Addendum to the previous posting: The Irma dream

I received a few remarks and queries about something I said in my above published note on the unconscious. I said:” The unconscious is a state in the mind that is of a linguistic structure, or an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about, even as an absence.

What I understood of the unconscious and put it in my own thoughts and words is that our minds have the potential to turn something conscious into something unconscious via innate linguistic adeptness. That process, transforms the intrapsychical conflicts into interpersonal relations or wishes, thus conceals its real content. The mind translates the intrapsychical entities into verbal or proverbial meanings, but seldom succeeds completely in achieving that goal. That is how Freud’s controlled rage the night before the Irma dream and projecting his anxiety (intrapsychical constructs) regarding the physicians’ opinion of him created -while asleep- the scene that when translated into words revealed a statement of contempt OR a wish to be blameless. 

This way we can put the unconscious outside cognitive function of consciousness because even if the subject’s function of consciousness is affected by something neurological or physical he still could have his psychological life intact and make things unconscious in the analytic sense. We could be neurologically brain imperfect but mind OK.  

          By detaching consciousness from its neurological basis, we get to deal with two other very central issue of psychoanalysis: interpretation and construction\reconstruction. Because the unconscious is a function of the mind and not of the brain the mind and its amenability to verbalization can only be made conscious when it is interpreted (matching verbal forms with meaningful content). Iinterpretation is the analytic act that gives the unconscious its meaning when the time comes to understanding the vagueness of some psychical material. 

The Irma Dream attests to the fact that the Unconscious is not a psychical entity (negative ideas…), content (censored intentions), a process that turns psychological entities into different entities (nonverbal or psychical). The unconscious is a state of mind that has a clear linguistic structure, or it is an explicit structure in the mind that could be talked about to make what is absence (unconscious)to presence.

A patient who lost her mother to suicide was constantly apprehensive to hearing bad news. There was nothing basically unconscious in the ‘symptom’ in light of her mother’s way of dying. But at certain times her apprehension was more active after disagreements with her stepmother. On one occasion the analyst requested her to talk more about her relationship with that woman because her anxiety about what could transpire in any of those times made the kind of apprehension itself unexplainable.  In that talk the analyst pointed out to her that her apprehensions seem to come in place of anger, which made her think for a while. Interpreting and reconstructing her apprehensions with the stepmother engendered few memories and thoughts stemming from losing her mother very young (nine years old). Working on that issue showed that anger and fear were unconsciously fused to make one bring the other forward in consciousness. Unconsciously the fusion of opposite feelings confused the patient but verbalizing them (from analytic material) turned the unconscious into consciousness and permitted some reorganizing of the intrapsychic configurations of anger \fear, and fear\anger. Still, reorganizing the intrapsychic in an effective way needed both analyst and patient to find the proper points where the disorganization happened. In this case the patient talked about memories of her mother’s suicide and how both sadness and anger at her mother for what she did scared her of herself. Anger, fear, sadness and a strange sense that she will never grow up “produced” a setup of both her intrapsychical and interpersonal worlds in which the patient had to make the unconscious conscious in order to work on reconstructing her psychical identity.  

The unconscious should not be treated as if it is the same substance of Cs.\Ucs; it could only take one of those two forms in the act of interpretation. It does not connote certain material but denotes the state of certain material. Those subtle, and sometimes not so subtle distinctions make the analyst listen to differentiate the unconscious from the conscious and preconscious. When that is done then the latent meaning in the unconscious should be verbalized (normally in stages if needed). When that is done both analyst and analysand- through free associating about the ‘content’ of the conscious and preconscious, should gradually identify the event or events where the intrapsychic has lost its integrity and work on reconstituting and reconstructing it. Psychoanalysis is the finding of disturbed intrapsychic conditions, make them conscious, then reconstructing them by the ‘working through’. However, this process needs some long time and several attempts, but it is much more effective if we listen (the basic and most difficult work) to hear first the unconscious talking.  

In this patient, her main topic was her mother’s suicide (not her mother), what that event tells about the mother (a mixture of longing and rage), exposes a sense of not getting what was her right to have…. What the mother’s suicide made her lose.