Listening To You - Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in North West London
  • Welcome
  • Listening
  • Psychoanalysis
  • The Therapist
  • Beginning therapy
  • Code Of Practice
  • Contact Details
  • Links
  • A Psychoanalyst's Blog

The Unconscious, part 1

3/9/2009

 
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.
There is a question. what does it mean "working with the Unconscious", and this is a bit tricky. After all, the Unconscious, by definition, is not conscious, i.e. not in consciousness. We do not know about the Unconscious, we do not see the Unconscious, we do no hear or feel it, we do not directly perceive it in any way; so what does it mean when we say that we are working with it?

That's another red herring.

Psychoanalysts are not the only people who work with entities that cannot be directly seen, felt, heard or perceived.

In fact all scientists work in this way –and I am talking about hard sciences now.

No scientist can claim that they work with the actual thing of their expertise. They all work with the indirect effects of the actual thing –whatever the thing in question is– to other things around it.

Verily, no one can claim direct access, any direct access whatsoever, to actual things. Humans only have access via proxy.

Confused?

Let’s say I grab a stone and throw it to the sea. There is a splashing sound, and I can see some waves. What has happened?

When I grabbed the stone what I really did was to approach my hand to a specific visual target, and then move my fingers in a particular way until they find some resistance and they cannot move further.

Combining indirect visual information with indirect tactile, pressure and temperature information I reach the (presumably direct) conclusion that I have grabbed a stone.

And yet. My conclusion was not direct at all.

At no point of my grabbing the stone did I have direct access to the actual stone; I only had access to indirect information about it.

The same applies to everything.

You know, I am not making this up now. This is what the German philosopher Immanuel Kant has argued, towards the end of 18th century. We don’t have access to the Thing in Itself, he said (the "Ding An Sich" in German)

But we do have access to its effects.

In a similar vein, we do not have access to the Unconscious. We only do have access to its effects.

And what can the effects of this Unconscious be?

Many things really. Dreams; slips of the tongue or of the pen (they are called Freudian slips for a reason!); lapses of memory; parapraxes; symptoms such as phobias or obsessions. In fact its effects abound.

How do I work with it, then?

I am afraid that I do not have time to address this question now. I will leave it for my next post.

(to be continued…)
David Smart link
26/7/2011 02:13:36 am

Interesting! A quibble: "...the Unconscious, by definition, is not conscious, i.e. not in conscience". It sounds as if you meant to say "in consciousness". But instead comes "conscience".

Christos Tombras
26/7/2011 02:20:56 am

Noted (and corrected) with thanks!


Comments are closed.

    About

    This is the blog of
    Christos Tombras
    a psychoanalyst practising
    in North West London.

    For more information,
    please click here.

    For a list of all posts,
    please click here.

    Archives

    January 2020
    May 2019
    March 2016
    October 2014
    April 2014
    May 2013
    October 2012
    February 2012
    July 2011
    June 2011
    February 2011
    September 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009


    RSS Feed


    Categories

    All
    Body Mind Dichotomy
    Books
    Brain Initiative
    Cfar
    Descartes
    Discourse Ontology
    Dsm
    Event
    Evidence
    Falsification Criterion
    Films
    Free Will
    Hard Sciences
    Health Professions Council
    History
    Immanuel Kant
    Jacques Lacan
    Jouissance
    Lanzmann
    Lecture
    Martin Heidegger
    Measuring Effectiveness
    Medical Model
    Mental Illness
    Nimh
    Oedipus Complex
    Phantasy
    Psychoanalysis
    Psychosis
    Randomized Control Trials
    Reality
    Regulation Of Psychotherapy
    Resistance
    Reviews
    Scientific Research
    Sexuality
    Shoah
    Sigmund Freud
    Signifier
    Stigma
    Symptoms
    Teaching
    Therapy
    The Unconscious
    Truth
    Ukcp


Listening To You • An Invitation to Talk • Lacanian Psychoanalysis • London     © 2009 - 2021