Introduction

Our work as analytical psychotherapists has to do precisely with the exploration of subjectivity, and consciousness might be said to be our primary tool. We may look ideally placed to speak of its nature. But at a time when consciousness is everywhere under discussion, it is little spoken of as a phenomenon in our own field: we seem still to take it for granted, as until recently it has been elsewhere. In David Black's metaphor, it is the primary task of the therapist to attend to the lamp and the lamp-stand, not to the light as such. And indeed, it could be pointed out that the central focus of our work is with the unconscious; but when we say that our task is to bring the as yet unknown to consciousness, to what, exactly, are we bringing it? This is the area AGIP set out, somewhat ambitiously, to explore in our series of conferences on ‘The Nature of Consciousness and its Relation to Psychoanalysis’.*

At the time, we scarcely realized how ambitious. The meaning of the word ‘consciousness’, as we were to discover, becomes the more elusive the more you consider it. And no wonder, for as the writers published here tell us in their different ways, it is not actually possible for consciousness - in its essence a subjective experience - reflexively to consider itself in any ‘scientific’ way as an object. David Black says: ‘There is no way that science can explain consciousness, because consciousness is what knows science, consciousness is logically anterior to science’. And Warren Colman quotes Laing: ‘The truth that I am trying to grasp is the grasp that is trying to grasp it’. ‘I can never reach the edge of my consciousness’, says Colman; as he shows it to us, it is effectively infinite.

Or is it rather, as Joseph Schwartz suggests, infinitesimal: a non-problem, a mere and minor ray of light on the overwhelming vastness of the unconscious? Freud indicated this a very long time ago, as Margaret Arden also notes in her reflection on Freud's attraction to the ideas of Goet