Infinity, The Conscious And Unconscious Mind: A Conversation Between Thomas Ogden and Riccardo Lombardi

THOMAS OGDEN: On reading Riccardo Lombardi’s Formless Infinity (2015), a thought occurred to me regarding the place of his work in the evolving psychoanalytic conception of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious aspects of mind. For Freud (1900, 1915), the unconscious is an aspect of mind that operates under the aegis of primary process thinking, a form of thinking that does not lend itself, on its own, to resolving emotional problems, such as the experience of instinctual sexual urges directed at forbidden objects. Instead, there exists something of a fragile stand-off between sexual and aggressive impulses and fantasies on the one hand, and the work of repression on the other. The repressed is continually pressing for release from its unconscious confines, and very often succeeds in the form of dreams, symptoms, slips, and so on.

Freud (1911) viewed the analytic process as centrally involving the transformation of thoughts and feelings from unconscious to conscious states of mind. The preconscious and conscious mind in health, for Freud, bring to bear on formerly unconscious thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the dominance of secondary process thinking, diachronic time,

cause-and-effect reasoning, and so on (all of which are parts of the operation of the reality principle).

Bion (1962) introduced a radical change in the analytic conception of the mind in general, and the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, in particular. Reversing Freud’s conception of the conscious mind as the seat of the operation of the reality principle, Bion viewed the unconscious mind as the seat of the richest form of thinking in which human beings are capable of engaging. In the operation of the unconscious mind, there is a simultaneity of primary and se