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Deception and Trauma in Existential Psychoanalysis: Laing and Freud on Mystification

An essay in reading Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis (Chapter 11)

Deception and trauma in existential psychoanalysis are not treated as mere clinical “content” to decode, nor as the private property of an isolated mind. In Michael Guy Thompson’s Chapter 11, they become the ethical problem that quietly governs everything else: the question of what happens to a person’s relation to reality when reality is repeatedly bent, denied, or strategically withheld, and what it demands of a therapist who claims to practice psychoanalysis in the name of truth. Thompson’s wager is that R.D. Laing’s work, so often positioned as psychoanalysis’ rebellious counterpoint, becomes most intelligible when we notice how thoroughly Freud inhabits it, even where Freud is barely named.

This is not only a theoretical matter, and it is not a dispute to be settled by choosing a camp. For therapists, Thompson’s chapter presses on the uncomfortable point that technique is never merely technique, because every technique presupposes an ethic, and the ethic can be betrayed in the very procedures meant to protect it. For patients, it gives language to an injury that often resists language: the peculiar devastation of being made to doubt one’s experience, and of discovering, often too late, that one’s world had been organized around what was concealed. Thompson’s claim is that the trauma at issue here is not simply what “happened,” but what happened to the possibility of believing what happens.

The gulf Laing refused to accept

Thompson begins where existential psychoanalysis often begins, not with a doctrine but with a stance. He portrays the most telling feature of Laing’s clinical technique as a radical effort to eliminate the gulf that customarily hardens between therapists and their patients, so that the patient can feel, in the therapist’s presence, not the impersonal authority of a procedure but “another human being like themselves,” someone who shares the ordinary weight of living and the ordinary capacity for pain. The point is deceptively simple, and it becomes demanding precisely because it deprives the therapist of a familiar refuge: the refuge of role, the refuge of expertise performed as distance, the refuge of a professional posture that can quietly turn the other into an object. In Laing’s hands, the clinical encounter becomes an exposure, because the therapist’s relation to truth cannot be kept outside the room as a private virtue while technique proceeds inside the room as a neutral instrument.

Thompson does not sentimentalize this stance as “niceness,” and he does not treat it as a rejection of analytic discipline. He treats it as a more austere demand: that the therapist’s humanity is not an ornament of the work but one of its conditions, and that the ethical imperative is not an afterthought added to interpretation but the ground on which interpretation can be trusted. The deeper problem, in other words, is not whether a therapist can interpret cleverly, but whether the relationship being formed can bear truth without collapsing into coercion, and whether the therapist can bear the temptation to manage reality, even in the name of improvement.

A contemplative male therapist sits in a chair, hand on his forehead, surrounded by ghostly, cracked images of a screaming woman, a solemn child, and an older man—symbolizing emotional burden, intergenerational trauma, and the lingering presence of the past

Freud’s “Truth and Trauma” and the expansion of reality

If Laing’s technique begins with the abolition of the gulf, Thompson’s argument begins with a different abolition, the abolition of an easy story about Laing’s relation to psychoanalysis. Thompson insists that Freud’s influence on Laing was “pervasive,” though generally omitted, and he goes further, suggesting that Laing saw himself, quietly and without fanfare, as Freud’s intellectual heir, with a style of allusion that makes the inheritance hard to see unless one knows how to listen for it. What matters is not biographical gossip about influence but the alignment of a central preoccupation: deception and its relation to trauma.

Thompson’s route through Freud is precise, because it follows the transformation of Freud’s own theory of trauma. Freud begins, under Charcot’s influence, with a relatively direct idea, that hysterical symptoms follow from traumatic seductions, from sexual experiences imposed on the child, a theory whose apparent concreteness has a certain moral clarity. Yet the theory collapses under contradictory evidence, and Freud’s collapse becomes, for Thompson, one of psychoanalysis’ decisive expansions: if some patients trace symptoms to traumas that did not occur as events, then fantasies have force, and “psychical reality” must be taken into account alongside practical reality. That phrase is not an escape from truth but a widening of truth’s domain, because it names the way the psyche can be organized around scenes that have the status of reality for the person, regardless of historical verification, and because it locates trauma not only in external violation but in the psyche’s own struggle to bear what it anticipates, what it dreads, and what it cannot admit it already knows.

