Editor’s Introduction

For some time now, analysts working in different parts of the world and influenced by a wide range of conceptual traditions have moved away from a reliance on the interpretation of disavowed meanings as the principle mechanism of therapeutic action. Analysts working within different traditions propose different alternative interventions, such as witnessing, empathy, recognition, affect attunement, unsaturated interpretations, and so on.

In some cases the proposed changes in technique are argued on strictly clinical grounds, in others they are part and parcel of a revised model of the mind. Throughout his career, and especially in his recent book Formless Infinity (2015), Riccardo Lombardi has taken the latter tack; although the book is clinical it is anchored in the radical reformulation of the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental functioning that was proposed by Bion and, similarly but independently, by Matte Blanco.

Both Bion and Matte Blanco begin with Freud, whose original distinction between conscious and unconscious contained two distinct propositions, neither of which implies or requires the other. The proposition that shaped traditional clinical practice is that the unconscious is defined by its contents, that is, by the memories, ideas, fantasies, and desires that are unacceptable to our conscious sense of who we are. These contents exert a pathogenic effect because they have been banished from consciousness; benign psychoanalytic change depends on releasing them from repression and the method for doing this is interpretation.

But from the beginning, or almost from the beginning, Freud had an even more radical vision of the nature of the unconscious, focused

not on content but on the logic of its functioning. Embodied in the distinction between primary and secondary process, the unconscious—obliterating difference through condensation, displacement, and timelessness—is potentially, the source of our richest and deepest experience. This sens