Unconscious Experience in Psychoanalysis: Being, Meaning, and the Limits of “Knowing”
A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis
There is a particular kind of sentence that appears in the consulting room, not as a report of something that happened, but as a disclosure that alters what is happening now. The patient hears themselves, perhaps with embarrassment, perhaps with relief, and what comes into the room is not a new fact so much as a new relation to the facts, as if the same life has shifted its lighting, and a meaning that had been operative all along becomes suddenly difficult to deny.
This is one of the ordinary ways psychoanalysis earns the right to speak of “the unconscious,” though what is striking, if we are willing to linger with it, is how quickly the term tempts us into spatial metaphors and mechanical explanations, as if the person before us were divided into regions and agencies whose dealings we can map like a household with locked doors. Thompson’s Chapter 9, pointedly titled “Is the Unconscious Really All that Unconscious?,” begins by pressing on a deceptively simple problem: does it even make sense to speak of “experiencing” the unconscious if the concept refers to what is, by definition, beyond experience, and what could it mean to say someone suffers “unconscious experiences” if they are not aware of the experiences they are presumed to be suffering.
The force of the question is that it unsettles a habitual compromise in analytic speech, the compromise by which we treat experience as something like knowledge, and then treat the unconscious as a kind of unknown knowledge, a content that is hidden but nonetheless already there in the way a thought is there, waiting to be retrieved. Thompson’s dissatisfaction is not merely philosophical, because he explicitly characterizes the psychoanalytic endeavor in experiential terms: analysis aims at “bringing those aspects of consciousness that lie on the periphery of experience to experience,” to the degree that such a movement is feasible in each case.
Once this becomes the guiding thread, the problem of the unconscious cannot be handled as a scavenger hunt for contents. It becomes a question of how something can be effective in a life, shape desire, symptom, and relation, and yet remain un-lived in the fuller sense of being experienced as mine, in time, with the burden of implication that such ownership entails.
Freud’s psychic reality, and why “facts” are not enough
Thompson begins, as he must, with Freud’s first topography, and he emphasizes something that contemporary caricatures of Freud often forget: Freud’s earliest use of the term “unconscious” is inseparable from the problem of fantasy, precisely because fantasies may be conscious or unconscious and yet can be experienced as real, irrespective of whether they are factually true. What follows from this is not an invitation to relativism, as if facts do not matter, but a clinical claim about where meaning lives, because the meanings that govern a symptom are not identical with the historical accuracy of a memory, and analysis cannot be reduced to a forensic reconstruction of events.
Thompson sharpens this by invoking Freud’s distinction between psychical reality and factual reality, and by quoting Freud on guilt: what lies behind the sense of guilt are “psychical realities and never factual ones.” If we allow ourselves to hear what this implies, we can see why existential psychoanalysis is not a rejection of Freud, but a demand that we take Freud at his own most radical word. To speak of psychical reality is to admit that the human being suffers and acts on the basis of meanings that are lived as real, even when they do not correspond to the world’s objective record, and it is to admit that the analytic task cannot be accomplished by correcting the record alone, because the record is not what is suffered.
This is also why Thompson insists that fantasies and symptoms are not merely distortions, but are meaningful communications, and why he describes interpretation, in this early Freudian context, as the attempt to understand fantasies as “disguised messages” whose source is not straightforwardly available to the patient. Yet the moment we grant the symptom the dignity of meaning, the philosophical pressure arrives, not as an academic exercise, but as a clinical unease: if the symptom is meaningful, who, precisely, is doing the meaning, and what does it mean to attribute intention to a person who disclaims it.
To put it in the existential register Thompson keeps returning to, psychoanalysis risks either dissolving the person into mechanisms, which preserves the analyst’s explanatory confidence at the cost of the patient’s subjectivity, or it risks refusing mechanisms and falling into moralism, as if the patient were simply lying. The task becomes to find a language that can account for how a person can be implicated in meanings they do not yet experience as their own, without inventing a second “person” inside them.
