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If this communication fails at some point, the infant receives in return a nameless dread. This increases its state of helplessness and the precariousness of the equipment to deal with mental pain. Winnicott, Bion, Money-Kyrle, and Bick, among other psychoanalytic authors, have stressed the mother’s function as a thinking object and that maternal mental functioning builds a scaffolding of meaning for infantile primitive experiences. The absence of this scaffolding, especially for pre-verbal experiences, leaves the infant exposed to mental states of empty turbulence devoid of meaning.

What happens to the emotion when it cannot have its psychic birth, and what happens in the personality that lacks the equipment for the psychic development of the emotion? In what follows, I present some theoretical considerations and some aspects of the clinical material from a patient, whom I will call Ana, through which I will try to illustrate the clinical experience from which these hypotheses or conjectures arose. Reverie, equipment, and mental pain The human infant has to face the extraordinary adventure of knowing the world, as a central factor of his process of adaptation and survival.

If this were so, the oldest systems, predominantly iconic, would have disappeared. Yet, observation shows that, in the human being, kinetics have become richer and more complex and the paralinguistic language has also flourished, parallel to the evolution of verbal language, developing elaborated forms of art: music, dance, poetry, etc. These ideas agree with those formulated by Langer about “presentative symbolism” as another “symbolic form”, and the importance given by Meltzer (1983) to what he calls music and dance in the elaboration of a deep emotional grammar.