ABSTRACT
First of all, a word about the Editor's Introductory Note to our article on “Empathy, Antipathy, and Telepathy in the Analytic Process.” It states: “A concept basic to their premise is that the unconscious of the other plays a formative role in the developing unconscious of the subject.” This assertion—if we exclude the questionable notion of a “developing unconscious”—ensues directly from the Freudian conception of language learning, in which the child's feeling that others have “made” speech in him (or her) and, with it, thoughts is indeed justified. 1 Need we add that infantile dialect, within which lie the fantasies of the unconscious, seizes onto the parents' unconscious, and that thought at the outset is unconscious? One has only to read Freud's (1920) observations on little Ernst to be convinced. If such a tendency did not already exist, it would be difficult to understand that in the analytic situation “the drift of one unconscious is caught up with that of another” (Freud, 1923).
