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‘Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use the emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality’ (Bion, 1962a).
A number of efforts are being made to bridge psychoanalytic literature with the developments in neuroscience, allowing for increased sophistication and enrichment in both realms. Prenatal and early life factors lay down the foundation for how the environment and sense of self will be subsequently negotiated. Neuroscience has provided an understanding of how particular neural circuits are strengthened based on environmental conditioning. The ability a person will have to cognitively bind limbic-cortical input, through inhibitory control, informs whether interoceptive and exteroceptive signals will be modified into something ‘thinkable,’ or whether avoidance strategies will be employed, be them behavioral, affective, or cognitive. If early life adversity informs that there is something potentially dangerous or untenable about engaging the thinking apparatus to deal with uncertainty, a template of avoidance may become the norm, resulting in a narrowing of one's understanding and an intolerance of knowledge.
In object relations theory, there is a close alignment between the notion of the internalized dyad, tinged with a fantasy element, and that of the working model highlighted by attachment theorists. It is a conceptual common ground among many different theories how the earliest object becomes internalized, and whether the child will emerge with a basic sense of safety regarding the world (thus allowing for exploration and discovery of one's own sense of self with the scaffolding of an other who serves a containing observing role, what Winnicott termed ‘primary maternal preoccupation’) (Winnicott, 1958). Within the realm of early experiential integration, making sense out of a massively complex world into which the child is thrust requires an object