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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