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In his paper on the Unconscious (; particularly Section III, “On Unconscious Emotions”), Freud made specific his sense that the atomic elements of System Ucs were Vorstellungen, visual scenarios, that were themselves constituted by subjects, objects, and drives, which have no independent existence except in the heuristic language of clinicians and theorists. Drives, for instance, were not to be seen outside of their context in these unconscious scenarios but were rather like transitive verbs: they all took on both a subject and an object. Perhaps it was Strachey's clumsy translation (Vorstellung rendered as idea) or perhaps it was our collective inability to accept the loss of the Great Father Freud that has had generations of psychoanalysts reinventing these Vorstellungen as object relations, schemata, fantasies, and RIGS.
Marilyn Charles' Patterns is more than a recasting of the topographic model with a new terminology. It is revolutionary not so much in its new purview of these structures as it is in its style. Infused with the principle that “pattern inheres in nature,” (p. 26), the work, by the very structure of its writing, demonstrates the manner by which clinical productions, art, and poetry (hers and others') are birthed from prelexical patterns in each individual. To accomplish this, Charles brings together a psychoanalytic chorus of clinical, developmental, and experimental voices (the likes of Beebe and Lachmann, Bion, Bowlby, S. Freud, M. Klein, Matte-Blanco, Milner, Stern, Tomkins, and Winnicott) and demonstrates how in lived-lives, in art (Vigee-Lebrun and Mendieta), and in poetry (Plath and Rich), patterns of love and loss, identification and disidentification, and conscious and unconscious are joined to construct the idiosyncratic forms that we each carry with us into our relational worlds and creative lives. If life has anything to do, as Charles suggests, with creatively synthesizing while being present with others, her work exemplifies this capaci