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Volume 11, Number 1
January - June 2007


Linguaggio, affetti e pensiero
(Language, affects and thought)
Jacqueline Amati Mehler

SUMMARY

Language lies at the heart of human psychic development. The author explores the "psycho-archaeology" of language, embedded in early affect and psychosensory experiences related to primary object relationships and primary processes.

Such early experiences condition the significance of the words and the organization of discourse within the vicissitudes of the development of the symbolic function, implying the transition from concrete to abstract, from bodily to mental and the bonding of thing presentations to word presentations.

However, "thing" presentations connected with sensations, affects and visual images within the complex network of associations may not always become connected to a word presentation and make their way to verbal expressions or to thought processes. The affects and defences that accompany their encoding run along pathways that will condition the fate of representability, memory and remembering as well as the language that vehicles thoughts.