In my previous post I have promised that I will write a bit about how one works with the Unconscious, this elusive entity that is only manifesting itself in our mental lives through its effects, such as dreams, “insignificant” or “accidental” errors, lapses of memory, symptoms etc.

Of course it is not in my intentions to offer an online course in psychoanalytic technique. Rather I am eager to show what sort of interventions a psychoanalyst can make, and how he or she can assess the accuracy, the effectiveness if you will, of those interventions.

After all we have seen that this is what most critics of psychoanalysis see as its Achilles’ heel –that it’s "impossible" to verify or falsify a hypothesis.

So I will try to show that such a claim is based on ignorance if not on bad faith.

Following what I wrote in my last post about the incompatibility between psychoanalysis, as a method, and HPC's requirements for “quality assurance” and “improvement programmes” –to bring just two examples– I would like to attempt to clarify the reasons why such incompatibility exists.

The answer is at once simple and complicated.

Simple because one only needs to remind themselves that psychoanalysts work with what is unknown in the psyche rather than what we know. Freud, who was the first to systematically work in this way, gave to what is unknown the name “Unconscious”.

So, psychoanalysts work with the Unconscious. That’s why requirements about “quality assurance” and “improvement programmes” are irrelevant.

Simple, wasn’t it?

Unfortunately, it is not so simple.