You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud took an overlooked idea that had been lying around the intellectual landscape and gave it a name: The Unconscious. Although, at the time, it was beginning to gain some attention, it was Freud who put it at the very epicenter of the human drama. Freud’s own thinking about the unconscious was slippery and polyvalent: sometimes referred to as a site, an organ, a process, a function, a force, a thing, and a location, among others. From Freud’s initial forays, the concept quickly refracted, like white light shot through a prism, with each new psychoanalytic theory seizing on a particular wavelength that coincided with its language and dialect. And yet, despite the dispersal of conceptualizations, the unconscious remained a common thread running through the different theories helping ground them in human experience and practice. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, this dilemma—the ubiquitousness and diversity of the unconscious—has been a central challenge: How does one reconcile the richly divergent conceptualizations with their common roots in human experience and praxis? The two articles that follow were part of a series of papers presented at the William Alanson White Colloquia Series (in 2017). The entire series, which will be published by Routledge, is a collection of papers presenting some contemporary struggles to understand and work with this quintessential, defining, and foundational source of psychoanalysis: The Unconscious.
This issue of Contemporary Psychoanalysis includes two important contributions to the Series. The first, by Warren Wilner, examines the unconscious from the vantage point of its convergence with the mystical. Wilner starts with an exploration of the unconscious as an event
that occurs out of time, now-here, and is always out of place, “nowhere.” His “no-where”/“now-here” house of mirrors illustrates the simultaneous elusiveness and omni-presentness of how lived unconscious experience takes us outside of time into the immediacy