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While many differing analytic schools might draw on the work of Jean Laplanche in thinking about the development and organization of the unconscious, for some relational theorists Laplanche (1999a ,b, c) offers an interesting two-person account of the emergence and evolution of unconscious experience in the complex encounter of child and adult as a universal situation. The infant feels the effects of desire and longing emanating from the parent as an enigmatic message which invades and intermingles in the child’s somatic and affective states of mind/body. On both sides, these experiences may be primarily or solely unconscious. What Laplanche terms enigmatic messages bring the desire of ‘the other’ into the child, and her intrusive desire interacts with desire emerging from within the child. A repeated process of translation gradually results in the constituting of subjectivity and unconscious desire which will always be both individual and intersubjective. Ruth Stein (2008) among others have been particularly attentive to the impact on unconscious experience of the excessive character of these enigmatic ‘seductions.’ Sam Gerson (2004) provides a succinct description of a ‘ relational unconscious’ : “[T]he unconscious is not only the receptacle of repressed material driven underground to protect one from conflict-induced anxieties; it is also a holding area whose contents await birth at a receptive moment in the contingencies of evolving experience “(p 69). A few pages later, he follows: “The relational unconscious, as a jointly constructed process maintained by each individual in the relation, is not simply a projection of one person’s unconscious self and object representations and interactional schemas onto the other, nor is it constituted by a series of such reciprocal projections and introjections between two people. Rather, as used here, the relational unconscious is the unrecognized bond that wraps each relationship, infusing the expression and constriction of each partner’s subjectivity and individual unconscious within that particular relation . In this regard, the relational unconscious is a concept that allows the joining of psychoanalytic thought about intrapsychic and intersubjective phenomena within a theoretical framework that contains each perspective and elaborates their inherent interconnectedness” (p 72). III. Cb. Unconscious Processing: A Contemporary Self Psychological Perspective Self psychology, another modern American psychoanalytic theory, accepts the postulation of unconscious mental activity as having been fundamental to psychoanalysis in Freud’s formulation of the dynamic unconscious and, more recently, in the recognition of implicit (unconscious or non-conscious) learning and memory. The latter has expanded exponentially the domain of unconscious processing (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2008; Clyman, 1991; Fosshage, 2005; 2011a; Grigsby and Hartlaub, 1994; Stern, et. al., 1998; among others). Unconscious and conscious processing – which includes perceiving, categorizing, consolidating memory and learning, regulating shifting priorities in motivation (intentions) and affect, and conflict resolution – is always occurring simultaneously during our waking hours. Unconscious processing continues during sleep in the form of REM and non-
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