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In this article, Jeremy Safran offers a two-part theory about theories of the unconscious developed by American psychoanalysts. First he contrasts the history of American
theories of the relation between conscious and unconscious to Freud's original theory, highlighting the function of the unconscious as a source of creativity and guidance and connecting this notion of the unconscious to styles of American religion, particularly what was described in Europe as American religious ‘enthusiasm’. Safran argues that the tradition of ecstasy and spontaneity inherent in American religious styles allowed American psychoanalyststo seek contact with and experience ego-expanding unfamiliar and involuntary unconscious material such as Bion's ‘O’ as creative and potentially able to be integrated into the ego rather than threatening. Safran's second theme is that this phenomenon, the creative unconscious, constitutes the return of the religious that Freud attempted to banish in favour of reason. Freud argued strongly in favour of the elimination of the mystical for the rational. Safran points out that the mystical has made its reappearance in many forms in the history of psychoanalysis, including the views of Jung. The creative unconscious in the history of American psychoanalysis is one of these forms. In particular, Safran argues that the creative unconscious is a manifestation of our desire not to constantly live by the will but to surrender to something deeper. Citing Emmanuel Ghent's paper ‘Masochism, submission, surrender: masochism as a perversion of surrender’ (Ghent 1990), Safran locates the desire to be an autonomous agent vs. The desire to surrender in the categories of the rational vs. The mystical, and argues that in the contrast between the Freudian representation of the dangerous untamed unconscious contained by the will vs. the creative unconscious that nourishes the ego, we see represented theories that express this conflict. I will argue further that, if we lo