ABSTRACT
In its founder, psychoanalysis had a leader who expanded our range of awareness of thoughts and feelings that had been banished to the unconscious, primarily through a courageous sharing of his own self-analysis. Despite his unprecedented openness, Freud had little patience for his dissenters. A collective sense of shame is fertile ground for the generation of consensual taboo. It is ironic, yet strangely consistent with psychoanalysis’s proclivity for contradiction and paradox, that a theory of the mind and a therapeutic process that focuses on the liberating within the individual of debilitating taboos could simultaneously encourage the creation of taboos within its tradition as a profession. Contemporary analysts, primarily intersubjective and relational theorists, have posited that whether in the form of enactment, sustained use of countertransference, reverie, or some other form of unconscious becoming conscious, the analytic dyad is triangulated by a third mediating voice.
