ABSTRACT
Our psychoanalytic understanding of the transference has always been that this psychological phenomenon is a re-living in the analytic process of earlier states of being and experiencing. Phantasy is the first representative of the unthought known in mental life. It is a way of thinking that which is there. In other terms, it is an expression of the idiom of the infant's being and is the first mental act in the gradual and complex development of an 'internal' world. Along with the representation of the true self will be the mental representation of the mother's logic of intersubjectivity. The concept of primary repression does not address early intersubjective contributions to the infant's knowledge of being and relating. The infant-mother dialogue is more an operational and less a representational form of knowledge. And the analyst, like the infant becoming a child, will struggle to move the unthought known into the thought known.
