Rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and analytic time

Abstract

ABSTRACT The author proposes ways of rethinking the concepts of the unconscious and time in the analytic setting, including the very existence of the unconscious. Freud (1915) stated that the success psychoanalytic thinking has in making inferences about the patient’s unconscious makes the existence of the unconscious “incontrovertible.” The author submits that this success does not establish the existence of the unconscious; rather, the inferences we think we make about the unconscious are inferences about consciousness itself – the totality of our experiences of thinking, feeling, sensing, observing, and communicating with ourselves. The author then offers thoughts about a second analytic concept, the experience of time in the analytic setting. He conceives of there being two inseparable sorts of experiences of analytic time that stand in a dynamic relationship with one another: diachronic time (clock time) and synchronic time (dream time). In diachronic time, time is sequential; one thing leads to another. In synchronic time, all time is contained in the present. In analysis, childhood trauma is experienced for the first time (in synchronic time) in the co-created subjectivity of patient and analyst.