Mistake:

I hope you will forgive me in making the mistake I am trying to correct now. It could be referred to something unconsciously playing with my understanding of the unconscious, or it might be just “a return of the repressed”.

In the past posting I used a clinical experience to show the manner the practicing psychoanalyst usually deals with the unconscious aspects in a patient’s associations. Instead of showing what may be a better way to giving the unconscious the chance to unfold in a gradual way I went directly to its content.  

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Here is the corrected mistake:

While in training my patient mentioned with some annoyance that sometimes he feels that his deceased mother is behind him watching what and how he does things. My supervisor (very Kleinian) asked me to ask the patient where exactly his mother stands behind him when he feels her presence. Although I very seldom ask my patients questions, I asked the patient, the first time he mentioned his difficulty with his mother’s presence. He replied: ‘She stood a couple of feet behind him to just feel her presence but not see her’. I mentioned to him that she stands in the same space I occupy with him laying on the couch i.e., he could be speaking about me too in his complaint. My remarks were meant to show the patient that his speech could unconsciously reveal things that he is talking about without being aware.

This remark came from realising that the patient-in an unconscious way- created a metaphor that (also unconsciously) depicted the psychoanalytic situation as the situation and relationship he lived with his mother growing up. The metaphor was quite revealing of this patient’s tendency to construct other situations in the same manner. In other terms, the patient’s unconscious identification of me with his mother reveals several possible unconscious leanings in his psychological relations with people: need for approval, narcissistic sensitivities, repressed anger, potential to regression to dependency demands. The point to underline here is that every patient has his own metaphor of his analysis as every analyst has his own unconscious metaphor of his practice. This notion is important in termed of ‘counter transference’ because analysts have to minimize, as much as it is possible for them, the works of the metaphor they live in being psychoanalysts.

The point I wanted to underline with this correction I am trying to make is that the analyst has to uncover the unconscious in the relationship with him before just going around our rich vocabulary to find the best term to use to form his interpretation. The analyst has to uncover the unconscious interplay in each analysis separately from a general conception of “THE UNCONCSIOUS”.

This remark was instrumental in analyzing the relationship the patient had with his mother through his transference relationship with me. In other terms, the unconscious is not something conscious that became unconscious, or something happened before the emergence of consciousness during psychoanalysis, so it was never conscious in the first case. The unconscious is a psychical process that is active all the time, shaping the present by something of the past family psychodynamics. The unconscious creates -by participation of consciousness- the psychical life of the subject as a natural part or aspect of the living present. The unconscious in this case is not a psychical entity, it is the psychical process that made the patient’s phantasy of his mother watching him, and analyst listening to him, overlap in one mentioned event. His upset about his mother’s interference meant something else too.

What I would like to strongly emphasises is that we should discover WHAT is unconscious in the analytic situation and gradually use it to rebuild the evolution of the original events that furnishes the unconscious in the patient’s life in general. The most unnoticed thing (which is the most important) is hurrying up to find a term, a verb, a concept a word in our repertoire of vocabulary that could explain what we are doing, when we should avoid the closure on the process of analysing for no gain from making the best choice.