Thompson reads Freud’s later conception as a subtle account of how deception and conflict co-constitute each other. The child, vulnerable to disappointment, can repress what is too painful, replacing an objectionable reality with an inviting fantasy, and thereby “not experiencing” the disappointment in the ordinary sense while still suffering its effects; later, anxiety forms around the fear of discovering what one must not know, which is to say, around the dread of re-encountering something that, in reality, has already happened. Trauma becomes inseparable from concealment, and the psyche’s defenses become, in their own way, deceptions that purchase bearability at the cost of truth. It is in this terrain, where reality is not denied merely because a person is irrational but because reality is unbearable, that Freud’s theory can be extended without being reduced to moral judgment.

What matters clinically, and existentially, is that the question of truth is no longer reducible to whether something “really happened,” as if the psyche were a courtroom. The question becomes: what has the status of reality for this person, what has been split off in order to survive, and what kind of relationship is required for what has been disavowed to become bearable without humiliation or coercion. Freud’s move toward psychical reality, in this sense, is already an ethical move, because it refuses the contempt implicit in dismissing the person’s experience as mere fabrication, and it binds the analyst to a more difficult fidelity, fidelity to the reality that is lived, even when it is not easily verified.

From psychical reality to social phenomenology

This is the point at which Thompson’s chapter takes its most consequential turn, because he argues that Laing takes Freud’s conception of psychic trauma and applies it to delusional confusion, but does so “in a more dialectical framework,” and this dialectical shift changes the moral topology of the clinical scene. Freud had emphasized fantasy as a way the psyche avoids objectionable realities, and even when Freud attends to interpersonal deceptions, the conceptual center remains intrapsychic conflict. Laing, by contrast, asks what happens when deception is not primarily what I do to myself, but what is done to me, repeatedly, by others, and done in a way that aims not merely at my compliance but at the manipulation of my experience, and therefore my reality.

Thompson names this shift with Laing’s term “social phenomenology,” defined as an “internal critique” of how others affect, and sometimes play havoc with, my experience. The emphasis is decisive: the psyche is not simply a private theater, because the stage itself is partly built by others, and the lines one is forced to speak are sometimes the lines of another person’s denial. Laing’s dialectical dimension, as Thompson describes it, is the tormenting structure of interpersonal reality: what I think you think about me, and what you in fact think but conceal, and the way this concealment invades my capacity to know what is happening, and to trust that what is happening is nameable. When this dialectic becomes chronic, the problem is no longer only repression or wish-fulfillment; the problem becomes confusion as an existential injury.

Thompson’s formulation is stark and, if taken seriously, unsettling. Laing concluded that schizophrenia can be understood as the consequence of deceptions employed on someone who assumes he is being told the truth, and who depends on what the other tells him to be true. The language is careful. It does not romanticize psychosis. It does not reduce it to an abstract “break” from reality. It suggests that what is shattered is the person’s footing in reality, and that the shattering can be precipitated by relational conditions in which truth becomes unstable, where the person is repeatedly forced into the impossible task of sustaining a reality that is denied by those on whom he depends.

This is also where Thompson’s contrast between Freud and Laing becomes clinically useful, because it clarifies two different models of trauma that do not exclude each other but interact. Freud often conceived trauma in terms of frustration that thwarts anticipated pleasure, a model that makes sense for neurosis and for the ordinary compromises of life. Laing envisioned a different form of trauma that could account for psychotic anxiety and withdrawal: states of confusion that follow when one’s reality has been savaged, not through self-deception alone, but through being duped or deceived by another, and the loss of reality becomes more poignant precisely because it compounds frustration with disorientation. In contemporary idiom, one might reach for “gaslighting,” but Laing’s point is more radical than a popular term can hold, because it concerns the conditions under which a person is forced to betray his own perception in order to remain attached, and the way attachment can become the vehicle of unreality.

