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.
Postural behavior. kinesthetic sensations, and other sensory perceptions are preverbal forms of expression of the unconscious or preconscious. During analysis, such forms of expression are closely connected with conflicts over certain early experiences, and disappear when the corresponding instinctual conflicts are settled. Lowering and heightening of the threshold of sensory perceptiveness during analysis is an expression of ego activity; cathexed and repressed sensory perceptions return to consciousness. When the young child (or the analysand in regression) differentiates between what is 'within' and what is 'without', his sense of loss leads to attempts to retain or regain the original relationships that existed before the loss of objects. There is a longing for the (earliest) state of objectless primitive perceptions. The relationship between sense perceptions and motor action is so close that 'movements are metamorphosed sense perceptions': the ego executes sensory messages toward or away from objects. When freed from their object cathexis, sensory perceptions may therefore appear as the previously unrecognized repressed memories of past experience. With this fact in mind the analyst can discover much that would otherwise escape understanding. Analysis destructuralizes and derealizes the symbolic representations of the object world, the goal being a new synthesis in a form with which the ego can maintain more harmonious relationships. Study of the preverbal forms of expression can facilitate this new synthesis.