A scientific take on the still-central therapeutic concept of “the unconscious.” More than one hundred years after Freud began publishing some of his seminal theories, the concept of the unconscious still occupies a central position in many theoretical frameworks and clinical approaches. When trying to understand clients’ internal and interpersonal struggles it is almost inconceivable not to look for unconscious motivation, conflicts, and relational patterns. Clinicians also consider it a breakthrough to recognize how our own unconscious patterns have interacted with those of our clients. Although clinicians use concepts such as the unconscious and dissociation, in actuality many do not take into account the newly emerging neuropsychological attributes of nonconscious processes. As a result, assumptions and lack of clarity overtake information that can become central in our clinical work. This revolutionary book presents a new model of the unconscious, one that is continuing to emerge from the integration of neuropsychological research with clinical experience. Drawing from clinical observations of specific therapeutic cases, affect theory, research into cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychological findings, the book presents an expanded picture of nonconscious processes. The model moves from a focus on dissociated affects, behaviors, memories, and the fantasies that are unconsciously created, to viewing unconscious as giving expression to whole patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving, patterns that are so integrated and entrenched as to make them our personality traits. Topics covered include: the centrality of subcortical regions, automaticity, repetition, and biased memory systems; role of the amygdala and its sensitivity to fears in shaping and coloring unconscious self-systems; self-narratives; therapeutic enactments; therapeutic resistance; defensive systems and narcissism; therapeutic approaches designed to utilize some of the new understandings regarding unconscious processes and their interaction with higher level conscious ones embedded in the prefrontal cortex.
Discussing the outsized role that fear, anxiety, and other distressing emotions play in forming fundamental aspects of who we are. Using recent findings from neuropsychology, this new book in the best-selling Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology shows that who we are psychologically starts with the early presence of an easily aroused fear/anxiety system. It goes on to discuss how clinicians can view people’s difficulties with self-confidence and identity, and how self-destructive patterns can be traced back to these systems and what clinicians can do to help. It also touches on intergenerational transmission of trauma, as well as people’s responses to COVID-19, PTSD, and real and imagined threats.
The book is dedicated to Jeremy Safran, whose recent tragic loss drove the editor as well as the publisher to gather these contributions about enactment, a topic to whom Safran devoted many papers of his. The collection Borders of Psychoanalysis includes books that investigate an area of research that our publishing house wants to cover since its foundation: that of the dialogue of contemporary psychoanalysis with 'confining' disciplines (for example, neuroscience, infant research, cultural anthropology), often with epistemologies that for origin and history appear to be incomparable to it. As Safran wrote, though problematic and source of confusion among different psychoanalytic approaches, this epistemological status of psychoanalysis, related to its condition of 'liminality', is a meaningful source of vitality for the discipline (Safran, 2012). The book explores the subject of enactment in relation to boundaries in psychoanalysis, referring to a series of viewpoints that lead to many crucial areas. From an intra-psychic point of view, enactment can be studied at the between internal and external (world), psyche and soma, psychic apparatuses (first topic) and 'provinces' (second topic), primary and secondary process, perception and representation, representation and affect, Ego and object, subject and object (included the concept of 'transitional space' by Winnicott). At this level we have to consider that many authors who have take into account very profoundly enactment are those who questioned the linearity of classical Freudian topics (the continuity between unconscious, preconscious and conscious, interrupted only by repression and negation), considering dissociation as a key mechanism apter in order to reflect and account for a discontinuous model of psyche (Bromberg, 2014). From an inter-psychic point of view, enactment can be explored in relation to the concept of intersubjectivity and 'the third' (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2004) to indicate the functioning that affects the entire analytic pair at work. At this level we can place all the theories on boundaries of the analytic setting and the whole clinics of their violations. From an intra-disciplinary point of view (inside of psychoanalysis), enactment can be considered according to different currents of contemporary psychoanalytic thought. From an inter-disciplinary point of view, enactment can be viewed as a 'bridge' concept between psychoanalysis and the other 'confining' disciplines, especially psychiatry but also infant research and neuroscience. Moreover, it is to be added an inter-cultural point of view, from which enactment can be considered as a transitional concept allowing to enlight cultural counter-transference phenomena in transcultural clinical setting. Finally, from a trans-generational point of view, studies on the transmission of traumatic conditions across generations (Bohleber, 2007; Faimberg, 2005) can demonstrate that enactments may cross disregard the boundaries between generations that are also places of links and largely unconscious narcissistic pacts (Aulagnier, 1975; Kaës, 2005).
A scientific take on the still-central therapeutic concept of “the unconscious.” More than one hundred years after Freud began publishing some of his seminal theories, the concept of the unconscious still occupies a central position in many theoretical frameworks and clinical approaches. When trying to understand clients’ internal and interpersonal struggles it is almost inconceivable not to look for unconscious motivation, conflicts, and relational patterns. Clinicians also consider it a breakthrough to recognize how our own unconscious patterns have interacted with those of our clients. Although clinicians use concepts such as the unconscious and dissociation, in actuality many do not take into account the newly emerging neuropsychological attributes of nonconscious processes. As a result, assumptions and lack of clarity overtake information that can become central in our clinical work. This revolutionary book presents a new model of the unconscious, one that is continuing to emerge from the integration of neuropsychological research with clinical experience. Drawing from clinical observations of specific therapeutic cases, affect theory, research into cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychological findings, the book presents an expanded picture of nonconscious processes. The model moves from a focus on dissociated affects, behaviors, memories, and the fantasies that are unconsciously created, to viewing unconscious as giving expression to whole patterns of feeling, thinking and behaving, patterns that are so integrated and entrenched as to make them our personality traits. Topics covered include: the centrality of subcortical regions, automaticity, repetition, and biased memory systems; role of the amygdala and its sensitivity to fears in shaping and coloring unconscious self-systems; self-narratives; therapeutic enactments; therapeutic resistance; defensive systems and narcissism; therapeutic approaches designed to utilize some of the new understandings regarding unconscious processes and their interaction with higher level conscious ones embedded in the prefrontal cortex.
Discussing the outsized role that fear, anxiety, and other distressing emotions play in forming fundamental aspects of who we are. Using recent findings from neuropsychology, this new book in the best-selling Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology shows that who we are psychologically starts with the early presence of an easily aroused fear/anxiety system. It goes on to discuss how clinicians can view people’s difficulties with self-confidence and identity, and how self-destructive patterns can be traced back to these systems and what clinicians can do to help. It also touches on intergenerational transmission of trauma, as well as people’s responses to COVID-19, PTSD, and real and imagined threats.
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