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.
This article explores the corrective function of data from other disciplines in formulating psychoanalytic theory. It addresses the challenge of validating psychoanalytic constructs and theories, given the lack of consensually agreed-upon criteria within the field. The article argues that incorporating findings from adjacent disciplines such as neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary theory can help ascertain the plausibility of both earlier and recent psychoanalytic formulations. To illustrate the importance of extra-analytic data, the article examines the notions of unformulated and unrepresented experience, as posited by D. B. Stern and by Levine, respectively, as the cause of significant psychopathology. In reviewing findings from neighboring disciplines, especially data on the innate capacity for mental representation and memory in infants, the article demonstrates the flaws in their arguments regarding unrepresented or unformulated experience as primary pathogenic factors in adults. The view of infant development espoused herein contradicts classical Freudian and Kleinian notions of development wherein infant mentation is innately primitive in a variety of ways: by being prerepresentational, unsymbolized, or filled with distortions from splits, mergers, or paranoid–schizoid ideation. Against these beliefs stand research findings that demonstrate that the infant's representation of subjective experience is innately accurate but becomes increasingly distorted by protective revisions as an infant marinates in the demands and prohibitions of the social surround and struggles to develop safe, stable attachments to important figures. The article concludes that psychoanalytic theories must align with findings from related disciplines to remain plausible and relevant.