ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3 I explored the evidence for the role that innate processes play in the development of human mental functioning, showing that genes trigger developmental processes, which then in their turn ‘switch on’ other genes, in a constant interactive sequence. In this chapter I want to change the focus of this inquiry away from the genetic and developmental processes that lie behind human mental functioning. I am now going to investigate the way the human mind interacts with the external world, how it processes experiences and events, stores information about them and then organizes that stored knowledge in a form that can be drawn on in order to make sense of further new experiences. This leads us to take a closer look at internal objects, the unconscious psychic structures which provide the substrate of our clinical analytic work.
