ABSTRACT
There is something theatrical about the psychoanalytic encounter. There is a special setting — the quiet room, the couch and the analyst who sits expectantly behind the patient, listening to the patient with particular attention. It would seem that the analyst is the audience, while the patient provides the play, though the situation is rather more complicated than this, for what counts is the relationship between the two sides. The analytic setting still owes something to its origins in hypnosis; it is a special place where forces unknown to the conscious subject are conjured up from the darkness of the unconscious. To put it another way, the analytic setting encourages the turning down of the house lights of conscious reason and the switching up of another set of lights usually kept in the background — the set belonging to the unconscious subject, who is the true author of our complicated internal drama. The conscious subject is, as Freud pointed out in The Interpretation of Dreams , the censor, the one who wants to distort, cut out, make more acceptable to the powers that be. Although this character wants to make our internal drama intelligible and would seem to have our best interests at heart, they usually completely misunderstand what the true author is trying to say. The conscious subject is a past master at confusion, at putting in unnecessary additions and stage directions, and a malign stage manager who keeps forgetting the props, or who substitutes the correct props with inappropriate ones, often at the last minute when it is too late to make corrections. Yet the internal drama will have its say, it has to be expressed, the show must go on even if only through indirect means such as through the expression of symptoms, which then have to be deciphered by our modern-day augurers and soothsayers, the psychoanalysts.
