You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Editor,
I was quite surprised when I read Richard Simpson’s article, which in large part seemed to be a response to and criticism of a good deal of my published work on unrepresented states. Richard is a valued colleague and friend whose translations of and commentaries on French psychoanalysis have made important contributions to my understanding and thinking. I am writing partly in self-defense, more significantly to try to set the record straight of what I believe and most of all in an attempt to engage a discussion about some interesting and important points regarding psychoanalytic metapsychology and its relevance to clinical practice.
There is a great deal to consider and discuss in response to Richard’s paper, which may eventually deserve a full-length paper of its own. For this letter, however, I will respond to and try to clarify several statements that Richard makes about my thinking and proposals that I am in disagreement with, and that I believe are not supported by a close reading of my papers. Of course, as I will explain, the problem may also lie in my choice of terminology or my failure to be sufficiently clear about my views and what I have been trying to say.
On pp. 28-29, Richard says: “the unrepresented is a term for a mixture of ideas that attempt to retheorize Freud’s unconscious and create another
metapsychology different from Freud’s.” In response, let me say that I have clearly and repeatedly stated that I see my work not as a retheorization, but an extension and completion of Freud’s work and a defense of a metapsychology that is deeply Freudian. I have even gone so far as to say, in agreement with César Botella, that had Freud lived longer, we might have had a third topography that more specifically addressed the movement from non-ideational, energy and drive movements, and other psychic transformational processes fundamental to containment, homeostasis, and the construction of meaning (i.e., ideational, affectively connected represe