ABSTRACT
From its very beginnings, psychoanalysis has been faced with a dilemma that is both epistemological and methodological. Bion (2005) succinctly summarized the problem when he wrote: “Our problem … is, how are we to see, observe … these things which are not visible?” When Freud (1900a, 1901b) first demonstrated that unconscious thoughts and feelings could be both legible and comprehensible, his discovery was so powerful that it may have obscured the fact that he only claimed that some part of the unconscious can be known by the symbolic traces it leaves on our conscious, waking lives. Freud (1915e) delineated this portion when he noted that some unconscious instinctual impulses are “highly organized, free from self-contradiction” (p. 190), relatively indistinguishable in structure from those that are conscious or pre-conscious and yet “they are unconscious and incapable of becoming conscious” (pp. 190–191). He continued: “qualitatively 43they belong to the system Pcs. but factually to the Ucs.” (p. 191, original italics). 1
