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Across psychoanalytic orientations, there is a growing emphasis on the ‘unrepresented’ and ‘ subsymbolic’ unconscious and an attendant reappraisal within the context of the interpretative and non-interpretative participation of the analyst, including countertransference enactments, holding, containing and facilitation. To the degree that the emphasis is on the non-interpretative modes of analyst’s functioning, it constitutes a theoretical departure from traditional conflict theory approaches to the unconscious. To the degree that the emphasis is on bringing the unrepresented and subsymbolic into the interpretative discourse, it constitutes the expansion of the intra-psychic realm of variously defined and stratified unconscious processes. Many schools of thought today stress the advantages of optimally permeable boundaries between the different parts of the mind. In Latin America , the trends towards synthesizing metapsychological and clinical thinking resulted in intensive studies of Unconscious Logic and Unconscious Communication. Combining Freud´s conceptions of the Primary Process with mathematical propositions, Unconscious Logic is presumed to be ruled by two principles: The principle of generalization, which explains that unlike the logic of the conscious system, the logic of the unconscious does not consider individuals as distinct units, but as members of infinitely large groupings; and the principle of symmetry, which identifies the way in which the unconscious treats identically the obverse/converse of every relationship. It is assumed that the mind works bi-logically by the simultaneous functioning of conscious and unconscious Logics. Historically rooted in Freud’s writings on the subject, and incorporating further advances in the conceptualizations of transference, countertransference, projective identification, Latin American analysts introduced the conceptualization of the analytic situation as a dynamic field. Convinced of the profound intersubjectivity of the analytic situation, authors have wrought a transformation of dream theory using the reverie concept. In contemporary expositions of Unconscious Communication, dreaming – postulated as a continuous psychic function – takes on an even more central role than in classical theory. Understood as the result of a communication between one unconscious and another, every session is understood as a long shared dream. Thus, the whole of analysis becomes an exchange of reveries. Overall, amidst divergences among and within regional trends with conceptual pluralities variously emphasizing multiple dimensions of unconscious processes, contents and structures, including the context of their formation and change, several converging themes emerge: The continuing need for the concept: Most psychoanalysts agree that the concept of the unconscious is an essential tool for apprehending a fundamental reality of the human mind: its traversal by modes of “representation” totally separate from the rules of secondary process cognition. The unconscious is generally construed as the inevitable by-product – both unique and universal – of psychic “incompatibilities” between individual experience and collective life. While the core of the unconscious is presumed to have emerged or have been “deposited”
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