Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known

This book integrates the unique contribution of the British School of Object Relations with the fine texture of the problems that have arisen in the author’s own clinical practice. His accounts are touching and often moving.

The chapter’s in the Shadow of the Object all focus in one way or another on the human subject’s recording of his or her early experience of the object. This is ‚the shadow of the object‘ as it falls on the ego, leaving some trace of its existence in the adult. The object can cast its shadow without a child being able to process this relation through mental representations or language, such as when a parent uses his child to contain projective identifications. As the object affects us, we do know something of its character, but we may not have thought it yet; this is ‚the unthought known‘. The work of clinical psychoanalysis, particularly the discourse of object relations in the transference and countertransference, will partly be preoccupied with the emergence into thought of early memories of being and relating. An exploration of this feature of psychoanalysis, of the reliving through language of that which is known but not yet thought, is the subject of this book. It makes the best insights of the object relations approach clearly available.