Institute Symposium – The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience

 

Institute Symposium

Wednesday November 5th, 2025 1pm to 2pm CT

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.

Educational Objectives: 

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

 

The presenter has  no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies to report.