The Fate of the Unconscious in Future Psychotherapy

It is important in these changing times to reconsider the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and the phantasmal mental life that occupies it—so that we can recalibrate our clinical work with it. It is the foundation of all our endeavors. Recent developments in neurobiology, combined with a more pragmatic intersubjective approach in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, have marginalized the status of the unconscious in the eyes of many mental health professionals. Moreover, considerations of realistic childhood traumata and neglect are being more and more counterposed to the traditional concept of the infantile neurosis. What is at stake is a dismissal of a concept that is still of enormous importance, yet one that has been too little understood. What is required is a dual-track conception in which an interplay can be seen to be taking place between the unconscious, neurobiology, and trauma in the intrasubjective as well as in the intersubjective matrix.