ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a greater depth the difficulties that emerge with patients who have a developed the necessary intuitive–emotional capacities for understanding themselves and who are not capable of containing or working through their emotions. Psychoanalysis as a research method and a therapy is based on the discovery of the function of the dynamic unconscious, a structured and complex system that, in the course of a psychic conflict, is capable of repressing and removing from awareness affects or emotions that are incompatible with consciousness. While neurosis results from a non-harmonious functioning of the dynamic unconscious, borderline or psychotic structures are nourished by an alteration of the emotional–receptive unconscious: that is, the mental apparatus capable of symbolising affects and using the emotional function of intrapsychic and relational communication. The chapter concludes that all the emotional experiences before the development of language contribute to construct the precursors of an internal emotional idiom that characterises the development of the unconscious psychic experience.
