Unthought known is a phrase coined by
Christopher Bollas
Christopher Bollas (born 1943) is an American-born British psychoanalyst and writer. He is a leading figure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Biography
Early life and education
Bollas was born in the United States in Washington, DC. ...
in the 1980s to represent those experiences in some way known to the individual, but about which the individual is unable to think.
At its most compelling, the unthought known stands for those early schemata for interpreting the object world that preconsciously determine our subsequent life expectations. In this sense, the unthought known refers to preverbal, unschematised early experience/
trauma that may determine one's behaviour unconsciously, barred to conscious thought.
Prehistory
It has been suggested that behind Bollas's concept lay a comment reported by
Freud
Sigmund Freud ( ; ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in t ...
from a patient to the effect that he had always ''known'' something but he had never ''thought'' of it.
The term also has been linked to
W. R. Bion's idea of Beta-elements – psychic experiences which cannot yet be processed in any way by the mind.
Central elements
Bollas saw several elements as going to make up the substance of the unthought known. Persistent
moods can be considered to preserve elementary but preschematized states of mind into later life; the complex early interplay of self and (primary) object may also be preserved in the unthought known; early aesthetic experience – pre-verbal – can again form part of the unthought known.
Bollas also linked the concept to
D. W. Winnicott's notion of the
true self
The true self (also known as real self, authentic self, original self and vulnerable self) and the false self (also known as fake self, idealized self, superficial self and pseudo self) are a psychological property dualism, dualism conceptualized ...
.
Systems theory
In terms of
systems-centered therapy, the concept refers to the boundary between ''apprehensive'' knowing (non-verbal) and ''comprehensive'' knowing – what we can allow ourselves to formulate in words.
Therapy
In therapy, the unthought known can become the subtext of the therapeutic interchange – the therapist's role then becoming that of picking up and containing (through
projective identification
Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Projective identification may be used as a type of defense, a means of communicating, a primitive form of relationship, or a ...
) what the patients themselves cannot yet think about.
[Wallin (2007), pp. 3, 183]
See also
*
Uncanny
The uncanny is the psychological experience of an event or thing that is unsettling in a way that feels oddly familiar, rather than simply mysterious. This phenomenon is used to describe incidents where a familiar entity is encountered in a frig ...
References
{{Reflist, 22em
Further reading
*Christopher Bollas, ''The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known'' (1987)
*Christopher Bollas, ''Cracking Up'' (2003)
*Gabriele Schwab, 'Words and Moods' ''SubStance'' vol 26 no 3 # 84 (1997) 107–27
External links
Ian Hunt, "The Unthought Known"
Psychoanalytic theory