ABSTRACT
The unconscious, once so central to psychoanalytic theory, tends to be relegated to secondary or even tertiary importance by both relational and drive theorists. The unconscious is of interest to both groups insofar as it is seen as the location of distortion or dissociation of conscious experience. Unconscious experience becomes merely those meanings that are out of awareness, thereby privileging conscious over unconscious experience. The American relational theorists particularly, in their zeal to discard drive theory, have failed to articulate an accepted conception of the unconscious that is synchronous with relational premises. The constructivists equate the unconscious with non-linguistic or unformulated experience which is potentially explicable through language. Symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of being are not equivalent to unconscious and conscious modes; rather, they are incidentally unconscious or conscious. From a relational-constructivist perspective, which borrows from the interpersonal tradition, I. Hirsch and J. Roth offer a contemporary critique of the classical model of the unconscious.
