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Emotional Turbulence: Working Clinically with Unformed Experience

With Avner Bergstein, Israel Psychoanalytic Society

“How are we to see, observe…. these things which are not visible?” (Bion, 2005). How does felt experience become thinkable? And what of a painful something which exists in the body, but which never becomes emotionally invested thought? How do we speak about the impact of what is unverbalisable and irrepresentable? How do we as analysts work with the ineffable, the inarticulate? With what is difficult in our patients?

These questions about connecting with subjective experience are central to contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, across the range of different schools of thought. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious obscured the fact that some, not all, parts of the unconscious can be known by the symbolic traces it leaves on our conscious waking lives. His dynamic repressed unconscious was a part of a much larger formless, not organized or articulated nor articulable subset of “proto” psychic elements that could be called the unformulated or unrepressed unconscious (Levine, 2013:43) and which may not be available to our senses.

While Winnicott writes of the fear of breakdown and the pull towards it, Bion writes of catastrophic change and the fear of it. Both meet in the sphere of the unrepressed unconscious. Both focus on the dread of encountering emotional truth encapsulated in the unmentalized, unrepressed unconscious, threatening the mind with a psychotic state. Yet both contend that this encounter, facilitating the integration of remote and unmentalized parts of the self, can save the personality from mental catastrophe, or alternatively from psychic death as a defense against it (Bergstein, 2014b). This interest in the unrepressed unconscious has broadened our notion of therapeutic action. The aim of lifting repressive barriers has been widened to include a process that involves extending the boundaries of the self to include split-off parts by analytic containment.

Along with different contemporary conceptualizations of the unconscious and unconscious processes have been changing formulations of the aims of psychoanalysis. At the centre of the change in the aims of psychoanalysis, based on the concepts introduced by Bion, is the function of transformation and emotionally invested symbolic creation. Although there are different views on transformational processes among contemporary theorists, converging formulations of psychoanalysis are concerned with how to bring those “not-yet emerged elements” of experience to a form capable of joining an associative network of feelings, thoughts, desires, and memories, so they can be discerned and forgotten; experienced in a way that they become unconscious.