Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

March 22, 1989. THE PAST UNCONSCIOUS AND THE PRESENT UNCONSCIOUS: TOWARDS A THEORY OF PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE. Joseph Sandler, M.D.

Dr. Sandler proposed a developmental view of the unconscious and explored the clinical relevance of this model. He began with a historical overview of psychoanalytic

theory that emphasized the vitality of its evolving theoretical concepts. He noted, however, that this evolution has been encumbered by resistance to discarding concepts that may no longer fit current psychoanalytic theory, and he described a widening gap between our explicit theory and our clinical technique. After reviewing the limitations of both the structural and the topographic theories in encompassing clinical materials, Dr. Sandler proposed an elastic concept of the unconscious to bridge both models. He suggested that his model would to some extent make explicit the problems that are implicit in the gap between current theory and clinical observations and technique. Dr. Sandler outlined his concept of the unconscious as divided into a past and a present. He defined the past unconscious as the inner world of childhood wishes, defenses, fantasies, theories, structures, and object relationships, as well as a preoperational thought process which becomes relatively inaccessible with the development of the repression barrier and the infantile amnesia at about the age of five. Terming the past unconscious the "child within," he stressed a three-dimensional development concept that is more complex than a concept of a purely instinctual id. Further, he noted that the past unconscious can normally be known only by clinical reconstruction, as it is never directly accessible to consciousness.

In contrast to the past unconscious, which Sandler placed topographically at a deeper level, he formulated a higher level unconscious which has similarities to the preconscious of the topographic theory and to the unconscious ego of the structural theory. He stated: "Whereas