Unrepressed Unconscious, Implicit Memory, and Clinical Work

The aim of this book is to analyse the psychological and neurobiological characteristics of what goes nowadays under the name of "unrepressed unconscious", as opposed to Freud's earlier version of a kind of "repressed unconscious" encountered and described initially in his work with hysterical patients. Italian psychoanalyst and neuroscientist Mancia in his pioneer work in 2006 has distinguished this seminal Freudian concept from an earlier version of unconscious, preverbal and pre-symbolic, bodily-rooted, that he terms "unrepressed", described as "having its foundations in the sensory experiences the infant has with his mother (including hearing her voice, which recalls for the infant prosodic experiences in the womb). In connection to this description of two different kinds of unconscious, a double system of memory has been identified: if a traumatic event or a series of event take place when the nervous system is not ready to encode them linguistically and register them within the declarative memory system, they leave a trace within the implicit memory and particularly within the right brain, which both Mancia and Schore see as the seat of implicit memory and of that kind of unconscious that is not available for recollection but has not been properly repressed either (therefore "unrepressed").