A Review of The Unconscious: Contemporary Refractions in Psychoanalysis, edited by Pascal Sauvayre and David Braucher, New York,  Routledge, 2020,  202 pages.

Pascal Sauvayre and David Brauchers’ edited collection of essays on unconscious processes, based on papers given at a recent William Alanson White symposium, is a truly invaluable cross-disciplinary contribution, offering the psychoanalytic literature a contemporary slant on Freud’s most important discovery: the unconscious. Through their interpersonal lens, the authors divide the book into three parts. The first is entitled “The Unconscious is everywhere and nowhere,” which consists of ideas from the metaphysical world with connections to quantum mechanics and Jungian viewpoints. It is followed by a section devoted to “Power and the social unconscious,” which includes political explorations as well as a blending of relational and interpersonal takes on the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The third part, “Language, the sexual, and the unconscious,” tracks linguistic interpretations and social constructions. The majority of the papers are followed by direct discussions of their content, giving the reader the experience of a stimulating dialogic exchange.

In the book’s first paper, Warren Wilner, influenced by Ben Wolstein’s notion of the paradox of unconscious experience (if something is unconscious, how can it be experienced?), provides fresh perspectives on what the nature and structure of unconscious experience might be through clinical, philosophical,

linguistic and literary points of reference. Wilner draws from his own life experience in this piece as well. Beginning with the notion that “the unconscious is nowhere,” (Sauvayre and Braucher, 2020, p. 12) but manifests its presence through intrusions into the physical world, Wilner semantically plays with spellings such as nowhereness and now-here-ness. He utilizes Einstein’s discovery that time and space are relative and connects this to Freud’s notion of the unconsci