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Intersubjective processes and the unconscious
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denition the recipient (the analyst) will remain unaware of the con-
veyance because it has aected the unconscious. The analyst may
experience some unnamed perturbation, which in Freuds terms
would be a thing-presentation. However, if the analyst is to grasp the
meaning of this disturbance, it must be linked in his or her own mind
with verbal/imagistic word-presentations, which involves overcom-
ing the rst censorship, thereby becoming a preconscious (usually
visual) experience to which he or she may attend on a conscious level.
Thus, following Freuds model, we may say that the Ucs. of one
human being can react upon that of another, but that impact will
itself remain unconscious unless the receiving individual can connect
that experience with a word- (verbal/imagistic) presentation that is
then potentially accessible to consciousness by passing through the
second censorship. To say that what was originally unconscious must
be transformed into preconscious experience is to privilege the
importance of preconscious mental processes (Kris, 1950) that are
visual, dream-like (Arlow, 1969a), daydream-like (Busch, 2006a;
Kantrowitz, 2001) phenomena that hover in a transitional space
between the unconscious and the conscious (Green, 1974, p. 417).
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What is function?
In On Arrogance, Bion commented about the purpose of his
patients projective identication to put bad feelings in me and leave
them there long enough for them to be modied by their sojourn in my
psyche (1958/1967, p. 92, italics added). However, he did not address
how the feelings are modied while in his psyche or the agency
responsible for this alteration, and much of his subsequent research
focused on just this question. It was a few years later that Bion (1962a)
identied alpha () function as that aspect of the psyche responsible for
acting on sense impressions and emotions ( elements) to produce
elements that are suited for storage and the requirements of dream
thoughts (p. 5), and soon thereafter (1965) he outlined in great detail
the processes of transformation that are inherent in function. Let us
return to Freuds theory of thing- and word-presentations for a
moment from the perspective of function.
Freud approached the question of the relationship between thing-
and word-presentations from the perspective of the fate of an
unconscious derivative as it traversed the path from the unconscious
to the preconscious and then to conscious awareness, but he did not
identify how this transpires other than to allude to the push of the
drives to achieve conscious expression. As mentioned above, he
(Freud, 1915c) briey discussed how the analysts interpretation
oered a second registration by suggesting to the analysand that his
or her conscious utterances have an unconscious meaning, thereby
alluding to, but not elaborating on, the analysts thought processes.
Bions theory of function expands on Freuds idea about the
transposition of concrete/sensory experiences to abstract/imagistic
representations in two ways: rst, by studying the nature of the
analysts mental activity in this process; second, by introducing an
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The dream . . . is in the domain of the reality principle and the pleasure
principle, and represents an attempt to satisfy both.
(p. 95, italics added)
Freud assumed that . . . the latent content was the origin of the
dream . . . I say that the origin of the dream is an emotional experi-
ence . . . and that this is worked on (rationalized?) to produce the
dream.
(Bion, 1992, p. 135)
The use of the male and female symbols is deliberate but must not
be taken to mean that other than sexual implications are excluded.
(Bion, 1970, p. 106)
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. . . if the person [or analytic couple] can dream, then he [they] can
digest facts and so learn from experience.
(Bion, 1992, p. 52)
And, also
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Jason was 13 years old when his parents contacted me because of his
depression, self-injurious behavior, experimentation with marijuana,
and extreme apathy about schoolwork. The middle of three boys, his
two brothers had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; while they
often ipped into manic states, Jason tended to be depressed and
listless. Most alarmingly, he engaged in self-cutting, and drinking
whatever alcoholic beverages he could nd until passing out, and he
had recently attempted to set himself on re. Understandably, his
parents, both intelligent human-service providers, were deeply con-
cerned; when I inquired as to what might be troubling Jason, they
looked blankly at me. The notion that there could be meaning to any
of their sons emotional suering seemed like a foreign idea, and they
considered Jason as having a variation of his brothers biological
illnesses. I had the impression that their pain at having three deeply
troubled children was ameliorated by the belief that the boys had been
stricken with illnesses akin to diabetes that is, with no emotional or
interpersonal meaning. Interestingly, when I later recommended
analysis, they quickly agreed because one of their relatives had been
signicantly helped through analytic treatment.
Although all his teachers viewed him as highly intelligent, Jason
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Figure 5.1
Objects should not touch because they are not alive. . . . But they
touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with
them as though they were living beasts.