Primary and secondary processes, and the question of the thinking subject
Freud’s solution to this problem, or at least his most influential attempt, is bound up with the distinction between primary and secondary processes, a distinction that becomes the backbone of a developmental story about how the psyche learns reality by abandoning hallucinated satisfaction. Thompson’s point is not to dismiss this distinction, but to show how Freud’s developmental narrative begins to wobble under its own metaphors, because Freud often writes as if a “psychical apparatus” decides to abandon hallucinatory satisfaction, forms a conception of external circumstances, and endeavors to alter reality, even though the very distinction Freud draws seems to leave no subject capable of making such a decision at that stage.
Thompson highlights the fictional quality of Freud’s picture of infancy, the fantasy of an infant entirely helpless and cut off from reality while the mother alone is in touch with it, and he notes a critique, associated in his discussion with Rycroft, that even very early life already involves a primitive form of communication and adaptation, which means the infant is not a pure wish-machine but participates, however rudimentarily, in a shared world. The significance of this, for Thompson, is not developmental trivia, because once one concedes that a rudimentary relation to reality is present from the start, Freud’s sharp partition between a pleasure-bound primitive system and a reality-bound mature system begins to look less like a natural history and more like a theoretical imposition designed to solve the problem of agency.
At this point Thompson makes what, in an existential frame, becomes the decisive shift: he suggests that the issue is not whether primary processes exist, but how we conceptualize them. He proposes that what Freud calls “primary” can be understood as conscious but pre-reflective, and therefore “not experienced, properly speaking,” whereas secondary processes correspond to reflective awareness, which is what allows a person to take up a meaning as theirs, to recognize themselves in it, and to stand in relation to it.
This is a subtle move that deserves more than a passing paraphrase, because it changes the phenomenology of analytic listening. Instead of imagining the unconscious as a sealed repository of contents, we begin to imagine a dimension of living that is already there in the person’s gestures, choices, evasions, and forms of speech, and yet is not owned as experience because it has not been gathered into reflective time. In that sense, the problem is not that the person does not know what they are doing, as if knowledge were the missing ingredient, but that the person is living a meaning without being able to live it as theirs, which is to say without being able to experience it in a way that makes them answerable to it.
This also begins to clarify why “unconscious experience” may be a misleading phrase. If experience means what is lived as lived, then whatever is pre-reflective is not “unconscious” in the sense of absent, but it is not yet experience in the sense that matters most for analytic transformation, namely the sense in which a life becomes narratable, inhabitable, and ethically binding.
Sartre’s critique of the unconscious, and the paradox of the censor
Thompson’s turn to Sartre is often misunderstood by clinicians as a flirtation with philosophy for its own sake. In fact, Sartre appears because he attacks psychoanalysis at the point where clinicians are most likely to smuggle metaphysics into technique, namely in the presupposed conception of consciousness that makes Freud’s model intelligible. Thompson notes that there is surprisingly little analytic attention paid to the conception of consciousness that Freud’s unconscious presupposes, even though psychoanalytic discourse is saturated with epistemological terms like truth, knowledge, and understanding.
Sartre’s famous objection, as Thompson renders it, centers on the censor in Freud’s topographical model. If the censor regulates what is permitted into consciousness and what is repressed into the unconscious, then the censor must be aware of both sides; yet because the ego is unaware of the censor, the model effectively posits a “second consciousness,” a hidden knower who becomes the de facto subject of analysis while the analysand disclaims knowledge of the whole affair.
The clinical relevance of this objection is not that Sartre “debunks” repression, but that he exposes the danger of turning analysis into a drama of inner bureaucracies, where meanings are processed by quasi-persons who are neither the patient nor the analyst. Thompson’s way of keeping Sartre close is to emphasize Sartre’s distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness. Sartre can say that a feeling is conscious at a pre-reflective level even when the person lacks reflective knowledge of it, and in that sense the feeling can be lived without being grasped as an object of awareness.
