The Amential Unconscious

The investigation by psychoanalysis of the characteristic modalities of the psychic functioning of non-neurotic psychopathological organisations has contributed to the development of metapsychological propositions related to the topographical structuring of the psychical apparatus. The practical questions raised by patients presenting psychotic modes of functioning, narcissistic pathologies or somatic illnesses have led to the identification of heterogeneous sectors, enclaves or splits at the heart of the psychic topography. These conceptions, whose premises can be found in the last texts of Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940a [1938]) and Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (1940b [1938]), have made it possible to account for the coexistence of distinct modes of functioning within one and the same subject.

And yet, in these clinical configurations it appears that splitting cannot be reduced to a mechanism of defence aimed at protecting the ego; rather, it has a topographical dimension concerning the psychic topography as a whole. This bipartition of psychic life reveals in reality the coexistence of two distinct sectors of the unconscious: the repressed sexual dynamic unconscious and another sector designated as the “amential unconscious”, which is formed not by repression but by the proscription of memory traces. (The term “amential” relates to Theodor Meynert's concept of amentia, with a view to insisting on the “thoughtless” mode of reaction of this unconscious, which takes the shape of the ego-disorganisation that is typical of mental confusion.)

In the context of analytic work, this other sector can make itself known through counter-transference manifestations that essentially take the form of what the analyst experiences as manoeuvres aimed at ensuring the immobility of the material and spatial frame of the session, but also through the patient's recourse to a concrete, logical, factual, “operational” form of thinking aimed at suffocating the a