(p. 19)
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that my function was beginning to bounce back from the initial
impact of Jasons projections.9
About a year later, Jason said that what is so terribly awful about
him is sexual in nature, but that he was not yet prepared to tell me the
secrets in any detail. By this time, he had been speaking more freely to
me, and his drawings in the sessions were similarly communicative,
richly expressing his aects as well as capturing the emotional eld of
the analytic hours. These pictures, and our interactions around them,
were indicators of the growth of Jasons function and of the emer-
gence of our connection as a fertile couple whose collaborating
functions created meaning out of what had previously been without
form and emotional substance. Figure 5.2 is from a session during a
Figure 5.2
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time that Jason was feeling defeated: he had achieved some notoriety
for his painting but resented the drawing exercises his teacher required
and was thinking about quitting. Similarly, he questioned whether the
analysis (the drawing exercises) was helpful because he could not
bring himself to talk about his deepest, most disturbing thoughts.
Jason started the session as usual by drawing in the sketchpad and
spoke of his mentor telling him to spend more time on drawing
rather than painting, but that he prefers to paint. I said that his draw-
ings in the hours have been uninspired lately, and he replied, maybe
Im wasting your time and mine here because I cant talk about the
sexual issues that I need to talk about; you expect me to talk about this
stu and Im not cooperating. I said that there must be something
that feels very dangerous about bringing these sexual feelings into the
room, and he shrugged his shoulders. It was about midway into the
hour, and I asked to see his drawing (Figure 5.2); at this stage,
the background gure with the prominent eye had not yet been
drawn. I asked Jason his thoughts about the picture, and he said there
is a candlestick in the middle that reminds him of a still-life drawing
he had originally refused to draw and had then destroyed. Then
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Jason and I have clearly traveled a long distance from the exchange
around the freakish image in Figure 5.1 that was largely encoded in
sensory language that I had to decipher. For Jason, that picture
carried no meaning he could explain in words; instead, it was solely a
vehicle for the evacuation of an insuerable 10 experience,
thoughts that required a thinker. In contrast, the images in Figure
5.2 were also disturbingly surreal, but they were expressive of mean-
ing that we were able to jointly elaborate. There was a creepiness
conveyed by the drawing that felt more communicative, rather than
invasive, to me. This was a complex dialogue occurring on many
dierent levels simultaneously: the transference implications of Jasons
complaints about his teacher asking for more drawings, his feelings
about the analysis (and his art tutoring) being a waste of time, the
destructive attack on his still-life drawing connected with fear of
devastating the analysis, and, nally, the shadowy emergence of the ill-
formed background apparition, drawn toward the end of the session,
that hinted at what was to come. One could spend considerable time
analyzing each of these important points, but what I want to
emphasize is the growth in the complexity of our interaction and
how our thoughts ping-pong or squiggle (Winnicott, 1965) with each
other to create a narrative where previously none had existed.
Jasons comment at the end of the session that there was optimism,
though it seemed to reside in me, appeared to kindle his own hope-
fulness, and the sessions became much livelier. Figure 5.3, drawn sev-
eral weeks later, captures his renewed commitment to the analysis as
well as being a product of a shared phantasy of the eld (Baranger &
Baranger, 196162). Jason picked up the sketchpad and began the
hour by saying he had registered for a human-gure drawing class [I
immediately felt heartened by his reinvestment in drawing/analysis]
and that he had done most of a drawing assignment for his tutor. In
fact, he had spent 5 hours on it last night but had stopped short of
nishing his homework because he got frustrated. When I asked
about the task, Jason said it was a self-portrait and that it made him
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sweeping tail.] That round part [at the end of the tail]
might be a pill, which stands for drugs, and Ive decided to
avoid the low road thats behind me.
A. The low road?
J. That would be to destroy everything: quit painting, drop
out of school and therapy too. Painting and therapy are
related they deal with expressing yourself.
Figure 5.3
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the thinker for his frightening thoughts, and I was quite surprised,
when telling him what I thought, that he quickly replied, I actually
had a eeting thought of what you just said when I handed you the
picture to look at, but it never reached my full awareness. It was
rather stunning that Jason and I shared in this somewhat idiosyncratic
take (being underwater, looking up at the gure used as bait) on the
drawing. This was a true intersubjective moment,15 resulting from the
unconscious work each of us were doing on both intra- and inter-
psychic levels in order to arrive at this shared thought, which was
conscious for me and preconscious for Jason. Then he added his
association of bait being like a sacrice, like some pain to be endured
. . . in order to deal with my sexuality. This statement seemed to
indicate his feeling of growing hopefulness that his inner container
and function had developed sucient strength to be capable of
handling some pain to be endured.
