ABSTRACT
In previous papers (most recently, Blass, 2016) I have argued that throughout his life Freud struggled to articulate some very basic aspects of the analytic aim and process, which he knew of and adhered to through insightful experience. While he clearly considered analysis to be a process of coming to know repressed and denied unconscious truths, of “know[ing] yourself”, of “look[ing] into your own depth” (Freud, 1917a, pp. 142–143) what this knowing specifically means and how and why it takes place was much more difficult for him to conceptualize and communicate. That is, Freud readily affirmed that our symptoms and psychic disorders are problematic and distorted expressions of denial and of that which has been denied and so naturally, knowing instead of denying, facing psychic reality, cures. But what does facing reality actually mean? Here, matters became complex and clouded. It is not, Freud emphasizes throughout his analytic writing, simply a matter of owning up to facts, affirming ideas; conscious knowledge does not prevent unconscious denial. We can understand that we are anxious because of denied oedipal wishes, and we may be convinced that such wishes exist because of their appearance in the transference, and still those wishes may maintain their unconscious anxiety-arousing influence. And taking this a step further, if we are to fathom another kind of knowledge of psychic truth which is more directly unconscious, should we, indeed, think of it as knowledge of a factual kind, only now in the unconscious? That is, is cure a matter of knowing in the sense of having ideas, unconsciously, of facts about one's psychic life, for example, the fact of the existence of oedipal wishes? The careful study of his writings over the years (clinical and theoretical alike) suggests that Freud was struggling to describe some other kind of knowledge of truth—not merely affirming ideas about the facts of psychic reality; rather, some kind of lived integrative process of knowing.
