unconscious to unconscious
The intersubjective process — encountered in the depth-psychology corpus under the alias ‘unconscious-to-unconscious’ — designates that domain of analytic work in which the psychic lives of two persons interpenetrate beneath the threshold of conscious intention, generating meanings neither could produce alone. Ogden is the corpus’s preeminent theorist of this terrain, mapping it through his constructs of the analytic third and reverie: the analyst’s daydreams are not private but are ‘unconscious intersubjective constructions generated by analyst and analysand,’ the co-authored text of a jointly dreamed session. Winnicott’s concept of potential space and Klein’s projective identification are the genealogical substrates Ogden inherits, but he transforms them into a dialectical model in which individual subjectivity and co-created intersubjectivity continually negotiate their boundaries. Wiener, drawing on Schore and Beebe, anchors the process neurobiologically — right-hemisphere to right-hemisphere communication, dyadic affect regulation, nonverbal choreography — while Ferenczi’s clinical diary quietly anticipates the entire tradition by treating the analytic encounter as a mutually interpenetrating psychic field. The central tension running through this corpus is between the radical porousness of the intersubjective field and the analytic necessity of preserving sufficient separateness to think. Projective identification marks the pathological pole of this spectrum; generative reverie marks its productive pole.
Although the analyst’s reveries are personal psychological events, I view them as unconscious intersubjective constructions generated by analyst and analysand.
Ogden establishes reverie as the primary phenomenal form of the intersubjective process, insisting that even the most private-seeming analytic daydream is jointly authored at an unconscious level.
, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997thesis
the analyst views the analytic enterprise as centrally involving an effort on the part of the analyst to track the dialectical movement of individual subjectivity (of analyst and analysand) and intersubjectivity (the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third).
Ogden’s foundational thesis: the analytic process is defined by the dynamic oscillation between personal subjectivity and the co-created unconscious life he calls the analytic third.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
projective identification involves a type of partial collapse of the dialectical movement of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, resulting in the subjugation (of the individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand) by the analytic third.
Projective identification is theorized as the pathological extreme of the intersubjective process, in which the co-created third overwhelms the separate subjectivities that generated it.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
I have attempted to describe something of the way in which my experience as analyst (including the barely perceptible and often extremely mundane background workings of my mind and body) are contextualized by the intersubjective experience created by analyst and analysand.
Ogden demonstrates that even the most subliminal somatic and cognitive events in the analyst are shaped by the intersubjective field shared with the patient.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
Human beings have a need as deep as hunger and thirst to establish intersubjective constructions (including projective identifications), in order to find an exit from unending, futile wanderings in their own internal object world.
Ogden elevates the intersubjective process from analytic technique to a primary human drive, arguing that self-analysis alone is structurally insufficient for psychological transformation.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994thesis
right hemisphere to right hemisphere communications of fast-acting, automatic, regulated and dysregulated emotional states between patient and therapist… In a growth-facilitating therapeutic context, meaning is not singularly discovered, but dyadically created.
Wiener, drawing on Schore and Beebe, grounds the intersubjective process in neurobiological laterality, showing that meaning emerges from mutual, nonverbal, right-hemisphere exchange rather than unilateral interpretation.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
experiences in and of the analytic third often generate a quality of intimacy between patient and analyst that has ‘all the sense of real’ (Winnicott 1963, p. 184).
The intersubjective process is not confined to pathology; its generative pole produces forms of enlivening intimacy that may constitute the patient’s first encounter with healthy object relatedness.
, The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique, 1994supporting
Dreaming and reverie always involve an unconscious internal discourse between ‘the dreamer who dreams the dream and the dreamer who understands the dream’ (Grotstein, 1979).
Reverie is shown to replicate at the intrapsychic level the same unconscious dialogic structure that characterizes the intersubjective process between analyst and analysand.
, Reverie and Interpretation, 1997supporting
The patient awaking from a nightmare has reached the limits of his capacity for dreaming on his own. He needs the mind of another person — ‘one acquainted with the night’ — to help him dream the yet to be dreamt aspect of his nightmare.
Ogden articulates the intersubjective process as the analyst’s capacity to extend and complete the patient’s interrupted dreaming, a function that is constitutively dyadic.
, This Art of Psychoanalysis: Dreaming Undreamt Dreams and Interrupted Cries, 2004supporting
Individual subjectivity is from the outset intersubjectivity, originally engaged with and altered by others in specific geological and cultural environments.
Thompson’s enactive phenomenology offers a philosophical grounding for the analytic intersubjective process, arguing that selfhood is constitutively relational rather than primordially solitary.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
these philosophers, none of whom could possibly have had access to what we now know about hemisphere differences, nonetheless each found himself compelled, unawares, to derive the reality and ultimate importance of the right-hemisphere world.
McGilchrist’s discussion of Husserl’s intersubjectivity provides an indirect philosophical lineage for the right-hemisphere-mediated, pre-reflective dimension of the intersubjective process.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
There exists in the newborn infant a natural intermodal coupling between self and other, one that does not involve a confused experience.
Gallagher’s developmental research on neonate imitation establishes that intersubjective coupling precedes reflective self-awareness, lending empirical weight to clinical claims about unconscious-to-unconscious communication.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside