The role of the preconscious in psychoanalysis.

The analytic process inevitably involves the interdigitation of the intrapsychic structures of both patient and analyst. This interplay is expressed in transference-countertransference interactions. Drawing a dichotomy between intrapsychic and interpersonal factors as central agents of psychic change is a faulty construction. Affective, behavioral interchanges between patient and analyst reflect their individual intrapsychic organizations and their interplay, which influence the form and nature of psychological change. The safer both patient and analyst feel in relation to each other, the more freely will they relax their customary cognitive controls and permit the emergence of preconscious responses. Preconscious resonance between patient and analyst is likely to facilitate the lifting of repressive barriers and the emergence of unconscious material in both participants. The integration and reworking of old conflicts then becomes possible. The role of the preconscious in facilitating the analytic process is illustrated. Creative use of preconscious processes requires the analyst's self-discipline to preserve the analytic role and keep the treatment safe for both participants.     

The ecology of automaticity: toward establishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing effects.

In the past 15 years, the single term automatic has been applied to a diversity of laboratory phenomena that differ as to the preconditions necessary for their occurrence. Several major strains of automaticity are distinguished, based on the experimental conditions under which they are obtained: preconscious automatic processes, requiring only the proximal stimulus event; postconscious automatic processes, similar to preconscious effects but needing a recent activation or "priming" event for their operation; and goal-dependent automatic processes, which occur only when a specific, intentional processing goal is in place. It is argued that to more accurately specify the conditions under which an automatic effect will occur in the natural environment, greater attention needs to be given to aspects of the experimental paradigm (e.g., subjects' task goal, questionnaire administrations, previous tasks) that might be necessary to produce the effect.     

Authenticity and the Analytic Process

In this paper we first make a differentiation between phenomena that can be defined as spontaneous and others that can be defined as authentic. We then attempt to present authenticity as a process rather than an outcome. Finally, we try to understand the location of authentic phenomena in the sensorial and pre-symbolic communicative register. We situate authentic phenomena in the register of sensorial and pre-symbolic communication. The authentic process becomes manifest, step by step in the analytic process (Borgogno, 1999), through the vivid iconic and sensorial elements that happen to cross the analytic field. Through two brief clinical vignettes, we seek to document the progression of the analytic process, in one case through the analyst's capacity for rêverie (Bion, 1962; Ogden, 1994, 1997; Ferro, 2002, 2007), and in the other through the sensorial elements with which analyst and patient are able to tune in to each other.     

On "Telepathic dreams?": an unpublished paper by Robert J. Stoller

In 1973 Robert Stoller wrote a paper on a series of dreams-his own and his patients'--that he reluctantly found himself calling "telepathic." He never submitted the paper for publication, though he returned to the topic of unconscious communication and telepathy with increasing fascination in the years before his death. Publication of Stoller's paper seems particularly opportune just now. In it he pleads for open-minded examination of data, however alien to current scientific belief those data seem. In the past, despite numerous published reports of possibly telepathic experiences in analysis, their investigation remained relatively one-sided, since a technical posture of anonymity with patients constrained analysts from revealing that a communication struck them as telepathic. This has limited what analysts have been able to learn about the information actually exchanged, how it was exchanged, and whether the communication was experienced as uncanny by the patient. Recent attention to the intersubjective nature of the analytic situation has led to a deemphasis of anonymity, opening freer dialogue that may facilitate the rigorous investigation Stoller calls for. Such investigation may further analytic understanding of unconscious mental function and communication in the clinical setting, and lend perspective to the growing body of carefully controlled experimental research on anomalous mental phenomena.     

Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: The transference as the scene of address

This paper will attempt to broaden the conception of witnessing in analytic work with traumatized patients by extending the idea to incorporate the patient’s developing and varied capacity for witnessing, as well as a witnessing that occurs within the analytic relationship itself. Actions occuring as part of traumatic repetition are understood to represent memory phenomena and are distinguised from dissociated self‐state experience. These experiences are not therapeutically intended to be symbolized, but rather lived‐through with the analyst, thus transforming the patient’s own relation to the experience. I suggest that the scene in which this living‐through takes place is the transference–countertransference matrix, and that it is the analytic encounter that allows traumatic repetition to take on the quality of a communication, an address to another, rather than remain meaningless reproduction. A clinical vignette illustrates the turning of trauma’s imperative for witnessing into an address in the analytic encounter.     

