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René Kaës (1993) is one author who has helped to conceptualize this duality of the unconscious. He wrote about ‘ two navels’ of the unconscious , one opening or descending into the body and the other connected to the group and its network of signifiers. Both have input into the formation of the subject, that is, the subject sustaining itself through the actualization of these unconscious reservoirs of accumulated sensations and ideas. Botella and Botella (2005) – based on their work with severely traumatized patients – have followed up Green´s work by pointing to the non-representation so characteristic of these patients. Because preverbal traumas are inscribed but not represented in the psyche, they feel a new technique is necessary to incorporate them in psychoanalytic treatment. To address these situations of ‘ memory without recollection’ , the Botellas (2005, 2014) accordingly introduced the ‘work of psychic figurability,’ which is then incumbent on the analyst. Still another important strand of contemporary French scholarship has studied the quality of unconscious ‘work’ and the quality of relationship between the Unconscious and Conscious systems (e.g. Green, the Botellas, and Reid). At the beginning, Freud (1900) posited an important marker. If, as he claimed, the dream had long been confounded with its manifest content, it was equally crucial to not confuse it with latent content. In fact, the essence of the dream is the dream-work . In analogous fashion, one can argue that the essential characteristic of the unconscious is the work-of-the-unconscious. Here the emphasis is on the Unconscious as a system, which – over and above specific contents – possesses logic heterogeneous to the Pcs-Cs system (see also UNCONSCIOUS LOGIC below). The unconscious lacks a reality- testing, to the effect that unconscious processes “equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfilment “ (Freud, 1911c, p 225). The primary process is governed by the hallucinatory; the hallucinatory is the first modality of investment of the Unconscious as system. In contrast, the conscious-preconscious system operates under the aegis of secondary processes and seeks to integrate reality testing. According to Green, Botellas, Reid and others, the hallucination as a process is thus the first form of unconscious investment-work. The psychical functioning described in the first (Topographical) Freudian model is actually the product of a long period of dependency on and interaction with the psyches of caretakers, a development which ideally leads to a felicitous articulation between the Ucs and the Pcs/Cs systems. This articulation is characterized by movements of opposition/collaboration, facilitated by a flexible, semi-permeable boundary, which allows repression to have a firm, but not too rigid, footing. Freud detailed this relationship of opposition/collaboration without however elaborating hypotheses about the genesis or construction of this relationship. It is at this juncture that Winnicott is considered to have taken up the baton, making the discovery of transitionality in a revisiting of the genesis of reality testing. Henceforth, this latter is inscribed in the framework of a paradoxical relationship between the psyche and its environment. Transitional processes induce a new modality of unconscious investment, which joins the hallucinatory mode with signs of reality . In transitionality, the good-enough object is at the same time, the mother and not the mother. Transitionality simultaneously brings together and separates primary and secondary processes. It is this transitional form of unconscious functioning or ‘work’ – the combination of hallucinatory mode and reality testing – which
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