ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the problems with which psychologists are confronted in psychoanalytical treatments of patients who have serious difficulties in the psychic transformation of their emotional experiences. It explores the specific symbolic failure which is related to the obstruction of the development of phantasies, dreams, dream thoughts. The chapter focuses on a frozen area of the mind, which, through immobility and emotional isolation, avoids falling into states of traumatic helplessness. It differentiates bombardment of stimuli, or chaotic states of excitement, from psychically elaborated emotional experiences. The chapter explains the conjecture that a factor in the arrest of the development is the detention of projective identifications, and that when this primitive form of communication is reestablished it also opens the possibility for the development of a symbolization process. It proposes the hypothesis of presentative symbolism as being especially capable of formulating emotional experiences, psychic reality, and the most unconscious phenomena.
