Briefly Noted: Reflections on the Unconscious

What is the unconscious? For Freud the unconscious names what has been repressed and what seeks expression through actions, words, memories, or fantasies, a description that has clinical applicability. Does such knowledge help an individual be aware of the tributaries that lead to their actions or thoughts? It seems to, and, for that, Freud and the history of psychoanalysis can justifiably take some credit.

That we live in a sea of unknowingness has been well established. Do we know what that means for our everyday experiences? Very difficult to tell—we know the words. But do we know what it means to live in a sea of unknowingness? I think the reality of such is beyond our capacity.

Heisenberg's discovery that we cannot know both the speed and the location of a particle at the same time is a valuable finding. We can know one factor, or we can know the other—the process of measuring limits our inquiry. Likewise, for what we name as unconscious the process of inquiry focuses as well as limits what we can know. Otherwise stated, as the physicist John Wheeler tells us, the questions we ask determine the answers we get. So, the question persists, what is the unconscious? Civitarese (2023), in his text Psychoanalytic Field Theory, elaborates on Bion, following Faraday and Maxwell, and perceptively speaks of fields in mapping the trajectory of individuality and the dimension of unconscious—a creative analogy. As we know, a proton is an excitation in an electromagnetic field. Might we use such a finding, again, by way of analogy, and speak of our own individuality as moments of excitation in a field of unconsciousness?

We are considering a field that is active in ways we can barely grasp. I have spoken to this issue previously (Gargiulo, 2023) when I proposed that an analyst “creates” a patient's unconscious by interpretation, that is, by naming what is repressed. That we live in a sea of unconsciousness is likewise true, just an alternative

perspective. Consequently, as Ci