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Philosophy is not a reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being…True philosophy in re-learning to look at the world… is as painstaking as the work of Balzac, Valery or Cezanne - by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.
I was struck in reading this introductory passage of Merleau-Ponty's celebrated publication, The Phenomenology of Perception, written in the early 60s, that we are in a similar state of reworking in psychoanalysis. In the true spirit of philosophy, the «re-learning to look at the world» of psychoanalysis has entailed fully describing and interrogating our experiences doing analysis as they are» and deciding whether our preciously held concepts do in fact hold true to those lived experiences as their «meaning comes into being».
So, in the spirit of continual reworking in psychoanalysis, in this paper I am asking, «What is deep?» Though we have no explicitly stated concept of what constitutes «depth» in psychoanalysis, the legacy of Freud's topographical and structural models of the psyche has remained with us as we assume that the «place» of depth is below the surface. With «deep» as our gold post, we have