Keeping Your Eye on the Ball: Reply to Tublin

It is a Pleasure to reply to Steve Tublin's thoughtful and considerate response to my article. Like all responses worth their salt, Tuhlin's provides much more than a simple exposition of my ideas. He brings a dialogical spirit of inquiry to bear that affirmed certain of my points, questioned others, and (best of all) challenged me to clarify and further develop the ideas raised in the article. IIis response is a welcomed opportunity for me to continue exploring, through dialogue with him and the readers of this journal, something that is otherwise completely ineffable—unconscious experience.

Questions of “depth” have always been at the heart of many a disagreement within the psychoanalytic world. Over the last century, virtually all theoretical perspectives within psychoanalysis have submitted the charge that the other theories lack insight into or appreciation of the depths of human personality and experience. Charges of lack of depth or relative superficiality often comprise the fault lines between various psychoanalytic approaches. The precise areas of emphasis (e.g., instincts, interpersonal relationships, self-cohesion, relational matrixes) vary, but constant is the preoccupation that many analysts and analytic thinkers have with wanting to know (and wanting others to know) that their approach offers the best point of access to the depths of their patients' concerns. Charging that another thinker's position does not provide a deep understanding of personality is often a way to contain or fix the other's position within the terms and parameters of one's own perspective. Nowhere is this tendency greater than discussions about “the unconscious.”

An observation that wends throughout Tublin's response to my article is that my conceptualization of the “psychoanalytic unconscious” does not account for, as he calls it, the “truly unconscious unconscious.” I imagine that any clinician who believes, as I do, that unconscious processes only make sense when considered withi