Within, outside, and in between: The relational unconscious.

Abstract

This article explored the idea of a relational unconscious, which presumes three interconnected ideas about human interaction. First, meaning and understanding are coconstructed and intersubjective and not universal, absolute, and preformed.Second, there is a fluid boundary between conscious and unconscious experience that is intersubjectively mediated. Third, language is basic to human experience, whether or not a particular experience can be verbally expressed. This view of unconscious experience suggests that a therapist's participation is a major determining influence on the generation, awareness, and expression of a patient's unconscious experience. In applying a relational view of unconscious processes, self-disclosure is used to consider the usefulness of therapeutic interventions, to think critically about the nature of human interaction, and to specify how the therapeutic relationship promotes healing and growth.In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature at Stockholm in 1950, William Faulkner depicted the writer's primary duty as that of

Minds in the Making: Attachment, the Self‐organizing Brain, and Developmentally‐oriented Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

“…Klein proposed that, although this primitive process of communication between the unconscious of one person and the unconscious of another begins in early development, it continues throughout life. These moments of right brain to right brain communication represent an alignment of what Zeddies (2000) calls the`nonlinguistic dimension' of ther elational unconscious' of both the therapist and the patient.…”

An even hover‐reading of Freud: The work of metaphor

“…Here, he refers specifically to some of Freud's papers quoted here as well (1913a, p. 320; and 1915a, p. 194). Loewald's paper seems to make possible the ensuing popularity of unconscious to unconscious communication as found in additional concepts such as "implicit relational knowing" (Lyons-Ruth et al, 1998), "right brain to right brain communication" (Marcus, 1997), "spontaneous emotional communication" (Buck, 1994), "inside out knowing" (Bromberg, 1991), and the "relational unconscious" (Zeddies, 2000), among others.…”

“Turnings”: The Transformation of Trauma into Grief

“…As Stolorow specifically notes, his views of the unconscious have Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 21:04 13 June 2016 important resonance with the ideas of the relational unconscious detailed by Gerson (2004) and Zeddies (2000), and indeed, with Donnel Stern's work on "unformulated experience" (1997). These theorists, and others who have written on the topic (e.g., Aron, 1996;Bromberg, 1998;Davies, 1996;Hoffman, 1998;Mitchell, 1997Mitchell, , 1998Spezzano, 1996), speak to the dialectic and continuous relationship that exists in conscious and unconscious mental states that are constantly being shaped within specific intersubjective contexts (Zeddies, 2000). As Gerson (2004) writes, transformation into consciousness requires the proper environmental fit.…”