On refusal

Traditionally, all efforts to counter psychotherapeutic work have been captured under the umbrella term, "resistance." However, it is useful to distinguish a concept of refusal. Resistance entails therapeutically a gradual elaboration of unconscious, preconscious, and partially conscious experience. Refusal manifests as a willful nonparticipation in offering or responding to material that can be symbolized. All communication has an element of refusal, which occurs at various levels of persistence, intensity, and legitimacy. Clinical examples are provided to discriminate refusal from resistance proper, and to describe three categories of mental and group experience, (a) refusal to perceive external experience; (b) refusal to think about what one knows, and (c) refusal to think about what one does not know. Therapeutic impasses may relate to limitations of the therapist's creativity and flexibility in thinking about and dealing with refusals, including one's own.     

The heuristic-analytic theory of reasoning: Extension and evaluation

An extensively revised heuristic-analytic theory of reasoning is presented incorporating three principles of hypothetical thinking. The theory assumes that reasoning and judgment are facilitated by the formation of epistemic mental models that are generated one at a time (singularity principle) by preconscious heuristic processes that contextualize problems in such a way as to maximize relevance to current goals (relevance principle). Analytic processes evaluate these models but tend to accept them unless there is good reason to reject them (satisficing principle). At a minimum, analytic processing of models is required so as to generate inferences or judgments relevant to the task instructions, but more active intervention may result in modification or replacement of default models generated by the heuristic system. Evidence for this theory is provided by a review of a wide range of literature on thinking and reasoning.     

Intuition: a bridge to the coenesthetic world of experience

The concept of intuition is relatively unestablished in psychoanalysis, where it is often associated with narcissistic meanings and vagueness. But intuition, as an integrated mode of archaic coenesthetic thinking, should be kept conceptually free of those connotations. Its capacity of undifferentiated delineation supplies an instinctive general means of dealing immediately with various rationally indistinct phenomena, such as forms, shades, and multidimensionality, regardless of the boundaries between sensory modalities. It may be impossible to translate intuitive experiences into lexical form; these languages are incommensurable. Intuition as a preconscious nondiscursive thinking process is needed in creativity, as well as less conspicuously in countless everyday activities. In speech communication, intuition rapidly specifies subtle shades of meaning in linguistic content and all the prosody. In psychoanalytic work intuition is like radar, creating preliminary contacts with the inner world of the analysand. The observations gained require, however, rational consideration to be confirmed. Intuition is an essential instrument of the psychoanalyst, and also functions in the service of tact to create working space and adequate forms of interpretations. Clinical vignettes reflecting some problematic fates of special intuitiveness in creativity are presented from psychoanalytic work with artists.     

States of grace: Eureka moments and the recognition of the unthought known

In this paper we consider states of grace in analysis. These encompass a range of phenomena which share an experience of something being received or revealed rather than produced by the ego. It feels that they are events that happen rather than events that are made to occur. They are marked by a profound sense of transformation of feeling tone. The quality of relatedness in the analytic dyad is also heightened. Some of these phenomena have been referred to as experiences of the self, synchronicities, moments of meeting, the unthought known and Eureka moments. The latter are experiences of sudden realization where a meaningful thought or image emerges which results in a dramatic shift in direction of the analysis and a transcendence of impasse. Although many authors describe these phenomena, we find that a Jungian approach provides a loom on which these threads can be woven together. Jung's concept of the transcendent function and his understanding of the gift of grace are particularly illuminating here. We also consider the conditions which allow grace to be experienced and how these inform our analytic practice.     

Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes

An increase in brain activity known as the “readiness potential” (RP) can be seen over central scalp locations in the seconds leading up to a volitionally timed movement. This activity precedes awareness of the ensuing movement by as much as two seconds and has been hypothesized to reflect preconscious planning and/or preparation of the movement. Using a novel experimental design, we teased apart the relative contribution of motor-related and non-motor-related processes to the RP. The results of our experiment reveal that robust RPs occured in the absence of movement and that motor-related processes did not significantly modulate the RP. This suggests that the RP measured here is unlikely to reflect preconscious motor planning or preparation of an ensuing movement, and instead may reflect decision-related or anticipatory processes that are non-motoric in nature.     

Understanding negative hallucination: toward a developmental classification of disturbances in reality awareness

Negative hallucinations are explored from a psychodynamic viewpoint in four cases of neurosis. Next, shifting to the level of clinical theory, negative hallucinations are contrasted with five better-studied disturbances in reality awareness. It is noted that all six function as screen phenomena, and all occur in everyday contexts. These and other phenomenological issues lead to an assertion that negative hallucinations are regressive perceptual phenomena, similar in form to both preconscious perceptions and infantile amnesia. Finally, developmental considerations are used to derive a coherent hierarchy of disturbances in reality awareness.     

