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[…] it is hard to penetrate what we «all know» and to suggest that there may be something that has not yet emerged from the turbulence, just as there may be something - we do not know what - that led to the turbulence. Are we then to inhibit the turbulence? Or are we to investigate it?
1. In a brief unpublished paper entitled «The Unconscious»,1 Winnicott writes: «One comes naturally to look at the phenomenon of the unconscious in respect of unintegrated personality. Here it is probably true to say that there is no unconscious; instead the individual is in a chaotic state or is split in a more organised way and what unconsciousness there is is felt from more than one area […]. In the more serious states there is a serious split of the personality so that there is no one human being there who can be said to be unconscious. Localised consciousness belongs to each of the split-up parts».
Some years later, he will write that the breakdown «is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious. The unconscious here is not exactly the repressed unconscious of psycho-neurosis, nor is it the unconscious of Freud's formulation of the part of the psyche that is very close to neurophysiological functioning. Nor is it the unconscious of Jung's which I would call: all those things that go on in underground caves, or (in other words) the world's mythology, in which there is collusion between the individual and the maternal inner psychic realities. In this special context