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Readers of intelligent non-fiction have lost the habit of reading books by public intellectuals who are also psychoanalysts, in part because psychoanalysts have gotten out of the habit of being public intellectuals. In What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motives in Life, Business, and Everything Else, Kenneth Eisold reverses that trend, and does so with impressive success.
Of course, some of the qualities that can help a book succeed for the general public might diminish its value for psychoanalytic professionals (clinicians, teachers, and consultants): the book's scope may be too broad, the style too journalistic, the vision too shallow. Here such a concern is unfounded. What You Don't Know You Know shows a psychoanalyst simultaneously participating as a 21st-century public intellectual while also providing useful insights for psychoanalytic professionals. Eisold describes what he calls a “new unconscious” and then shows it in action by exploring self and identity, psychotherapy, organizations and groups, and “post-professional” thought. Along the way psychoanalytic readers are shown what can be described as a post-relational sensibility. This is an emerging sensibility whose defining feature is a direct relation to both its object of study and the wider culture, rather than being defined as a dialectical advance over previously articulated psychoanalytic theories and sensibilities.
But does such a sensibility as reflected in this book have value? The fact of the matter is that both the value of this book for psychoanalytic professionals and the fairness of this review rest on answers to two questions: Is Eisold's “new unconscious” really all that new? And, if so, does it matter?
Eisold never explicitly defines the unconscious—new, old, or timeless. But that does not mean a definition is not present for readers to discern, however textually unconscious that definition may be. Throughout the book, the term “unconscious” ref