The Relational Unconscious, The Enchanted Interior, and the Return of the Repressed*

In recent years, a number of relationally oriented psychoanalysts have begun to think of the unconscious as generative and creative, rather than as a seething cauldron of potentially dangerous distinctive drives. There is also a tendency to view the unconscious in mystical or spiritual terms. For these theorists the emphasis tends to be on infusing life with the vitality of the unconscious or on being guided by the unconscious forces rather than on taming and modulating them. In this article I argue that this perspective on the unconscious is consistent with a world view that is characteristically American and that it has its roots in developments within both popular and academic psychology that preceded the absorption of psychoanalysis by American culture. I also argue that it is consistent with certain culturally specific features of the American Protestant tradition that began emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that have had an important impact on contemporary American culture and on popular psychology. Finally I speculate about the role that the tension between secular and religious (or rational versus mystical) world views play in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory.