ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the psychoanalytic process has focused on words, language, and the symbolic meaning of the language employed by the patient within the analytic relationship. In a productive analysis, the patient produces verbal associative material that leads to deeper understanding of his own past life, as well as life as he lives it in transferential relation to the analyst in the present. “Primitive” communication, in contrast, may be verbal or nonverbal, but is thought to derive primarily from developmentally early relational36 experiences that occurred before the acquisition of verbal communication. These early relational experiences, particularly when they take the form of psychic traumata (such as the early death of a parent, having a depressed or psychotic parent, or a childhood illness of notable duration or severity), become solidified or concretized in ways that make them inaccessible through the usual verbal-symbolic codes of free association and discourse with the analyst.
