Pathways of Emotional Communication

The phenomena that have been characterized clinically as “unconscious communication” may be accounted for systematically as emotional communication, which occurs both within and outside of awareness. The new formulation is based on current work in cognitive science, extended to account for emotional information processing, not information processing alone, and emphasizes the structure and organization of the multiple modalities of mental processing, rather than the dimension of awareness. The process of emotional communication, as it takes place in treatment (as in all the interactions of life), is accounted for in terms of the referential process, defined within the theoretical context of the multiple code theory. The referential process operates in the patient attempting to express emotional experience, including warded off experience, in verbal form; in the analyst who listens, experiences, and generates an intervention; and in the interaction between the two.