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The Innate Capacity for Representing Subjective Experience: The Infant’s Mind is Neither Primitive nor Pre-representational - Anne Erreich, PhD (Live Webinar)
2025 Grand Round Series
In this presentation, Dr. Anne Erreich cites the prominence of theories which locate serious adult psychopathology in the pre-verbal infant’s inability to formulate or represent traumatic experience. The work of two such authors, H. Levine and D.B. Stern, is briefly considered. The frame of reference for this investigation is that clinical and academic research findings are highly relevant to psychoanalytic theorizing. It is argued that when such findings are considered, a view of the infant with “primitive,” “unformulated,” or “unrepresented” states of mind has little evidence to support it. In fact, research findings point to an opposite view: that of the “competent infant,” one with highly accurate perceptual discrimination capacities and an innate ability to register and represent subjective experience in both procedural and declarative memory, even pre-natally. Given the infant’s competencies it seems implausible to hold that representational deficits are at the heart of serious adult psychopathology, which is instead seen to be the result of defensive maneuvers against unknowable and unspeakable truth rather than the absence of a pre-verbal representational capacity. Current research findings seem to pose a significant challenge for psychoanalytic theories which espouse so-called “primitive mental states,” “unrepresented,” ”unformulated,” “unsymbolized” experience or “non-conscious” states.
Target Audience
______ Introductory ___X___ Intermediate ______ Advanced
Learning Objectives
Describe the putative cause of significant adult psychopathology according to Donnel Stern and Howard Levine.
Identify Peirce’s three registers for representation.
Identify one cognitive ability that leads to the notion of the “competent infant.”
Dr. Anne Erreich is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Association of NY affiliated with NYU Grossman School of Medicine. She maintains a private practice in New York City. She has lectured and supervised over multiple years in Seoul, Korea, and at Tokyo University and Kyushu University in Japan. In 2017, she was an IPA-CAPSA Visiting Scholar at The International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin, and the Alexander Mitscherlich Institut in Kassel, Germany. For the last decade, Dr. Erreich has served as associate editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and she has published papers in that journal as well as other psychoanalytic publications such as The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. Her work has been translated and published in German and Italian psychoanalytic journals. She has also published work in academic journals such as Cognition, Child Development, and The Journal of Child Language, as well as several book articles on clinical, theoretical, and research topics. Her writing is often an attempt to integrate academic research related to models of mind and development with the unique data offered by psychoanalysis.
Austen Riggs Center Inc. adheres to the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Medical Education. All those at Austen Riggs Center involved in the planning of this activity, including the presenter(s) listed above, report they have no relevant financial relationships with an ineligible company*.
The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the Austen Riggs Center.
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Available Credit
- 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™
ACCME - As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for a maximum of 1.00 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
- 1.00 APA
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for 1.00 continuing education credit(s) (CE) for psychology. Continuing Education (CE) credits for psychologists are provided through the co-sponsorship of the American Psychological Association (APA) Office of Continuing Education in Psychology (CEP). The APA CEP Office maintains responsibility for the content of the programs.
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- 1.00 ASWB-ACE
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organization, not individual courses, are approved under this program. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. Austen Riggs Center maintains responsibility for this. Social workers completing this Online live course will receive 1.00 continuing education credit(s).
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