This distinction allows Thompson to name what clinicians encounter daily, namely that the patient may be conscious of a wish, a dread, a hatred, or a longing in the sense that it is enacted and effective, while simultaneously resisting the reflective recognition that would make it speakable and ethically charged. Thompson describes Sartre’s point in a formulation that helps keep the discussion from becoming scholastic: it is possible to be conscious of something, and yet not possess knowledge of it, because to know it would be to apprehend it as mine, which is precisely what resistance works to prevent.
At this point one can see why the question of “unconscious experience” is not a mere terminological quibble. The concept becomes a way of speaking about time, about the gap between living and owning, because reflective consciousness is where the person gathers what they do into the form of a self-account, and the refusal of reflective ownership is one of the most basic ways a life becomes split against itself.
Heidegger: why the question becomes ontological
If Sartre keeps us within the architecture of consciousness, Heidegger, as Thompson reads him, relocates the entire problem. Heidegger’s movement from epistemology to ontology leads him to abandon concepts like consciousness and even intentionality, at least in their Husserlian form, in order to focus on our relationship with Being and the way it is disclosed in the immediacy of everyday experience. This is why Thompson can say, in a strictly Heideggerian perspective, that psychoanalysis is already concerned with our manner of Being, because people enter analysis not satisfied with the manner of Being they embody and wanting to change it, and because to determine what our manner of Being is about we have to give ourselves to it through experience.
It is at this juncture that the existential psychoanalytic sensibility comes into focus as something more than a theoretical preference. Thompson argues that psychoanalysis gives us the opportunity to give thought to our experience by taking the time needed to ponder it, and he aligns this with Heidegger’s distinction between two fundamental types of thinking, calculative and meditative, a distinction that avoids both Freud’s and Sartre’s conceptual confusions around conscious and unconscious systems.
The point of this distinction, in Thompson’s hands, is not to romanticize “depth” or to disparage rationality, but to name something clinicians recognize: patients resist thinking about certain topics because they are distressing, and one manner of thinking is inherently comforting while the other is more likely to elicit anxiety or dread. Thompson writes that we tend to avoid thinking the thoughts that make us anxious, and instead abandon ourselves to fantasies that are soporific, and he frames the task of analysis as nudging our thinking into those areas we typically avoid so that we can access a region of existence we are loathe to explore, though it lies at the heart of our humanity.
Here the unconscious is no longer a hidden container. It is the lived structure of avoidance, the way a life organizes itself around what cannot yet be borne. If we still use the word “unconscious,” it begins to mean not an absence of consciousness but an absence of experienced ownership, a refusal to dwell in what is most disclosive and therefore most frightening.
Thompson then makes the Heideggerian move that is perhaps the most clinically fertile, because it gives a language for what interpretation is doing when it is doing more than producing insight. He explains Heidegger’s “ontological difference,” the distinction between beings, understood as entities and objects of scientific investigation, and being, understood as the disclosed significance of entities in time. Beings become being when they are experienced through interpretation, because interpretation is how temporal flux becomes meaningful for a particular person.
Thompson’s clinical translation is explicit: psychoanalysts already “temporalize” the patient’s experience when they interpret its historical antecedents, but the aim is not merely to help the patient “understand” themselves better. The aim is to help them experience who and what they are, essentially, so that the patient’s world comes alive again, and Thompson names this as what Heidegger calls doing “fundamental ontology.”
If we take this seriously, “unconscious experience” can no longer mean an experience that is experienced unconsciously, which is near nonsense, but rather a region of life whose being has not yet been disclosed in time, and whose disclosure requires interpretation not as translation into theory but as the opening of a world.
Laing’s language of experience, and what cannot yet be said
Thompson’s inclusion of Laing is not an eccentric historical gesture. Laing appears because he pushes the experiential stance to its ethical edge, and because he exposes how psychoanalytic theory can proliferate abstractions that attribute motives and experiences to patients who disclaim them, while leaving unasked the basic question: what is the person’s experience of themselves, and of the other, in the encounter that is actually happening.
