This volume explores the primitive yet complex emotional world of the baby, a preverbal world that predates memory, symbolic representation, self-reflection, and verbal description. Author Ivri Kumin describes the impact of early relational experiences on the foundation of emotional living, when traumatic developmental interferences can disrupt the infant's emerging capacity for representational thought. Using detailed clinical examples, he explains how these early experiences are enacted within the psychoanalytic situation and how their analysis and mediation enable the patient to think about and emotionally encompass these states for the first time. Synthesizing empirical findings with theoretical and clinical information, this volume is invaluable for psychoanalysts and psychodynamic therapists. It is an ideal text for graduate-level courses in psychoanalytic theory and technique, attachment theory, human development, and psychotherapy of early traumatic states.

Introduction Part I: The Basic Language of Primary Relatedness 1. Attachment to the Unperceived 2. Precursors of Internalized Object Relationships 3. Signal Anxiety and Environmental Mediation Part II: Intermodal Exchange 4. Intermodal Matching and Affect Transmission 5. Intermodal Exchanges in the Psychoanalytic Situation 6. Fields of Identity 7. Creation of Representability 8. The Container of Sleep Part III: Pathology of Pre-Object Relatedness 9. Two Disturbances of Pre-Object Relatedness 10. Ambivalent Relatedness and Avoidant Relatedness 11. On the Repetition Compulsion 12. Trauma and Enactment 13. The Incorrect Interpretation