Group Artistic Creation as a Lived Experience of the Unconscious

by The Unconscious Collective

The Unconscious Collective is a group of ten Duquesne University first year psychology graduate students who have joined together to study and experience "the unconscious", free of constructs or theoretical abstractions. We are clinicians in training, bringing with us influences ranging from psychoanalysis, humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology, to cultural, political, and historical theory. We come from four continents, bear different skin colors, were raised into diverse faiths, and speak different languages as our mother tongues. We have not come together to identify the best theoretical approach for understanding the unconscious, or to synthesize a bridge across the diverse theories that inspire us. Rather, we cultivate the diversity of our backgrounds in order to enrich our exploration of the phenomenon that most intrigues us: the ineffable mystery which is the unconscious.

In this short piece, we would like to introduce people to our questions and method of investigation. Our purpose is to inspire other training therapists to hold similar events and reflect on their experiences in ways that will deepen psychological praxis, as well as engender personal insight.


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Enchantments and Hauntings: Encounters with the Magic of the Unconscious

by Gabriella Serruya

The Section V 2003 Student Essay Award Competition winner is Gabriella Serruya, Institute for Graduate Clinical Psychology, Widener University, Chester, Pa.

In this beautifully written essay that ranges from memories of her own childhood play to insightful clinical encounters, Gabriella Serruya describes the unconscious as a ghost writer, a "story teller weaving its own logic and its own sequences into a tapestry that mezmerizes all who view it, if they dare." What Serruya has set out to do is nothing less than locate the unconscious processes that underlie Fonagy and Target's current work on the development of attachment and reflective function. In so doing, she describes a uniquely co-constructed intersubjective unconscious, very much in line with current relational models of the unconscious as unformulated experience.

—Ghislaine Boulanger

Part I: Play and Books

My parents are both psychiatrists.

Now, informing some people that your parents are psychotherapists, not to mention medical doctors, is something akin to casually mentioning that you descend from a line of witches. Inevitably, such people respond with an uncomfortable pause and a nod of the head or bland comment that screams the suspicion they forebear to admit. More often, people laugh out loud, and chuckle "So, did they analyze you all the time?" which, when they discover I am a graduate student in psychology, quickly turns to, "So, are you analyzing me?" The notion that one is an "expert" on the life of the mind seems to activate a fantasy in many ordinary, non-schizophrenic people that their thoughts can be read, almost as if thoughts had a bar code which could be scanned into consciousness by those with the proper equipment—namely, therapists.


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Discovering Child Abuse

By Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Author's note: The Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture that I gave for the NYU Post-doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis on March 14, 2003, was based upon the text below. This text is part of a longer work in progress, and it should not be read as a finished piece. Please do not cite it or circulate it in its present form. Thank you, EYB

Part 1: "Child abuse and neglect" (CAN)


Child abuse had to be discovered. People have always known, of course, that some adults beat or rape or starve children; and that some societies have explicitly sanctioned injurious acts and violence against children, even institutionalizing corporeal punishments, child labor or child prostitution, infanticide. Although most of the harm done to children was taken for granted, some of it was condemned or prosecuted even before child abuse was discovered. In the mid-18th century, for example, almost a quarter of the capital rape cases prosecuted at the Old Bailey in London involved victims of less than ten years of age; while three quarters of the men charged with rape in mid-19th century France were accused of raping children. But these actions were prosecuted as rape, not as "child abuse and neglect." That designation had to exist before crimes against children were clearly and consistently distinguished as crimes against children. But even then there was not a concept explicitly indicating that a group—children—was being targeted and attacked when a child was raped as a child. There was not a concept like the concept sexism, which indicates that women are targeted and attacked when a woman is raped as a woman. Maltreatment of people of color existed long before such maltreatment was marked with the word "racism" and understood as prejudice against a group called "Negroid."


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Love Is Unmistakeably Relational

An appreciation of Stephen A. Mitchell in the form of a book review

by R.G. Kainer

Art pushes back the void. The sudden death of Stephen Mitchell left a great void, and his posthumous book Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time consoles us. It is the bittersweet fruit of his labors that made him so highly regarded in our contemporary analytic world; one he helped shape through his open mind and his generous spirit. From his now classic book on object relations theory (co-authored with Jay Geeenberg) to this final one, he left a rich intellectual legacy.


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A Dream Manifesto

By Paul Lippmann, Ph.D.

(This article is adapted from the Bernard Kalinkowitz Memorial Lecture delivered on Novermber 16, 2001.)

From the beginning, dreams and psychoanalysis were made for each other. Freud brought the magic of dreams into the materialism of modern times and rooted his infant science along the royal road to the unconscious. Thus, dreams were born into the 20th Century on the wings of psychoanalysis and to return the favor, psychoanalysis was born into the 20th Century on the wings of dreams.


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