Event Detail



Institute Symposium

 

Wednesday November 5th, 1pm to 2pm 2025 
Anne Erreich - The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The
Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational.

The author cites the prominence of theories that locate serious adult psychopathology in the preverbal 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 “primordial and unrepresented” states of mind has little evidence to support it. In fact, research findings summarized herein 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 prenatally. 

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 preverbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories that espouse “primitive mental states”; “unrepresented,” “unformulated,” or “unsymbolized” experience; or “nonconscious” states.

Learning Objectives: 
 

  1. Examine theoretical evidence that challenges the view of the infant mind as primitive or prerepresentational.
  2. Discuss the clinical implications of recognizing representational capacities in early infancy 
  3. Apply the concept of early representational functioning to therapeutic work with parents, infants, or children 

 

Participants are asked to be aware of the need for privacy and confidentiality throughout the program. The Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute maintains responsibility for this program and its content. CPI is licensed by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation to sponsor continuing education credits for (license numbers in parentheses): Social Workers (159.000122), Professional Counselors (197.000202), Marriage and Family Therapy Therapists (168.00204), and Clinical Psychologists (268.000091). 

Eligible professionals will receive 1.0 continuing education credits for attending the entire program. To receive these credits an evaluation form must be completed online. Learners must claim the amount of time spent in the educational activity and that will be the amount of credit they will earn. 

Continuing Education credits (CMEs) are not available for physicians for this program.