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What is mind? What is “psychoanalytic mind?” How do we develop psychoanalytic mind? Fred Busch explores these fascinating questions in his excellent and important new book, Creating a Psychoanalytic Mind. For Busch, psychoanalytic mind is defined through one's relationship to his own thoughts. Busch differentiates between state knowledge and process knowledge. In state knowledge, we learn to know what we did not know, what was previously unconscious. Content that was repressed becomes accessible, leading to more complex psychic structures and less propensity towards action instead of reflection. Process knowledge is different. It leads to “… a difference in how one thinks rather than what one
thinks” (p. 12). Busch writes that “… at the heart of process knowledge is the capacity to think of one's thoughts as mental events” (p. 12). Attainment of process knowledge is at the heart of “creating a psychoanalytic mind.”
As a goal, Busch's definition may not seem very different from that of, for example, Bach (2006), who writes of developing the capacity to shift between “subjective awareness” and “objective self-awareness” (p. 108), or even Bromberg (1998), who writes of the capacity to “stand in the spaces,” by which he means “… a shorthand way of describing a person's relative capacity to make room at any given moment for subjective reality that is not readily containable by the self he experiences as ‘me’ at that moment” (p. 274). These are certainly developmental achievements, but they are not necessarily conscious acts. Busch is emphasizing something different: development of the conscious capacity to be able to reflect on one's own thoughts and feelings and regard them as conveying realities per se and also as mental events that convey information about the nature of one's inner process at any given moment. One who has developed psychoanalytic mind can not only access and hold the complexity of these thoughts and feelings (and disparate self states), but also, an