Introduction

One of the hardest things to think clearly about in psychoanalysis, but one with which analysts are constantly confronted, particularly by their more disturbed patients, is the question of experience that will not go into words. Freud wrote about it in terms of ‘thing-presentations’ and ‘word-presentations’, emphasising the importance of the latter for adequate mental functioning. The concept of representation is central to analytic thinking. The capacity to symbolise depends on forming internal representations and it is when representations arouse intrapsychic conflict that repression or other defence mechanisms come into action. The analyst's free-floating attention and avoidance, so far as possible, of preconscious assumptions are in order to detect traces of representations that the patient has needed to remove from consciousness. The analyst tries, by interpretation, to put these back into words. This habitual mode of analytic understanding, centred on the concept of representation, leaves out what is not representable: that aspect of experience which will not ‘go into words’ because it will not, so to speak,‘go into thought’ in the first place. César and Sára Botella stress how important it is to take full account of the unthinkable and they set out to offer, in this book, a view of psychoanalysis that can do so.

The authors’ clinical examples show the analyst finding his or her own capacity for representation subverted. With Thomas (pp. 31-33), for example, and notably in the session with Florian, which is described at length (pp. 71ff.), the analyst found himself in a kind of nightmare state. These patients’ communications were not merely meaningless to the analyst's normal mode of understanding, but they provoked a sense of unreality in the analyst himself. In the case of Aline (pp. 123ff.), the analyst found he could not remember the patient's name and again experienced a sense of derealisation. The final paragraph of Chapter 5 (p. 49) is a helpful summary