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The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Pre-representational

April 25 @ 12:50pm EDT

Anne Erreich, PhD, cites the prominence of theories which locate serious adult psychopathology in the pre-verbal infant’s inability to formulate or represent traumatic experience. The work of two such authors, H. Levine and D.B. Stern, is briefly considered. The frame of reference for this investigation is that clinical and academic research findings are highly relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. It is argued that when such findings are considered, a view of the infant with “primitive,” “unformulated,” or “unrepresented” states of mind has little evidence to support it.

Debbie Steinke