Four Papers on the Concept of the Unrepresented: Editor’s Introduction

With increasing frequency over the past sixty years, analytic practice and theory have dealt with the problems presented by patients who appear to demand a way of working other than the “standard analytic technique” of free association and interpretation. Part or all of these patients’ inner worlds appears to be inaccessible; material does not take the shape of elaborated fantasies that emerge when conflict and defense are analyzed; rather, emerging material appears to be unsymbolized, concrete, and difficult to link to words or thoughts. Green, one of the first to theorize the psychopathology of these patients, hypothesized that their anxiety seemed “to relate essentially not to the problem of the wish (as in neurosis) but to the formation of thought” (Green 1975, p. 40). Over the years, a growing literature, drawing centrally upon the work of Green, Bion, and Winnicott, has been produced to consider the origin and dynamics of these problems with symbolization and thinking, which may be gathered together into the general category of the unrepresented. Most often, these problems are seen as linked to the earliest preverbal stage of development and believed to reflect a deficiency or disturbance of maternal care; correspondingly, although the technique prescribed by theorists of the unrepresented may rely in part upon interpretation of fantasy, conflict, and defense, it is also a reparative technique in which a capacity that is lacking or disturbed is internalized, at least in part for the first time.

The four papers we present here reflect a wide range of attitudes and approaches to the unrepresented. In his overview, Levine makes a strong case for the value of this concept. Simpson, drawing upon the work of Laurence Kahn , disputes both the theoretical underpinnings ascribed to the concept of the unrepresented and the shift toward a

reparative technique that Levine and others advocate. Leikert and Katz develop detailed models for the origin of unrepresented materia