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conception of transference/counter-transference workings as far as transformations through dream symbolization, enactments and attunement to the prosody of language are concerned (Mancia 2006). Following Le Doux’ investigation of the implicit interplay of the multiple memory systems under conditions of acute trauma in adults, several longitudinal studies continued to expand knowledge of the neurobiological consequences of early attachment related experiences (Balbernie 2001; Siegel 1999; Schore 2003, 2006, 2007, 2010) in children with and without early traumatic histories. Detrimental early experiences with consequent neurobiological damage to the extended limbic system, which today includes the Orbitofrontal cortex, can cause the child to develop a range of cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems, including impediments of symbolic functioning, vitiating their adolescent and adult adjustment, creating a predisposition to regressive de-symbolization and/or diminishment of symbolic functioning when under stress later in life (Busch, F.N., 2017). Synaptogenesis and axon myelinization continue in the Orbitofrontal cortex well into the second year of life. After this period of peak neuroplasticity of experience-dependent emotional learning, the “working models” of relationships tend to retain their character. However, the Orbitofrontal cortex tends to retain a remarkable degree of neuroplasticity throughout life and it is possibly through this pathway that in depth psychoanalytical therapy can have a neurobiological impact (Andreasen 2001, p. 331). The ongoing discussion over the dynamic nature of first unrepressed implicit imprints remains an enduring controversy, with implications for clinical work. 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. In these strictly procedural terms, the transference reenactment occurs because some feature of the analytic relationship is sufficiently similar to an already laid down relational working model ‘procedure’, so that priming – an automatic unmotivated process – elicits the procedural relationship pattern. Change can be achieved through ‘moments of meeting’, not necessarily interpretable. Whereas in Shevrin’s dynamic paradigm, unconscious intentions and expectations help determine exactly how and what will be retrieved. “Retrieval is never simply automatic and unmotivated…” (Shevrin 2002, p. 137). Shevrin (ibid.) proposes that ‘procedural memories’, while not repressed and not unconsciously symbolized, are still not inherently automatized, but are rather subject to dynamic-conflictual transferential modifications each time they are retrieved. This view is compatible with dynamic concepts of psychic temporality and Freudian notions of Nachträglichkeit and screen memories. It is also compatible with the broadly defined contemporary Freudian and Object Relations’ approaches to transference enactments, as subsymbolic but ‘symbolizable’ and therefore interpretable (Ellman 2008). 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.
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