eiseEducation

The concept of Primitive Mental States is difficult to define in positive terms. Rather than being characterised by what is present, these states are more often described by what appears absent in adult patients who present with severe regression: the capacity for symbolisation, fantasy, affect differentiation, reflective thought, and the ability to make links between experience and meaning. There is often a diminished capacity to inhabit one’s body, to experience experience itself, or to hold internal representations of self and other.

Eekoff emphasises that prior to the development of psychic representation, the unrepresented or not-yet-formed mind exists in and of the body. Mental representations are not a given; they emerge through relational experience. Early psychoanalytic formulations, beginning with Freud’s drive and structural theories, conceptualised psychological development largely in terms of libidinal energy seeking object contact for drive gratification. However, subsequent psychoanalytic inquiry—particularly within Object Relations theory—profoundly reshaped understandings of regressed, pre-oedipal states and early infant development.

Key contributors including Melanie Klein, Fairbairn, Balint, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Kohut, though differing in theoretical language and emphasis, all turned their attention to the early mother–infant relationship. Central to their work was the mother’s psychological function in meeting the infant’s innate developmental needs—needs essential for the emergence of emotional regulation, psychic organisation, and mental life.

When this function is grossly compromised, infants may be exposed to pre-conceptual or developmental trauma—experiences that are overwhelming, unthinkable, and unrepresentable. Such events have been described as the unforeseen, unfathomable, incalculable, and unbearable (Ferenczi), threatening the infant’s basic needs for safety and protection. In these conditions, profound anxieties of annihilation, dread, and terror may emerge, laying the foundations for severe psychopathology, including psychotic organisation (van der Kolk).

This webinar series examines how such early disruptions shape primitive mental functioning, trauma, dissociation, and the clinical challenges encountered in treatment.