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.
Constructing A Mind is a challenging and important book for contemporary psychoanalysis. Antonio Imbasciati takes the reader through the workings of an ambitious endeavor to show how “mind” is constructed. He calls this a theory of the proto-mental and psychoanalytic cognitivism. The discussion and the model set forth in the book are both interesting and relevant for psychoanalytic theory and practice. The model provides a way of understanding individual development of unconscious contents of the mind from the earliest moments of life. Perhaps even more powerful for the field are the questions and issues that are articulated and clarified, especially those arising from the framework provided.
Constructing a Mind contains a theoretical framework for psychoanalysis. The project is to exhibit both how and when mind is constructed in the individual. An objective of the study is to build a model of the construction of mind without employing assumptions concerning endogenous elements. That is, Imbasciati endeavors to model the emergence of mind from early object relations without assumptions or mechanisms of innate input. He pursues the basic micro levels of human functioning and gives a detailed account of learning from experience. Initial learning from experience and its very first operations are posited as located in fetal life. Beginning with neonatal life, learning is considered as already ongoing and is described in its basic and early, but not initial, operations. What are described are complex, wholly unconscious processes which only later, in mature development, become elements of conscious thought.
Another goal of the project is to provide a model in such a way that the result will not only be useful to psychoanalysis but also will be comprehensible to and compatible with cognitive science and neuroscience. In this way psychoanalysis is to be integrated into the contemporary scientific community. A theory of psychoanalysis that is in sync with contemporary science