ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two different relational processes - transference–countertransference and enactment - and their respective connections to the repressed and the unrepressed unconscious. The repressed unconscious remains to this day a key concept in defining the work of the psychoanalyst. Analysis is an emotional and relational experience in which the past and present of the patient are inevitably intertwined with the past and present of the analyst. Unconscious contents come to be part of the analytic process through language and its relationship with the world of emotions. Clinical experience suggests that transference involves the patient’s past and its re-evocation under the form of a psychic acting out in the relation with the analyst. According to Mauro Mancia, the unrepressed unconscious has its foundations in the sensory experiences the infant has with his mother. The chapter focuses on a specific mental process related to these unsymbolised emotions connected with the unrepressed unconscious.
