Preconscious defence analysis, memory and structural change

Abstract

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 intrasubjective 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.