Is The Unconscious Necessary?

By Victor P. Iannuzzi, PhD
New York, NY

This essay shared shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize

Among psychoanalysts, the postulate that there is such a thing as the "unconscious" at all is a stance that originally and most directly derives from Freud. Freud's realization that human mentation proceeds predominantly from outside of subjective awareness stands as his most valuable contribution, surpassing even his comprehensive methodological approach to investigating the nature and effects of unconscious mentation (Gedo, 1999). The idea of an "unconscious," of one form or another, has remained central to psychoanalysis throughout its evolution. The "unconscious," it seems, was not only the de facto invention of psychoanalysis (de facto because the idea of automatism had been around for about 50 years before Freud) but, for a good part of the past 100 years, it seems to have been an almost constant preoccupation. It has been exhaustively surveyed and studied by psychoanalytic historians and cognitive psychologists (Ellenberger, 1970; Kihlstrom, 1987, 1995, 1998, 1999a, b; Kihlstrom, J.F., Mulvaney, S., Tobias, B.A., & Tobis, I.P., 2000; Westen, 1998a, b, 1999), apparently received not one but three "new looks" followed by "another new look" (Bruner, 1992; Greenwald, 1992), and at one time was considered to have been found, lost and regained (Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, & Tataryn, 1992). On at least one occasion, the specific question posed in this essay was asked and answered (Shevrin & Dickman, 1980); yet we continue to ask the question, revealing something of the remarkable metamorphosis that continues to take place in the discipline of psychoanalysis.


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On the 21st-Century Necessity of the Unconscious

This essay shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize

By Todd Essig, Ph.D.

Although some current versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and the other life-forms, biological and artifical, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.
(Hayles, 1999, p. 291)

In 1953, at the birth of the information age during the interdisciplinary "Macy Conferences," Warren McCulloch, the noted neuropsychiatrist and researcher, and Lawrence Kubie, the noted psychoanalyst, had a fight. Fifty or so years later, during a treatment that radically changed course when digital communications devices entered a patient's life, I had a similar fight, albeit with myself. A closer look at these two clashes between psychoanalysis and the information age, which this essay endeavors to provide, shows how issues first contested in that infrequently cited episode of intellectual history were also present many years later in my own internal struggles as I worked through a 21st-century clinical challenge. Taken together, these similar issues speak directly to the necessity of the unconscious.


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Some Thoughts on the Loss of a Spouse: A Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist's Perspective

By Sally Bloom Feshbach, Ph.D.

Emerging from a taxi in front of the radiology center, I naively stepped into the waiting arms of my handsome leather-jacket clad husband. "Honey," he said, enclosing me in his strong arms, "what I am about to tell you will change your life forever. I'm so sorry!" Those words, harbingers of his mortality, ushered in our new life, and from that day forth, this paper began germinating. How do two therapists, long-time best friends and students of separation and loss, prepare themselves for death?


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Attachment Is Where You Find It

By Fern W. Cohen, Ph.D.

Some time in the fall, our youngest child Josh came home for his first weekend since we had left him, somewhat forlorn (both he and we), a freshman at college. For me, his departure had been the most poignant and difficult of three, heralding as it did an end to the period of mothering that had given me such a strong sense of self and fulfillment. Now Josh was back, casually dragging along a monstrous duffle stuffed with a two-week accumulation of laundry as he entered the apartment. This was not, he said, an unusual time span but one that he had determined would be manageable between washes, an idea he had floated the previous summer when he and I had shopped for clothing and necessaries for school. That he had even thought about that aspect of life away from home was quite in character with this most organized of our children, although I thought I might have detected a touch of sheepishness when he said it was quite by chance that the opportunity to do the wash had coincided with his first trip home.

At least seventy five pounds worth of opportunity.

For me.


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Living Large: My Expanded Life as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist

By Teresa Rose, Ph.D.

Pondering what it means to be a psychoanalytic psychotherapist has prompted a great deal of free association and deep thinking. It touches me in many profound ways, and to try and tease out the meanings has been a challenge, albeit an exciting one. Overall, my analytic identity is so tightly entwined with my personality that it is hard to separate them. The more I learn and study, the more I apply analytic concepts to most aspects of my life, not just in my practice. In fact it is impossible not to do so. Writing about this topic, I found it difficult to focus on any one area of my life, so I gave up, and embraced all the ways it affects me.


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