Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Freud’s repression of Judaism and its cultural markers from the published “Rat Man” case history has been noted but never satisfactorily explained. This elision can be interpreted using Freud’s suggestion that the paradigmatic “rat” represents (among other things) a circumcised penis marking an intergenerational, covenantal exchange. When read against the case study as originally published, Freud’s process notes for the Rat Man’s treatment (the only set of such notes on a published case that Freud didn’t destroy) suggest that Freud chose to sanitize the published version of explicitly Jewish content, thus repeating a pattern of absence as a marker of debt. This debt only grows more tortuous and powerful the longer it remains unpaid. This system of elision in the Rat Man suggests that Freud understood deferral and denial to be built into the Jewish system of piety. Thus, it would seem that Freud used the Rat Man case history to explore Judaism through its repression; Freud’s relation to and interpretation of Jewish values are revealed as a primary, if unconscious, subject of the text.

This paper is the third in a series of investigations into (1) the nature and development of unconscious fantasy, (2) its place in a contemporary model of mind that, parenthetically, suggests a possible solution to the problem of theoretical pluralism, and (3) its mode of operation in the mind. The aim of these investigations is to update the notion of unconscious fantasy, an indispensable construct in psychoanalytic theories that assume out-of-awareness mentation, and to situate that construct within contemporary views of mental functioning in disciplines such as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and developmental psychology. At the same time, data accessible only through psychoanalytic work challenge these fields with findings that indicate the need for further investigation. This paper argues that experimental evidence on the phenomenon of “priming” lends support to one of the seminal claims in our field, one frequently attacked as an outmoded shibboleth: that is, that the past matters, whether encoded in declarative or in procedural memory. In common parlance, we are “primed” to respond to some situations in predetermined ways; the past primes us to experience the present in often unique and personal ways. There is evidence too that the priming mechanism and the encoding of subjective experience in declarative and procedural memory operate from very early in life.

Viewed within the psychic geography of Thomas Ogden’s modes of generating and organizing experience, in particular the autistic-contiguous mode, Louise Bourgeois’s creative imagination can be seen as originating on what Ogden (1989) has called the primitive edge of experience. This mode, dominated by the sensory, is characterized by chaos, fragmentation, and a loss of boundaries. In dynamic movements between the depressive and the autistic-contiguous positions, between destructive and reparative impulses, Bourgeois transforms experiences of chaos, as well as destructive aggression, into aesthetic order and form, into works of art. She is able to delve into the most elemental and presymbolic modes of psychic experience and artistically harness raw feelings and sensations on what can be called the primitive edge of creativity.

The psychoanalytic process of reconstruction has yet to be examined from the perspective of today’s two-person psychologies. Earlier writers on the subject have implicated the analyst and his emotional involvement as influences that may distort the valid recovery of memories, while others have written that the transference and the reconstructed past are interdependent. By contrast with both views, it is suggested here that the reconstructed product itself may reflect the transference-countertransference engagement of the dyad: in some instances, and to some extent in all instances, the scene or story of the presumed past will be a version of the current analytic relationship. In certain cases consideration of the conscious and unconscious emotional entanglements of the dyad will reveal that the reconstruction says more about the analytic present than about the past. Freud’s Wolf Man case provides a good illustration of this point. While a broad consensus exists that its famous primal scene reconstruction cannot be veridical, it has most often been dismissed as distorted by Freud’s theoretical commitments. A closer examination of the relationship between Freud and Pankejeff reveals that the reconstruction is an accurate rendering of warded-off aspects of the dyad’s way of being together. The potential clinical utility of adopting this perspective is that it encourages the analyst to reflect on his clinical reconstructions, interrogating them for clues to otherwise elusive aspects of the current clinical relationship.