[Undated] [8]. Cogitations

Freud described the conscious as “the sense organ for the perception of psychical qualities”. If the patient, thanks to deficient α, cannot be awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious, can he have a conscious or an unconscious? His attacks on α-function make it impossible to become conscious or unconscious, but he can have a conscious and an unconscious, so he is able to perceive psychic qualities. But he cannot transform them into α-elements. This is where I do not accept Freud's description of the conscious as comprehending psychic qualities, but do accept his description of the conscious as perceiving them.

It is evident in my clinical experience that the patient can perceive psychic qualities in that he says he is anxious, or frightened, or depressed. He must then be able to perceive that, but he seems unable to learn from the experience of being anxious, or frightened, or depressed. It may depend on what he expects he would learn if he learned anything. But as I have shown with the emotional experience of having emotions in sleep, this kind of patient cannot ‘dream’ it and so cannot learn from the experience. Exactly the same thing is true of the emotional experience when he is awake: he cannot become unconscious of the emotions, and he cannot become conscious of them. What, then, is the position in analysis when the analyst gives an interpretation drawing the patient's attention to an emotional experience that the analyst can deduce from the patient's behaviour? At least we should expect to run into great difficulties in so far as an analysis is to be regarded as an emotional experience, for we cannot regard it as anything less and yet suppose it has some kind of reality.

It is tempting to suppose that the patient fears that if he learnt anything from his emotions, he would learn that he is alive, and from that, that his parents had had sexual intercourse; he then fears that this would release murderous envy and hate towards them and towards himself as the resu