Allan Schore writes that psychoanalysis has been called the scientific study of the unconscious mind. The construct of the unconscious is now being across numerous disciplines to describe ‘essential, implicit, spontaneous, rapid and involuntary processes’ that act beneath conscious awareness. Freud notes that ‘the unconscious is the infantile mental life’. The unconscious mind begins to develop in prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal stages of infancy and continue across all later stages of the lifespan. The unconscious mind has a long enduring impact upon all later human development.
The unconscious mind is shaped through early experiences particularly in the relationship with the primary caregiver. This is where the personality develops along with adaptive capacities as well as vulnerabilities to later psychopathology, which is expressed at unconscious levels. Early emotional experiences during critical periods of right brain (the biological substrate of the unconscious) development permanently influence the development of right-brain structures that process unconscious information. Schore asserts that there is evidence that maternal-fetal placental transactions occurring in the final trimester may shape the ‘primordial emergence of the deep unconscious’. A young infant functions in an unconscious way and unconscious processes in an older child or adult can be traced back to the primitive functioning of the infant and child.