Forum

(08/17/2016) ✕

Share:

The idea, introduced in Western culture, in Vienna, a little more than a century ago, that a part of our subjective personal life is unconscious, or even that there might be a hidden region somewhere in the space of our psyche, has become widely accepted. Few other notions have given rise to so many controversies and debates throughout the last hundred years, be it on the way we obtain knowledge about the unconscious, on its relation to other layers of the psyche, on its relations to the body and organic processes, or simply on the correct methods used to conceptualize it.

It is of course well known that Freud’s approach to the problem changed throughout the development his work. Moreover, the subsequent generations of psychoanalysts and other psychiatrists and theoreticians have discussed and explored many different paths to continue to make sense of the Freudian ideas. In the present context we witness a relative opening in the psychoanalytical practice towards other methods and conversely an opening of other schools towards psychoanalytical problems and concepts. For example, in the German context, a very interesting debate is going on about the articulation of the two dimensions of the unconscious, the first, classically Freudian, dimension being the “vertical” unconscious concerning the more or less hidden memories of the individual, and the second dimension being the “horizontal” unconscious, concerning the space of resonance in the relation between two people [See Michael B. Buchholz and Günther Gödde, Unbewußtes (Gießen, Psychosozial Verlag, 2011)]. In the therapeutic relation, the issue is to articulate the two dimensions, i.e. to work on the history of the patient and in so doing to use one’s sensitivity towards his/her meaningful movements and expressions in the living present of the therapeutic encounter....