IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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contradiction between the two drives and condensation) are viewed as stemming from these two principles that govern the logic of the unconscious. The relevance of Matte-Blanco’s theory of the bi-logic of the Unconscious for contemporary psychoanalysis has been increasingly widely acknowledged (Grotstein, 2000; Guignard, 1995; Keene, 1998; Newirth, 2003). When considered as a form of logic/symbolization/discourse on its own terms, the ‘primitive’ unconscious can be appreciated as a sophisticated generator of symbolic codes that utilizes bi-logic to create its message, and which can become a potential resource of growth and recovery. III. Eb. Unconscious Communication The first reference to this topic in psychoanalytic literature was in Freud’s (1912b) paper “Recommendation to Physicians Practicing Psycho-analysis” “[The analyst] must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound waves the electrical oscillations in the telephone line . . . so the doctor´s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious, which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient´s free associations (p 115-116). He returned to this topic in “The Unconscious” (1915c) “It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs. This deserves closer investigation, especially with a view to finding out whether preconscious activity can be excluded as playing a part in it; ... but descriptively speaking the fact is incontestable” (p 194). After that, Freud no longer took up this theme but Sándor Ferenczi introduced the importance of the analyst’s personality to the development of unconscious communication, fundamental to determining the idiosyncratic characteristics of each psychoanalysis process. In his Clinical Diary (1932 pps 31, 45, 107 and 109), this author broached what he called the ‘real analyst countertransference’, that is, the analyst’s emotional participation in the analytic process: “A patient dream, two days earlier predicted an important German revolution, it would be in fact a intuition of my repulsion against suffering” (Ferenczi, 1932, p. 91). Green (2008) considers Ferenczi, from his diaries, the precursor of modern psychoanalysis and Zimerman (2008), in his Contemporary Psychoanalysis Vocabulary, states that Ferenczi considered the analyst’s personality an analytical healing instrument. Both Freud and Ferenczi were fascinated by the possibility of telepathy. There was a silence about these ideas until Theodor Reik published “Listening with the Third Ear” (1948). Reik made a significant step toward understanding unconscious communication when he wrote “The analyst hears not only what is in the words; He hears also what the words do not say. He listens with the ‘third ear’, hearing not only what the patient speaks but his own inner voices also, what emerges from his own unconscious depths. . . What is spoken is not the most important thing. It appears to us more important to recognize what speech conceals and what silence reveals” (ibid, pp. 125-126). He added: “…the unconscious planes are not grasped directly. The medium is the ego, into which the other person’s

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