Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: Locating Unrepresented Thought: The relationship between Trauma, Disrupted Object Representations and Evolving Concepts of the Unconscious

Dr. Bohleber opened the session stating that the title of this session was an ambitious one. For many decades psychoanalytic presentations have primarily consisted of patient material that was symbolized. Nowadays we frequently encounter analytic material that is insufficiently represented, and it is often only through the countertransference of the analyst that the material can be worked on and become understood. We have learned that implicit procedural memory content is not represented verbally but in schemata of action. Trauma research has shown that a traumatic experience is registered in the mind or in the body but is not psychically and narratively informed. A transformation of unrepresented material into verbally represented material has to take place. Bohleber asked: How can unrepresented or only weakly represented material become verbally represented? He suggested that the psyche of the analyst, i.e. his/her intuition and countertransference reactions are the first step to understanding narratively unrepresented material. The analyst must offer his own psyche and elaborate on the patient's unspoken behaviors and reactions. Bohleber acknowledged having been influenced by Pierra Aulanger's notion of the pictogram, Bion's notion of alpha function (that turns beta elements into alpha elements), Ferro's notion of waking dream thoughts, and Reed's book “Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning”.

The first panelist was Rose Gupta, LICSW, psychoanalyst of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California who has spoken widely on unrepresented states. Ms. Gupta's paper was titled: When the Mind does not Arrive- The Negative of Trauma and the Encounter with a Non-Symbolic Object. She stated that “the intra-psychic world, in my view, steadfastly remains the domain of contemporary psychoanalysis. What has shifted,