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In a provocative and stimulating paper, prompted by ideas originally presented in his book, Oedipus and Beyond, but departing from an earlier discussion of drive theory, Jay Greenberg offered a unique approach to the understanding of unconscious processes, one which focused on the primacy of what he terms the “representational world,” rather than on the traditionally based analysis of repressed wishes. Challenging the classical Freudian viewpoint in this regard, he argued that the unconscious not only embodies disavowed wishes, but also acts as a container for ideas, beliefs, and cognitions about the self and others, which can serve as the basis for a broader range of analytic work and conflict resolution.
By way of example, Greenberg cited a well-known paper by Jacob Arlow on psychic reality, in which Arlow interpreted a patient's sarcastic reaction to a bee flying into the consultation room as representing the patient's disavowed wish to be penetrated sexually, to be “stung” by the analyst. Arguing that this was but one possibility, Greenberg chafed at the restrictive notion that the work of analysis consists only of uncovering the sexual or aggressive wish, and posited another interpretation—that perhaps the patient was communicating his perception of Arlow as a hurtful, “stinging kind of guy.”
Greenberg acknowledged the compatibility of his position with that of relational psychoanalysis, as well as Object Relations theorists, but took issue with the current emphasis on “actual” experience, the “overvaluation” of reality, which disregards the complexity of the mental processes that function as memory. He maintained that experience is both dynamic and multiply represented, not inevitably encoded as static and fixed. Greenberg emphasized that experiences are represented and re-represented according to current need, stressing that one of the tasks of analysis is to penetrate the numerous layers of representations so that the full range of a patient's experience becom