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With the publication of What You Don't Know You Know, Ken Eisold makes a bid to join the pantheon of authors who have brought psychoanalytic thinking into the general and business realm; for example,
Americans such as Czander (1993), Diamond (1993), Hirschhorn (1990), Levinson (1976), Schwartz (1992), and Zaleznik (1977), and Europeans such as Armstrong (2005), Kets de Vries (1984), Lawrence (1979), Miller and Rice (1967), and Obholzer and Roberts (1994). His foray is cloaked in the garb of a “new unconscious.”
In clear, crisp, yet lyrical prose Eisold's innovative view of the unconscious cuts across literature, philosophy, sociology, politics, economics, psychoanalysis, psychology, and neuroscience. The amount Eisold knows he knows is not surprising as it reflects his early background as an English professor. What is surprising, however, is the ease and aplomb with which he handles the complex concepts of modern neurobiology. Who knew he knew that?
Two early chapters describing the new unconscious, entitled, “From the Body to the Person” and the “Interpersonal and the Social,” showcase his talent. He systematically constructs a user-friendly outline of the characteristics of the unconscious: autonomie, cognitive, emotional, self-esteem, language/myth, belonging (attachment), and the “unconscious at large.” He effortlessly weaves in the observations of writers as diverse as Damasio (1999), Edelman (1992), Foucault (1982), and Lakoff and Johnson (1980). These bits of understanding are held together nicely by vignettes from Eisold's clinical and consulting experience.
The aim of the book is stated fairly clearly at the outset: it is to refresh and renew an understanding of the unconscious and to “rescue” it from the dying hand of psychoanalysis. More compellingly, the goal is to reverse a perception of the unconscious as contradictory, holding us back, crippling, manipulative, and pathological. Instead, its constructive function and adaptive uses are emphasized: it mak