Transference symptom

Transference symptom is a hazy notion in Freud's writings. The notion is presented here as a particular moment in the crystallization of the transference neurosis. It results from a double cathexis of the analytic frame and the analyst resulting in a symbolic distortion that is represented plastically within the session, as occurs in dreams. The transference symptom proceeds from two different preconscious cathexes, one attached to the reality of the frame, the other to the drive linked to the analyst. A psychic space is thereby opened up for interpreting both the resistance and the unconscious derivatives of infantile conflict. The transference symptom is a compromise formation that includes the analyst and questions the countertransference stance. Three different analytic situations give rise to transference symptoms according to the relative balance between frame and process in the analytic encounter. The concept is compared with enactment.     

Preconscious defence analysis, memory and structural change

Beginning with the ways in which the use of the couch lends 'depth to the surface' (Erikson, 1954), I explore the topography of the inter - and intra subjective psychoanalytic situation and process. I suggest that defences are not by definition unconscious but rather can be observed operating at conscious and preconscious levels, particularly under these conditions. A focus on preconscious disavowal provides a window on what has become unconscious repression. As a result of eliciting and then verbalising the operation of such defences with regard to anxieties in the here-and-now transference, declarative memories of increasingly specific childhood fantasies and events begin to hold sway over unmanageable procedural remnants from the analysand's past. With this may even come the possibility of neuronal regeneration, the more generalisable enhancement of declarative and symbolic functions and the sense of identity with which these are associated. Herein may lie one enduring therapeutic effect of the 'talking cure' - putting feelings into words - as one among a variety of psychotherapeutic modalities.     

A shadow concept

The author focuses on the signifi cance of preconscious thinking, and its relationship to what we think of as unconscious fantasies. He reopens Freud's forgotten struggle with preconscious thinking, while he explores preconscious thinking as the basis for thinking about psychoanalytic treatment. This includes our goals in bringing an idea to the analysand's attention, and the role of transitional space where thoughts and feelings can be played with.     

The holding function of theory

As multiple theoretical models contend on the American analytic scene, the holding function of theory emerges as a unifying theme. In addition to supplying an intellectual superstructure for the working analyst, theory provides a psychological presence--a sense of conviction, affective stability, reassurance, and self-esteem--that makes effective analytic work possible from the analyst's side. Ideological passions and differences arise from the vital need for the holding function in an intense and inchoate engagement like psychoanalysis. To show how adherents of different models use theory in practice, three clinical cases are reviewed, one from Betty Joseph, one from Lewis Aron, and one from the author. The last example reconstructs the analyst's subjective experience of treatment both in the selected hours and in terms of the analyst's preconscious use of theory.     

失语：医患交往中的沉默现象反思

本文从医生和患者交往的失语现象入手,采取案例分析的方法,分析了沉默的不同类型及特点,指出沉默的原因是对医患沟通的忽视,医生的无暇,受传统父权思想的影响,其根源在于人文精神的失落,并有针对性地提出了沉默的唤醒的途径和治疗失语的方法。     

Conscious and Preconscious Uses of Memory in Patients with Depressive and Somatoform Disorders

This study investigated whether conscious and preconscious memory features contribute to discrimination between depressive and somatoform disorders. Thirty-one participants fulfilling the diagnostic criteria for a somatoform disorder and 28 participants fulfilling the criteria for depression were examined within the framework of the process–dissociation paradigm using neutral, health-threatening, and general threatening words in a lexical decision task. Parameters of conscious memory, preconscious memory, and chance were used to compare memory features of both the groups. There was an inverse relationship between conscious and preconscious memory effects for health-threatening stimuli in the group of patients with somatoform disorders but not in the group of depressive patients. Patients with somatoform disorders showed a significantly lower level of conscious memory for health-threatening stimuli than depressive participants. Compared to depressive patients, a more dynamic relationship between decreased conscious and increased preconscious memory for health-related stimuli seems to be characteristic for patients with somatoform disorders.     

In Search of the Absent Analyst: Commentary on Janine de Peyer’s “Uncanny Communication”

The subject of telepathic phenomena in psychoanalysis has been highly controversial ever since it was introduced into psychoanalysis by Freud in 1921. Following a theoretical-clinical introduction, my explanation for these profoundly mysterious phenomena combines contributory factors involving patient, archaic communication, and analyst, regarding massive primary traumatic absence that was imprinted in the patient’s nascent self and inchoate relating to others. The telepathic occurrence in treatment bursts forth as a search engine when the analyst is suddenly emotionally absent in order to seek and find the analyst and to halt the process of abandonment and collapse into the despair of the early traumatization. This is discussed here with regard to de Peyer’s clinical examples. Thus, the telepathic phenomena embody the enigmatic “impossible” extreme of patient–analyst deep-level interconnectedness and unconscious communication in the analytic process.