ABSTRACT
The specific kind of internal object with which psychoanalysis has been concerned is distinguished by the fact that it is formed through mental processes available in the earliest stages of emotional development and reflects in its construction the way of knowing suitable to primitive emotional life. The struggle over interpretation in the world of politics, culture, and social institutions parallels the struggle in the inner world between the embedded meaning and the explicitly articulated meaning, between the unthought known and what is thought to be known. Social institutions and processes instantiate ways of knowing as ways of relating, thereby assuring that they are not contingent results of personal biography and experience, but larger realities of living that transcend what is particular, personal, and contingent. Families, schools, work organizations, and political processes all embody norms of relating that are also norms of thinking and knowing, or, in some cases, of knowing without thinking.
