Well this is either very simple or very complicated. I am a believer in the idea that the human brain has a lot of Ucs processes, well of course it does, if I had to think about where to put my fingers when typing I’d very slow and if I had to think how to move the wheel to stay upright on a pushbike I’d fall off. But this isn’t about what I see as “the behavioural unconscious”, this is about the psychonalytic unconscious.
Details #
So what’s that? To me it’s a layer of processing, particularly of relatedness and emotions connected with relatedness, that is beyond any easy access from consciousness: access is actively blocked.
What is this entry doing in a glossary that grew up around a book about measuring change in psychological interventions? Well, because some people who, like me, believe in this psychoanalytic unconscious argue that believing in it makes it paradoxical to ask people to describe their state when trying to assess change: “They can only answer from the conscious, from what they can reach, not from where the real issues are, in the Ucs.”
Well, to some extent, yes. However, my take is that people can, with sensibly designed self-report measures, tell you a bit about how their lives are going: including, as Freud famously put it, how they are working and loving. Sure, any questionnaire is only a crude reflection of someone’s state and it can tell you about change but not about the process of change, but it is a reflection of how the person feels they are and not irrelevant whatever you believe about processes of distress or processes of change.
Try also #
- I’ve expanded this a bit more in psychoanalytic theory and therapies
Chapters #
These ideas run through the OMbook though we believe the book to be genuinely pantheoretical and absolutely not espousing any one theory of distress or change. However, the issue surfaces most in Chapter 7: Outcome measurement for individual practitioners.
Online resources #
None plausible!
Dates #
First created 30.xii.25.
