Emotionally marked link and meaning

With the fading use of the economic-dynamic model, psychoanalysis failed to respond with a profound reformulation of the general theory and it preferred to promote psycho-evolutionary, psychodynamic and clinical generalizations to theory, renouncing a procedural theory which, in justifying clinical practice and the method, would promote psychoanalysis’s research and development. Against the trend and in view of such a necessary general theory, the Author introduces the concept of emotionally marked link to indicate a fixed, stable and persistent bond in time between a somatic-value-based element and a symbolic-representative element which, by virtue of emotional markings, limits, directs or prescribes the possible actions of the subject. A crucial feature of the emotionally marked link is its continuous attractive activity, which according to a fixed and marked framework tends to model the elements of the flow of experienced life, which logically, analogically or metaphorically allow it to be traced back to the framework. Emotional marking triggers an anticipation of emotion and initiates the approach response, moving away or caution in any motivational field, placing itself as the elementary mechanism for the formation of motivations, and therefore, intentions. The concept of emotionally marked link also makes it possible to clarify the problem of meaning, by indicating the meaning bound to emotion, the only “meaning” that can be considered causative from the point of view of actual processes. The conjecture behind the definition of the concept of emotionally marked link is that which psychoanalysis has always understood as the “unconscious” and must and can be translated into the continuous, systematic, and generalized action of the hierarchical network of emotionally marked links. This network silently guides behaviour not through unfathomable mentalist intentions, but through the simple exercise of (relatively or radically) binding rules, which construct meanings, intentions and motives, according to a grammar and syntax, that instruct meanings and contexts driven by marked emotionally marked links rather than by causative intervention of a mental content or projection of an image exhumed from a distant, unverifiable past.