ABSTRACT
With this book we pay tribute to the contribution and work of Jacqueline Amati Mehler, who spent her whole professional life exploring the complex reality of interpersonal and intrapersonal experience at the levels of language (1982, 1990), dream (2003), and thought (1988, 2004). Two of her major contributions were to show how emotional experience takes place in different languages and the variable relations between psychopathology and the developmental vicissitudes of the symbolic function. Together, all of her writings offer a challenging perspective on the nature of the associative process, the connection between memory and awareness, the connection between linguistic structure and the consolidation of the unconscious dynamic, and how all this happens in the encounter and communication between patient and analyst (1994, 2004).
