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In the last few years I have become very interested in the question of how we represent the unconscious, by which I mean how we talk about the primary focus of psychoanalysis. My interest in this area arose out of several factors, but they all have in common one goal: to be able to address what, specifically, constitutes the interest of psychoanalysis. This is a problem because, on the one hand, the unconscious is obviously something that can never be known. At the same time, however, there is a great deal of theoretical ambiguity that gets used to fill in this gap in our knowledge. If I may take one rather old example, consider how the Oedipus complex has been used in the past as defining a certain normative bedrock of the healthy human subject: the male child hates his father and wants to sleep with his mother, represses this fact, and sometimes has symptoms that prevent him developing to maturity—symptoms like homosexuality. The whole notion of a true north of maturity for the child—that he should marry a woman, get a good, responsible job, and have kids, once he has worked through his unconscious conflicts—is not supported by the evidence of what goes on in the unconscious. This is not a big surprise anymore, I think, but that does not mean that there aren't other surprises in store.
I was struck about a year ago, though, by another example of what seemed to me confusion about what constitutes the unconscious. It was in the context of a discussion of Arendt's concept of “banality of evil” (Arendt, 1963/2006) in which I heard several analysts make the argument that the people who murdered Jews during the Holocaust or Native Americans in the 19th century, among myriad other examples, simply had not been analyzed yet. This concerned me, as I often find myself concerned now when analysts talk about, for example, the presidency of Donald Trump. There seems to be an assumption of what needs to happen to put the world to rights, and, it goes without saying, psychoanalys