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

2025 Grand Round Series: Anne Erreich, PhD

In this presentation, 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. In fact, research findings point to an opposite view: that of the “competent infant,” one with highly accurate perceptual discrimination capacities and an innate ability to register and represent subjective experience in both procedural and declarative memory, even pre-natally. Given the infant’s competencies it seems implausible to hold that representational deficits are at the heart of serious adult psychopathology, which is instead seen to be the result of defensive maneuvers against unknowable and unspeakable truth rather than the absence of a pre-verbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories which espouse so-called “primitive mental states,” “unrepresented,” ”unformulated,” “unsymbolized” experience or “non-conscious” states.