ABSTRACT

 

Most authors characterize trauma as the (complete or partial) unrepresentability of psychic events constituting the precipitate of past life vicissitudes and persisting in the subject’s mind, albeit without, or with very little, representability, thereby in effect giving rise to a void, on which the analytic couple finds it enormously difficult to work.  Although historical (external) events in the patient’s life may be remembered, it proves virtually impossible for them to be elaborated in affective terms in such a way as to produce a change of mental attitude (mutative effect).  Clinical descriptions that highlight this unrepresentability are often at variance with each other owing to the differing definitions of the concepts of representation and representability applied in each case.  These descriptions are commonly explained by the impossibility of enduring mental pain, which prevents the patient from “thinking” (in Bion’s sense) of what has happened in his or her inner history following a given life circumstance (or, more frequently, life circumstances), often dating back to infancy.

 

This paper offers an explanation of the characteristic description on which many authors have concentrated.  The concept of representation (and representability) is defined in the context of my personal theory – the theory of the protomental – which I have developed over the last twenty years and which offers an explanation in psychophysiological terms (i.e. terms also consistent with experimental psychology and the neurosciences) of the origins and construction of the individual mind.  The paper therefore gives a succinct outline of this theory, whose main elements are as follows:

 

Construction of the mind by a progressive process of symbolopoiesis, involving (relational) learning operations each of which modifies the subsequent modes of learning. Memory traces of these. Symbolopoietic chains and network of capacities for symbolopoiesis. Memories of protomental acquisitions. Concept of representation. Continuum extending from protorepresentations, or proto-inscriptions of certain functionalities within the mind, to internal objects. Widened concept of the internal object. Representation as memory of affects. Holes in the symbolopoietic network that is to be constructed. The concept of autotomy and the absence of any memory trace.

 

The genesis of trauma can be conceptualized in this context as a defect in the construction of the symbolopoietic network constituting the functional structure of the relevant individual’s mind. This defect can be described as an empty, or rather emptied-out, area, “autotomized” during symbolopoietic construction.  It involves the erasure (autotomy) of memories and, in particular, of memories of functions and of connections between memories.  It is not a matter of repression, but of the actual absence of memory.  The concept of Nachträglichkeit is reconsidered in mnemic terms, as the possibility that, in the continuum of transformations in any case occurring in memory, various “holes” in the symbolopoietic network may flow together into a single deficit, and indeed reactivate autotomic processes in the reverse direction.

 

This theoretical framework may help the clinician to be aware that interpretations concerning the traumatized “area” cannot be effective without a prior process of construction of what was not constructed, or was destroyed, within the functional structure of the patient’s mind.  The analyst must therefore base his approach on that of a caregiver looking after a child and teaching him or her to think.  That child may be one, two, three, five or seven years old, according to the mental level identified as referable to the trauma.

 

Clinical examples are given.

  

 

1936 – Born in Pisa

1961 – Degree in Medicine and Surgery (University of Milan)

1964 – Specialization (= Master) in Psychotechnics  (Milan)

1965 – Specialization (= Master) in Clinical Psychology (Milan)

1967 – Specialization (= Master) in  Infant Neuropsychiatry (Pisa)

1968 – Candidate of Italian Psychoanalytical Society

1971 – Associate Professor in Psychology (University of Turin)

1973 – Associate Member of Italian Psychoanalytical Society and International Psychoanalytical Association

1975 – Full Professor in Psychology (Turin)

1980 – Full member of Italian Psychoanalytical Society and I.P.A.

1986 – Full Professor in Clinical Psychology (Faculty of Medicine, University of Brescia)

1994 – Training Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society

 

Perceptology – Mass media – Projective testing – Psychotherapy – Psychoanalytic Theories and Clinics – Cognitive processes and Cognitive Psychoanalysis – Medical Psychology – Training for Health operators – Perinatal Psychology.

 

42 volumes and more than 200 other papers.

 

For details see his web-site: www.imbasciati.it

  

 

The Author is Full Member and Training Analyst of Italian Psychoanalytical Society, and he is Full Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Faculty of Medicine in the University of Brescia.

He wrote many papers, and 38 volumes, in Experimental Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychoanalysis: on his website: www.imbasciati.it you may see a detailed curriculum, the list of all his works and the topics he wrote about. Since 1978 most of his works relate to confront psychoanalysis with Experimental Psychology. He worked out a personal theory –the Protomental Theory- whose last elaboration is described in his last volume, “Constructing a Mind, Routledge, London.