You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The Chairman introduced the panellists. She reminded us that the IPA had decided to spend two afternoon sessions of its conference on the subject of research and stressed the importance of research in producing a broader prospective in theoretical and clinical fields, and for the acknowledgement of psychoanalysis itself.
The first panellist, György Gergely, presented his bio-feedback model of parental affect-mirroring. This model was developed in close co-operation with John Watson at the University of California at Berkeley (Gergely & Watson, 1995) to account for the developmental processes leading to the emergence of self-awareness and control in infancy. In this model it is hypothesised that the psychological mechanism involved in affect-mirroring is the same kind of process as is demonstrated in bio-feedback training procedures (Dicara, 1970; Miller, 1969). The current proposal is that parental affect-mirroring provides a kind of natural biofeedback training for the infant that plays a crucial role in emotional development. Raising the question of how externalised representation of the infant's affect-expressions could result in emotional development, Gergely suggested that the mirrored externalised stimulus correlates of the infant's internal state expression were represented at a separate level of secondary representations that became associatively linked to the infant's implicit, non-conscious primary emotional states. Thus, by encoding the affect-mirroring expression of the parent, the infant created a kind of representational redescription (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) of his implicit automatic emotional states. Unlike the primary emotion programmes, this secondlevel representational structure, based on exteroceptive rather than interoceptive stimuli, was accessible to consciousness and played a vital role in exerting control over primary level automatisms.
Gergely said that the structural characteristics of affect-mirroring were markedness and congruence, and tha