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Christopher's provocative question provides the linking rationale for a paper with three distinctive areas of interest. She explores ‘Whose unconscious is it anyway?’ in the clinical context of confidentiality and publication, in the various competing models of the psyche within the different analytical groupings, and in the inter-disciplinary arena of the neurosciences, where there has been increasing interest in and research into the dimensions of consciousness and unconsciousness.
Christopher's paper starts and finishes with the contemporary ethical controversy concerning confidentiality and publication. She vividly and honestly describes the therapeutic ‘risk’ of involving a patient in the decision as to whether, and what, to publish about his treatment - her best conscious intentions swept into a maelstrom of negativity and conflicts both conscious and unconscious - necessitating further intensive psychic work by both therapist and patient.
Risky too, she thinks, is the challenging approach she decides to take when asked to prepare this paper for a conference of colleagues coming from both the Jungian Analytic and Psychoanalytic schools. The choice of these themes arose in the context of the 50 th Anniversary Conference of the British Association of Psychotherapists (BAP) in 2001, ‘Changing Times in the Analytic World’. (The BAP is unique in Britain, comprising three analytic sections: Jungian, Psychoanalytic and Child and Adolescent).
Christopher sets out her versions of the ‘topographical models of the psyche that were produced by Freud and Jung and later Klein and the Object Relations theorists’ (p. 133) with their potential for intra-professional controversy and also inter-professional rivalry, preceding this with the rallying assertion that ‘as analytic clinicians we are collectively united in our acceptance of the notion of an unconscious mind and that our purpose is to study and analyse it’ (p. 132).
As a participant at the Conference, I found the scope of t