The contemporary clinical relationship to unconscious determinism remains attenuated in the context of more popular modalities emphasizing behavioral modification, e.g. CBT, DBT and ACT. Although there have been great strides in the neuroscientific and philosophical fields substantiating unperceived, automated processes, neither discipline has been meaningfully integrated to combat the current trending away from the significance of subjectivity and consciousness itself. In this paper, a developing psychoanalytic percept is illuminated, bridging these adjacent schools in harmony with their therapeutic properties. This is presented through binding psychoanalytic heuristics, integrated information theory and complex systems theory to allow for an unconscious ‘renaissance’, highlighting the iatrogenic considerations to modern-day treatment which so often disavow the mind outside of awareness.
The Whole Self and nothing but the self: a psychoanalytic conceptualization of what makes us, us
The insidious boundary between the intrapsychic and interpersonal perspectives to clinical intervention remains a point of contention in psychotherapeutic training. Despite efforts to establish a more permeable membrane and grand(er) theory between the individual self and group phenomena, evidence demonstrates the rigidity between these isolated factions continues to operate in pathogenic discord. In this article, a more comprehensive frame is offered, incorporating internal and external experience of the self and its concomitant culture. Through amalgamating the history and perception of the I, Horney’s idealized image and Hegelian societal dynamics, an interface with the universal substrate of the person—that is the self—is established. In turn, allowing for effective binding of the wholehearted individual and their experience, to a realistic feedback loop between their own development and the influencing environment.