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The traditional assumption underlying most depth psychological perspectives holds that one of the primary therapeutic tasks is the uncovering of unconscious material, which reflects a psychological conflict or holds the possibility of enlarging the conscious perspective of the analysand. However, as the scope of analysis has widened, there has been a gradual shift of focus from the identification of psychic presences which have been forgotten, repressed, or disguised towards an emphasis on facilitating the creation of psychic structures that are undeveloped, missing, or functionally impaired. It is at the cutting-edge of these developments where Unrepresented States resides.
Unrepresented States builds upon earlier work by Botella and Botella (2005) who have adopted the terms figurabiity and non-figurability, rather than references to representable and non-representable experience. They define figurability as ‘a psychic property determined by a tendency towards convergence, the actualization of which triggers a process of binding all the constituents, all the external and internal stimuli’ (2005, p. 12). The contributors to Unrepresented States acknowledge that ‘representable’ and ‘figurability’ have come to be used somewhat interchangeably and that both terms refer to an absence of mental representation.
Imagos, complexes, meanings, narratives and internal object relations all refer to forms of mental representation. In their introduction, Levine, Reed and Scarfone state that representation is the culmination of a process through which impulse and content must all be linked. The authors emphasize that affect, image, drive, somatic experience and thought all must cohere for a functional representation to be created. Where stable representation of primary objects is