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conception of ‘spreading activation’ , the neurophysiological equivalent of the Freudian notion of ‘unbound cathexis’ characterizing the primary process and symbolism. Comparable to the classical psychoanalytic conceptualization of the primary process, but in difference with the connectionist account, the researchers found that bound and unbound cathexes were tied closely to the status of motivation and defenses. The more instinctual and ‘drive-like’ a motivation, the more likely it was to mediate ‘spreading activation’ or unbound cathexes. The more defenses failed and the greater the anxiety, the more unbound cathexes prevailed. The recent studies (Bazan et al. 2013) focus on the nature of language processing in the unconscious, where they hypothesized that words would be treated as perceptual stimuli and processed in a bidirectional manner. Based on their findings (consistent with Freud’s definition of primary process mentation), they propose that novel and creative sequencing of linguistic units (i.e., the word is treated as a perceptual object) predominates in unconscious cognitive processing and that this novel sequencing potentially contributes to ambiguity, condensation, displacement, and unconscious symbolization. Throughout, the Shevrin group’s findings corroborate the qualitative difference in the functinng of primary and secondary processes and symbolizations. VI. Db. Unrepressed Unconscious, Implicit Memory and Pre-Symbolic Domain The discovery of implicit memory by Warrington and Weiskrantz (1974) has extended the concept of the unconscious, allowing for the hypothesis that all infantile experiences of the first two years of life are located in this latter kind of memory, which is managed by the amygdala in its function of the processing of emotions. The hippocampus, which is indispensable for repression and for explicit memory system does not reach complete maturation before the infant is two years old. Additionally, it is hypothesized that the processing code specific to the earliest nonverbal subsymbolic experiential system is likely the parallel distributed processing of connectionist subsymbolic models of no discrete categories, with continuous computations of processing the visceral, somatic, and motoric functions (Bucci 1994), and the “scale free network” that operates on a molecuar level and on a level of nodal and hub-like neural connections (Alexander, Feigelson, and Gorman 2005, p. 137). From the early stages of intrauterine-prenatal life, sensory experiences take part in the formation of a basic emotional and affective memory, a real cornerstone for the organisation of early representations (Mancia 1980; Le Doux 1992). Herein might be a mechanism bridging the neurophysiology of memory and the concept of Freudian unconscious. Moreover, with the remarkable widening of the original concept of the unconscious into “nonconscious” domains, other substantial interdisciplinary convergences with cognitive science, neurobiology and neuroscience have also been postulated (Bucci 2001). The current huge brain research database on unconscious processes and representations has subsequently influenced the way the unconscious is conceived within psychoanalysis itself and have greatly transformed the
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