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Inspired in part by progress in cognitive psychology, and with a serious commitment for an empirically driven reconceptualization of psychoanalytic theory, Wilma Bucci has developed a multiple code theory, which she presents as a psychoanalytic psychology (Bucci 1984, 1988, 1997b). This is the result of a very successful, very creative, and stimulating research program that—in its direct relevance to psychoanalytic theory, practice, and research—also constitutes a challenge to psychoanalysis. Her ideas have also grown from the notion that information is registered in the mind through emotion schemas in verbal and nonverbal codes connected by referential links. This means a linking (Freud's Bindung?) of the multichannelled, parallel, and analogic contents of the nonverbal schemata, often private and unique to an individual, with the discrete, sequential, and logically organized verbal modality that is the shared communicative code.
Images (seen as the symbolic nonverbal code) are the pivot of the referential process, mediating between subsymbolic nonverbal representations and symbolic verbal forms (i.e., words and language: Bucci 1997b). Referential activity (RA) is best illustrated by the activation of some story or narrative, perhaps a dream, which uses words imbued with multiple-code properties (i.e., imagistic and metaphorical, symbolic, referential). High RA thus corresponds to a narrative “story,” rich in concrete sensory detail, which also has a quality of immediacy. For instance, a patient reports in detail a dream, a vivid memory, etc Language with low RA will sound abstract, general, vague, lacking in specific and concrete details and it will fail to evoke imagery in the listener. Alternatively, an ongoing verbal enactment may often come out as low in RA.