Response to Professor Mancia

Dear Sirs,

First of all, we would like to thank Professor Mancia for his letter and detailed comments on our work.

We would like to clarify a few important points in response to his observations. The first concerns the issue of thinkability. As we have claimed many times, the unrepressed unconscious—the level of early unconscious traumatic experiences—is different from the repressed. This is true even when the sensorial-affective dimension of the contents of the repressed unconscious is still unformed, though it is capable of taking form eventually.

Based on our clinical experience, what most distinguishes communications from the unrepressed unconscious is the alteration in the therapist's consciousness, which even in the most extreme levels should not be seen as a ‘simple’ countertransference problem on the part of the analyst. Instead, we believe that this situation represents the communication of unconscious elements that are associated with unrepresented traumas and therefore highly repetitive and violently intrusive.

Different analysts, of course, have different degrees of susceptibility to this type of communication. Although they may not even acknowledge it, such communication is intrusive and discrete by nature. Thus, in accordance with the point of view we propose, the alteration in consciousness, at its various levels, can be considered