Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. George Wiedeman noted that the most archaic perception presumably consists of syncretic phenomena in which the different sensory modalities are perceived as an undifferentiated totality. The various sensory modalities become differentiated during maturation. The less mature the individual, the more prominent are the eidetic phenomena which are intermediate between true percepts and memory images. The decreased importance of hallucinatory processes may be explained by a decrease in the cathexis of the sensory projections and an increase in the cathexis of adult abstract thinking, which occurs in normal maturation. In commenting on gestures in space which serve the adult to describe objects or actions, Dr. Wiedeman referred to Werner's statement that movement is basic for primary form perception.

Dr. Milton Malev felt more emphasis should be given to structure formation, developmental sequences, duration factors, and other processes. From the beginning there are primary autonomous ego apparatuses which are the nuclei of later ego structures, and are the organism's first guarantees of adaptation to an expectable environment. Dr. Nininger's schema tends to 'adultomorphize' infant behavior by the use of such sophisticated teleological terms as 'scanning' and 'recognizing'. The infant's recognition of the mother is attributed to memory, though actually it stems from an inborn reflex. Memory does not appear until later. The difficulty that results from blurring the distinction between memory and hallucination is illustrated by the statement that 'remembering is a hallucinatory reproduction of original experience'. Dr. Malev felt that, unlike hallucination, which is primary process, memory is secondary process par excellence, the binding of the drive in search for the real object.

Dr. Marcel Heiman commented that different people have different areas of spatial thinking experience, and wondered whether such areas vary with the level of intelligence.