatible with the concept of developmental transformations, Freudian Nachträglichkeit, and transference. It is supported clinically in that the archaic, pre-symbolic, pre-represented experiences have been found to be symbolically representable in transferential enactments, language and speech prosody, symbolic play, dreams, fantasies, attitudinal and behavioral patterns of response, and symptomatology (Mancia, 2006; Gaensbauer 2011, Papiasvili, 2014, 2016; Papiasvili & Mayers, 2017). The difference between the two interpretations of the neuroscientific findings seems to be related to the exclusion or inclusion of the dynamic interplay in the inner representational worlds , a hallmark of the psychoanalytic perspective. Ellman and Moskowitz (2008 citing Freud, 1915) note that the earliest representations are encoded as thing-representations without symbolic value. Although non-symbolized, the thing-presentations can act as basic motivators for complex conflicted responses.
812
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online