Debates around issues of free will and determinism continue unabated and appear to be no nearer to a resolution. This article focuses on a recent paper by Lynne Layton to show how dichotomous reasoning can lead to positionality and thereby to a closing-off of possibilities rather than towards a resolution of this debate. Taking the transferential encounter as an example, the author questions current thinking on the so-called “unbridgeable gap” between unconscious drives and the social world and suggests that if psychosocial approaches are to work they have to be able to hold on to the idea of a universal unconscious and to be able to reconcile this with the structures of social existence into which agents are born and live out their lives.