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unsymbolized and procedural memories), are used to cover over a specific unwelcome reality (in this case, the importance, in most people, of the active repression of declarative memories and their associated affects). By using the ego psychological method of differentiating various processes and modes of thought, contemporary ego psychologists approach the study of unprocessed and unsymbolized post-traumatic memories, without reducing the entire unconscious with its the primary process to this mode of memory and mental processing. Outside of American Ego Psychology, many authors have proposed conceptualizations of the unsymbolized (e.g. Bion, 1962; De M’Uzan, 2003). Valuable as their clinical expositions have been, Ego Psychologists view them as conflating various processes, such as developmental ones related to ego growth and the growth of the secondary process out of areas of the primary process, with the traumatic process. Within American Ego Psychology, Alvin Frank (1969), in his evocatively titled paper “The unrememberable and the unforgettable: passive primal repression”, described this area of unprocessed functioning with some very striking clinical examples. Recently the term “ zero process” has been proposed for this form of mental functioning (Fernando, 2009, 2012), differentiating it from the primary process. For instance the frozen , “ present moment that is always just happening and never changing” characteristic of the zero process, which describes its ‘timeless’ nature, is quite different from the free-wheeling, constantly moving, but never wearing away, characteristics of the primary process, which describes its ‘timeless’ nature. Similarly, ‘ concreteness’, ‘lack of abstraction’, ‘lack of secondary process symbolization’, and ‘lack of integration’ are markers that could be applied to both the primary and zero processes, and yet they have somewhat, sometimes very, different meanings in the case of each of these important classes of mental processing. The ‘zero process’ offers a tool for conceptualizing post-traumatic mental functioning, and delving into its characteristics. At the same time, the importance of the two other great classes, primary process and the secondary process, of mental processing, and of the way in which the mind organizes itself and functions through them can be processed. This highlights the interaction between these forms of functioning. In the zero process there is a very different form of the unconscious, a strange sort of ‘ parallel universe’ , which people can slip into and then out of, in a manner quite different from the ‘system unconscious’ or Id that Freud described. In view of modern Ego psychologists, all of these realms of the unconscious continue to be important factors in normal and disordered mental functioning, and it is time to expand the conception of the mind to include all of them. III. Ab. The Unconscious in Modern Conflict Theory (MCT) Modern Conflict Theory has moved away from a focus on derivatives of the psycho- sexual stages of development to one that is centered on the processes of conflict and compromise formation (Arlow, 1966, 1981; Brenner, 1982, 1999, 2006; Richards, 1986). Central to this approach is the importance of understanding the unique fantasies, desires, wishes and fears that were organized by the child’s relationships with others. An understanding of
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