Title: Primitive mental states : a psychoanalytic exploration of the origins of meaning /
Authors: Van Buren, Jane.; Alhanati, Shelley.
Publisher: Routledge,
Year: 2010
Subjects: Psychoanalysis; Mother and child Psychological aspects.; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Child; Mother-Child Relations; Psychology, Child.
Abstract: Traditional psychoanalysis relies on the presence of certain meaning-making capacities in the patient for its effectiveness. Primitive Mental States examines how particular capacities including those for symbolising, fantasising, dreaming, experiencing and finding meanings in those experiences, can be taken for granted. Many of us lack these capacities in certain dimensions of our minds making traditional psychoanalysis ineffective. In this book, international contributors are brought together to consider a radical evolution in contemporary psychoanalytic theory developed from a combination of ultrasound studies, infant analysis, and observation of mothers and babies. These findings demonstrate how much mental life exists even before birth and considers unevolved, unborn and barely born aspects of the self such as the birth of emotion and the birth of alpha functioning. Topics covered include: prenatal imprints on the mind and body; difficult to treat patients; non-verbal, non-symbolic, disembodied states of being; and early relational and attachment trauma. --From publisher's description.
Contents: "Orphans of O" : the negative therapeutic reaction and the longing for the childhood that never was / James S. Grotstein -- Experiencing emotions, avoiding emotions : between Hercules and Puss-in-Boots / Antonino Ferro -- Incorporation of an invasive object / Paul Williams -- The theory of transformations and autistic states; Autistic transformations : a proposal / Celia Fix Korbivcher -- A binocular view of adhesion : from prenatal contiguity to postnatal appetite / Marianne Robinson -- The trauma of conception : cellular memory / Joanna Wilheim -- Thoughts without a thinker / Jane Van Buren -- Nothing comes from nothing : failed births, dead babies / Francisco Gonzalez -- The origins of the unconscious : framework of the future mind / Arnaldo Chuster -- Pre-verbal language in the treatment of a mother and infant : a clinical exploration / Annie Reiner -- Transformations of early infantile experience : a six-month-old in psychoanalysis / Johan Norman -- 'Talk to me baby, tell me what's the matter now' : semiotic and developmental perspectives on communication in psychoanalytic infant treatment / Björn Salomonsson.