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unsynthesized and unsymbolized. While many have conceptualized a form of post-traumatic mental functioning (eg. Bion 1962), Fernando’s theory of the zero process, by explicitly putting it on equal footing with the primary process, and sharply differentiating post-traumatic functioning from the primary process, facilitated making more definite comparisons between these two forms of mental functioning, including in the area of symbolization. The zero process and the primary process, which have often been confused with each other, differ from regular secondary process functioning quite markedly on a number of fronts. As an example, both the zero process and primary process are timeless, in the sense that they do not have the time sense of the secondary process, but they are timeless in different ways. The primary process is outside of time, with its wishes and fantasies not being worn away by time, and not being ordered according to time, while the zero process contains pieces of perception and feeling from a trauma frozen in time, and ordered in a sequence, but an ever repeating one. Similar comparisons can be made in relation to reality sense, perception, thinking, and other characteristics (Fernando, 2018b). In relation to symbolism, both the primary process and zero process lack the higher-level language based combinatorial symbolism of the secondary process, but here as well they lack it in different ways. Primary process symbolism is based on the body and immediate perception, with invariant connections between symbol and symbolized, such as the well known symbols for the genitals. Because the symbols are few and universal and concrete, they do not have the combinatorial possibilities that allow ever expanding expression, including of complex abstract ideas, of the secondary process symbolic systems. According to Fernando (2018b) the zero process involves a different level of “concreteness” compared to the primary process, as it contains the bits and pieces from which first order experience is constructed. Thus it lies at a point prior to the constructed experiences and fantasies that make up the primary process. It contains the stuff from which not just memories and fantasies, but also primary process and secondary process symbols, are made on. Fernando’s ideas are most closely aligned to those of the French psychosomatic school (eg De M’Uzan 2003) and some French Canadian authors (eg Scarfone, 2017), in positing a stage in mental formation and functioning prior to any form of symbolization, whether of the primary or secondary process. This is an important theoretical divide in terms of ideas on symbolism and mental formation generally: between those who think that mental functioning is symbolic from the beginning and those who think there is a stage prior to any kind of symbol formation. Those on one side of this divide posit symbolic processes of some sort even in the most regressed or disturbed states (for instance Segal’s (1978) idea of symbolic equation) while those on the other side conceptualize stages or forms of mental functioning without any form of symbolism. This is a theoretical issue with a great deal of clinical consequence, in terms of how to interpret and work with psychosomatic and traumatized states.
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