ABSTRACT
Jung C. G. take on the unconscious was always significantly different from S. Freud’s. He thought there is a collective, as well as personal, aspect to unconscious processes, and his belief that libido is energy with a more than specifically sexual function led to his rupture with Freud. Phenomenology attends to descriptions of the immediacy of lived experiences rather than explanations. Challenging the dualisms of inner/outer, mind/body, conscious/unconscious, and thinkers like M. Merleau-Ponty and Levinas view the unconscious as co-extensive with consciousness. Marion Milner’s understanding of unconscious processes developed into something with a greater purpose and potential than Freud’s. Milner’s shift in thinking was influenced by Winnicott’s ideas and echoed by what other analysts in the Independent group were discovering and expressing. Dreams have a life of their own outside of the therapeutic space. Freud once wrote that psychoanalysis was about learning to see in the dark, and dreams come from that place of dark.