While Jason and I shared the same visual perspective on the draw-
ing, our associations went in dierent directions: his to the idea of
sacrice and suering pain; mine to wondering whether his reference
to sexuality was a kind of bait (what psychoanalyst worth his salt isnt
interested in sex?) to lure me into an enactment in which I was seen as
the one pushing the dirty thoughts on him. As I was considering
whether he was baiting me, Jasons thoughts turned to his decision to
leave the low road behind. There seemed to be a shared
unconscious phantasy permeating the room about dirty thoughts
and low roads that each of us was processing in our own way: I was
concerned about being seduced into being a pusher of lascivious
thoughts, and Jason struggled to eschew the low road. By this point
in Jasons analysis, we had evolved into a dreaming couple that had
been successfully internalized by him into his function, and in some
respects the sexual themes in our communications were partly an
expression that implies a mental mating, or primal scene, resulting in
the birth of new thoughts (Ferro, 2002, p. 98).
I have underscored Bions view that function, and the associated
capacity for life-promoting dreams, depends not only upon the
internalization of the mothers function but also upon an internaliza-
tion of the process of mother and infant making meaning together. In the
latter case, a triangular situation is established in the psyche that is
comprised of the individuals self relating to the dreaming couple
(Grotstein, 2000); thus, ones deployment of function always implies
a three-way interchange. We will now turn in Chapter 6 to a
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consideration of the triadic aspects of intersubjectivity, the relevance
of the Oedipal situation, function, and the role of the internalized
Oedipal couple.
Notes
1 For the moment I will leave the distinction between Ucs. and Pcs. vague
and discuss this below.
2 I do not mean to imply that authors from other schools (Kohutian,
Freudian, etc.) subscribe to the notion that projective identication/
transidentication is the vehicle for intersubjective relationships.
3 In On Aphasia (1891) Freud uses the term object-presentation in place of
thing-presentation, but in later writings refers only to thing-presentation.
Thus, to diminish potential for confusion, I am using only thing-
presentation here.
4 This issue of two kinds of mind one capable of metaphorical thinking
and suited for classical analytic technique, the other with a limited or
absent capacity for symbol formation has been the subject of numer-
ous papers and books in recent years (e.g., among many others, Botella
& Botella, 2005; Brown, 2005, 2006 (Chapter 6, this volume), 2007
(Chapter 9, this volume); Ferro, 2002, 2005; Fonagy & Target, 2007;
Grotstein, 2007, 2009b, 2009c; Levine, 2008). The thrust of these studies,
while often taking dierent theoretical perspectives, is that the analyst
must use his own experiences as the means to catch a concretized
communication that then must be transformed, (Ferro, Grotstein,
Brown), mentalized (Fonagy), or given gurability (Botella &
Botella) through processes in the analyst. (See also p. 71 above regarding
technical implications of this issue.)
5 In a recent paper, Parisi and Ruberti (2009), two Italian analysts, quoted
Corrao (1987): One could say that every phase in a childs development
is marked by the childs fundamental request of the adult to tell a story (p.
182, italics in original, translation from the Italian by Parisi & Ruberti).
6 This shared dream is what classical analysts refer to as a transference
neurosis.
7 The conference title of the Bion in Boston 2009 conference was
Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained.
8 From the paper, Reections on Non-Dreams-For-Two, Enactment
and the Analysts Implicit Alpha Function, which received the Parthe-
nope Bion Talamo prize for best paper at the Bion in Boston 2009
conference.
9 See Chapter 6 for a further discussion of disturbances in the analysts
function.
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Intersubjectivity and unconscious process
10 Perhaps a balpha element (Ferro, 2009), since the drawing itself suggests a
nascent transformational capacity?
11 Bions (1977b) notion of the developmental status of a thought
and Freuds (1900, 1915c) ideas about the movement from thing- to
word-presentations.
12 A topographical regression (Brown, 1985; Freud, 1900), transform-
ation in hallucinosis (Bion, 1965), or, in the Botellas (2005) framework,
formal regression.
13 This was the subject at the Bion in Boston 2009 conference of a panel,
Dreaming into Being: Transformation and Representation in Non-
Neurotic Structures, chaired by Howard Levine, with panelists Jaime
Lutenberg, Renato Trachtenberg, and Rudi Vermote.
14 Perhaps a representation of his ego-destructive superego (Bion, 1962a) as
well?
15 Are there any moments that are not intersubjective? One could argue
that the moment two persons engage each other, all inter- and intra-
personal moments are intersubjective phenomena of the eld.
However, something is lost if we ignore the one-person dimension;
rather, these are two vertices from which to consider the analytic dyad
(Grotstein, 1997).
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