Thompson connects this to Laing’s social phenomenology, but the point that matters most for the present question is how Laing describes conflict. In the language of psychic conflict, Laing agrees with Freud that people who suffer conflicts are essentially of two minds, struggling against the intrusion of a reality too painful to accept on one hand while harboring a fantasy incapable of being realized on the other, and he adds a claim that is both simple and uncompromising: their lives are held in abeyance until they can speak of their experience to someone willing to hear it with benign acceptance, without a vested interest in what that experience ought to be.
This matters because it reframes the unconscious not as a thing, but as a condition of speech and listening, and therefore as an ethical condition of the analytic situation itself. What cannot be said is not merely unknown; it is unlivable under the present conditions, and the analyst’s task is inseparable from the creation of a space in which the person can risk letting what is pre-reflectively lived become reflectively speakable.
Laing’s preference, as Thompson notes, is to avoid terms like consciousness and unconscious and to situate the discussion in the language of experience and the way experience determines perception of world and self. One could read this as an anti-theoretical move, but Thompson’s chapter suggests something more unsettling: perhaps the deepest theoretical fidelity is precisely a fidelity to experience, which forces us to treat theory as a secondary construct rather than the primary reality.
What changes in analysis, if not merely knowledge?
One can now see why Thompson’s chapter ends with an argument that is at once skeptical and oddly hopeful. He states that Freud’s models are “scientific” only to the degree that psychoanalysis is a theoretical science that presumes to explain what is inaccessible to experience, and that, as theoretical constructs, such models cannot be proved or disproved, which helps explain the proliferation of competing psychoanalytic theories.
But the existential pivot is sharper than skepticism about theory, because Thompson then says that from Heidegger’s ontological perspective the unconscious is not a theoretical construct “in” my head, but “out there, in the world, a dimension of being,” apprehended as an enigma that appears and disappears, and accessible to us only through interpretation in the sense of giving things name and significance in the ongoing movement of life.
The consequence is that the unconscious is never simply unconscious for me, but a living presence in my world, and this is why, Thompson concludes, the purpose of analysis is not finally to “know” the unconscious, but to return the patient to the ground of an experience from which they have lost their way, so that the patient can claim it as their own.
If we keep the initial question in view, we can now answer it without the usual evasions. “Unconscious experience” is a phrase that collapses under scrutiny if it is meant to designate an experience that is experienced while remaining unconscious, because experience implies some form of ownership, however faint. Yet the phrase can be rescued, existentially, if it is treated as a pointer toward what is lived without being lived as lived, toward pre-reflective involvement that has not been gathered into reflective time, and toward a dimension of being that remains concealed not because it is locked away somewhere, but because it has not yet become bearable enough to be spoken, remembered, and carried.
For patients, this reframes the unconscious away from the fantasy of an inner monster or a hidden vault of secrets, and toward the more intimate, more unsettling possibility that what is “unconscious” is often what you are already doing and suffering, but cannot yet experience as your own without anxiety. For therapists, it reframes interpretation away from the delivery of explanatory knowledge and toward the temporalization of experience, the slow work by which a world becomes newly disclosed, and by which the patient’s life ceases to be held in abeyance by what cannot yet be said.
At Free Association Clinic, this orientation grounds our understanding of depth work, whether one arrives through existential therapy or through psychoanalytic psychotherapy, because the task is not to impose a theory onto a life but to make room for experience to enter language and time with the seriousness it demands.
James Norwood, PsyD
Associate Director, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociation.us)
Clinical Director, The Free Association Clinic for Existential Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (https://www.freeassociationclinic.com)
Founder/CEO, inpersontherapy.com (https://inpersontherapy.com)
Sources
Freud, S. (1953–1973). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols; J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. Penguin Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness (H. Barnes, Trans.). Washington Square Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
