Back to Table of Contents
consistent with recent findings in attachment theories, early parent-infant interaction, and affective and cognitive neuroscience. The third important trend in European conceptualizations of the unconscious is drawn from object-relation theory which focuses on the role of the object in the formation of the unconscious, to be conceived as the product of internalization of relational experiences. The innate drive endowment of the infant is presumed to be shaped by interactions with the environment; these interactions are themselves colored and remodeled by unconscious psychical processes. The unconscious in this tradition of thinking is structured through the quality of the mind’s transformation of sensory and emotional experiences in primary relations. The innovative notions of an intermediary area between self and other and of the transitional object paved the way for re-thinking the dyad of object relations with extensions into ‘third’ areas. Theoretical concepts like the analytic third, the waking dream and the unthought known all point to forms of unconscious knowing that exceed the idea of the dyad while permeating the idiom and the entire being of the individual. In North America , among the multiple voices conversing on workings of the unconscious ego, on unconscious process and processing, on intrapsychic conflict and compromise, on the role of the object, subject and ‘the other’ in development and in the psychoanalytic situation, on internalization, representation, symbolization, enactments, horizontal layering and vertical splits, on ‘inter-subjectivity’, neuropsychoanalysis and group unconscious, several following trends can be discerned. In focusing on the process , the study of unconscious processes, processing and structures is set apart from unconscious content, yet the process itself is increasingly viewed as having both fluid and structured dimensions. There is a recognition of the role of the object in the constitution of, and modulation of, unconscious contents and processes. Inherent in this new direction is a less biological view of ‘instinct/drive’. At the same time, contemporary dynamic neuroscience and neuroanalysis have given a boost to re-examining Freudian meta-theoretical postulates, as it re-centers the physiology of brain and body again in relation to unconscious processes as well as contents. The dominant alternative to classical theorizing on the contemporary American psychoanalytic scene has become a group of approaches known under the umbrella term of relational psychoanalysis all of which stress in various ways the inherently dyadic, social, interactional, and interpersonal nature of mind. Hence the alternative appellation of ‘ two- person unconscious ’, the unconscious co-created in the inter-subjective field. Traditionally allied with the infant research and neurosciences, the trend seems to be from the exclusion towards the inclusion of the dynamic interplay in the inner representational world. Outside relational psychoanalysis, contemporary debate is less about the respective contribution of intrapsychic versus relational factors but rather of the articulation and complex interplay between the early (and in the analytic situation the present) object’s quality of binding-dreaming-symbolizing-facilitating and the subject’s unconscious intrapsychic « response » and representation.
1016
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online