ABSTRACT
Laplanche's development of psychoanalysis is now becoming increasingly influential as a result of his concern with the origin of the unconscious fantasies which psychoanalytic psychotherapy seeks to make conscious, deconstruct and dispel. To this we could add the preconceptions signs of these fantasies evoke in the analyst. Where do these preconceptions come from? In part, as indicated by Bion in likening analysis to painting, they come from what analysts, like artists, learn from practising their trade. In this the analyst's preconceptions are akin to the knowledge of dream-symbolism acquired from their clinical experience which Freud recommended them to use to supplement their analysands' associations when these fail or become mute. Where, beyond this, do the analyst's and artist's preconceptions come from? Their preconceptions, as regards the meaning of symbols, are rooted, according to Freud, in an archaic language which, with accretions from later developments and inventions (zeppelins included: see p. 26) shape our understanding of the world we find ourselves in. Jung believed that knowledge of this language is inherited in each of us in the form of archetypes in the collective unconscious.
