Unconscious Experience
In Self and Others, Laing engages with this question directly by unpacking the concept, as presented by Susan Isaacs, of unconscious phantasy. His initial challenge is on the basis that Isaacs is confusing the category definition of ‘phantasy’. He asks ‘what is the experiential status of ‘unconscious phantasy’ as Isaacs uses the term?’ (Laing 1971: 21) The answer which comes back seems to be a contradictory one: ‘Phantasy appears now to be the cause of itself, as an effect, and the effect of itself, as a cause.’ (Laing 1971: 23) Laing concludes that this conceptual confusion is a result of a critical entanglement which is at the heart of Isaacs’ psychoanalytic theory:
One source of the confusion is the particular dichotomous schema in which the whole theory is cast. This particular schema entails the distinction between ‘the inner world of the mind’, on the one hand, and ‘the external world of the subject’s bodily development and behaviour …’ on the other (Laing 1971: 23).
In other words, we are back in Heidegger’s territory of ‘the Dreadful has already happened’. Inner is split from outer, mind from body. This theoretical schism leads inevitably to further complications in trying to explain psychoanalytic mechanisms:
Terms like conversion, a shift from mind to body; projection, a shift from inner to outer; introjection, a shift from outer to inner, are caught and entangled by this theoretical split (Laing 1971: 24).
Psychoanalysis runs aground, Laing argues, on its failure to explain unconscious communication, to properly represent the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’:
The idea that ‘the mind’, ‘the unconscious’, or ‘phantasy’ is located inside a person and, in that sense, is inaccessible to the other, has far-reaching effects on the whole of psychoanalytic theory and method (ibid.).
The implication is that only a phenomenological, ontological enquiry into our ‘being in the world’ can address this problem of human subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Freud did not begin with such an enquiry.
I agree that the reification of notions of inner and outer worlds, with its accompanying assumption of a single and objective ‘external reality’, constricts much of traditional psychoanalytic theory, resulting in an inability to adequately conceptualise the interactions between people. The imagery in object-relations theory of two containers and an exchange of psychic phenomena between the two is both impoverished and alienating. The phenomenological insistence on our experience as embodied beings, living through our bodies, is useful in beginning to conceptualise an ‘in betweenness’, especially in the consulting room, as is Laing’s description of a ‘field of inter-experience’ (Laing 1990: 15).
However, I am less convinced that Laing adequately locates the concept of ‘phantasy’ as he continues to use it. As we have already seen, there is a lack of clarity regarding whether phantasy is considered to be unconscious, conscious or pre-conscious.
The second, interrelated, aspect of Laing’s challenge to Isaacs hangs on the notion that experience can be unconscious: ‘A person’s experience comprises anything that ‘he’ or ‘any part of him’ is aware of, whether ‘he’ or every part of him is aware of every level of his awareness or not.’ On this basis, experience cannot, by definition, be unconscious. Laing objects to the suggestion that, whereas an aspect of my experience may be unknown to me, the psychoanalyst can infer from my behaviour something of this unconscious experience: ‘Things are going to be difficult if you tell me that I am experiencing something which I am not experiencing. If that is what I think you mean by unconscious experience.’