Comments on Anne Erreich's Article “The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant's Mind is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational”

Anne Erreich (2024), in her article “The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant's Mind Is Neither Primitive nor Prerepresentational,” makes a crucial point about the lack of clarity of what is meant by unformulated or unrepresented states. More needs to be done to define these terms, including what is and what is not being represented, and how clinicians are making this determination. In addition, she notes that for something to be experienced in the mind it must be represented in some form. As she points out somatic states, often referred to in discussions of unrepresented states, are represented in the mind as the experience of bodily sensations.

What is most problematic in the paper is the misapplication of data from outside of psychoanalysis to push a particular psychoanalytic theory. Such a development occurred with the discovery of mirror neurons, which were seen as proof of immediate, nonverbal resonance (Gallese, Morris, & Migone, 2007), a popular concept at the time. Without going into great detail, our understanding of mirror neurons has become far more complex, and their basis for supporting any specific metapsychology or clinical approach has been questioned (Heyes & Catmur, 2022). In this case, Erreich has taken data demonstrating the “competent infant” to argue against unrepresented states and to support the defense model as the only legitimate basis for understanding difficulties bringing fantasies or feelings into conscious

awareness. In this view, everything is represented in the mind of the infant from its earliest life, so if some feeling of internal experience is not accessible to consciousness, it must be defended against.

However, just because something can be represented does not mean that