To say this is not to collapse all psychosis into family dynamics, nor to transform existential psychoanalysis into a single-cause polemic. Thompson explicitly resists simplistic causality. What he insists on, instead, is that reality is not merely a given, it is something that is sustained, confirmed, or subverted between people, and that the clinical task cannot be faithful to experience if it treats relational deception as incidental.

A distressed woman holds her head in anguish while a faded silhouette of a couple whispering looms behind her, split by visible cracks—conveying themes of psychological distress, secrecy, relational conflict, and emotional fragmentation

Mystification in therapy, a vocabulary for interpersonal deception

Thompson’s reading of Laing’s oeuvre sharpens the point further by showing that deception between persons is not a marginal theme in Laing, it is a sustained preoccupation across his most prolific decade. Thompson notes, with some irony, that The Divided Self is the only major work of Laing’s in which interpersonal deception does not play a major role, since it is oriented toward the existential experience of going mad rather than toward the social context that later becomes central. The shift is visible in Self and Others, where Laing turns toward the effect human beings have on one another in the etiology of severe psychological disturbance, and it is here that Thompson locates an important philosophical inflection: Laing’s engagement with Heidegger’s “On the Essence of Truth” and with the pre-Socratic term aletheia, truth as what emerges from concealment. Laing does not simply borrow Heidegger’s notion of truth, he twists it toward the interpersonal, emphasizing the interdependency between candor and secrecy, and thereby locating truth not as a detached property of propositions but as something that appears and recedes within conversation, within the fragile drama of what is disclosed and what is withheld.

This is where mystification becomes more than a provocative term, and becomes instead a conceptual instrument. Thompson underscores that Laing coined a vocabulary, terms such as collusion, mystification, injunction, untenable positions, and did so in order to name how ordinary interactions can distort truth so effectively that they affect each other’s reality, and therefore sanity. Thompson’s claim is not merely that Freud cared about deception and Laing cared about deception, but that Freud lacked this interpersonal vocabulary even where the problem was present, and that Laing supplies what psychoanalysis, in Thompson’s view, too often evaded: the possibility that pathology is not only a private compromise with desire, but also a response to a world in which reality is negotiated through power, denial, and coercive “care.”

Thompson’s account of Laing and Esterson’s family studies makes the clinical stakes concrete without collapsing them into accusation. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing and Esterson demonstrate families in which massive forms of trickery and mystification are employed against the identified patient, sometimes with chilling casualness, and Thompson recounts the case of “Maya,” where parents deny to their daughter what they have openly admitted when she is absent, a denial that functions not simply as lying but as a systematic twisting of the child’s hold on reality. Thompson is careful to note the controversy that follows, and he observes that Laing did not claim that such incidents conclusively “cause” schizophrenia, only that they were ubiquitous in the families studied, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. He also insists that mystification is not unique to “pathological” families, because it is inherent in the hypocrisy of everyday life, and the difference is often one of degree, persistence, and consequence.

Laing’s later work extends the analysis to other relational fields, including couples. Thompson’s discussion of Interpersonal Perception is striking because it presents the book as “radical even now,” precisely insofar as it exposes how duplicity and deception can be woven into love relationships through confused communication patterns that resemble, in magnified form, what occurs in families of schizophrenics. Laing’s “politics of experience” then names the wider terrain: how others confirm or disavow my experience, how they determine what my experience is permitted to be, and how severe disturbance is not only an internal defect but can be the consequence of human deviousness, sometimes unwitting, sometimes masked as altruism. Thompson’s point, again, is not that the world is nothing but cruelty, but that truth is always vulnerable to being politicized, and that psychic life cannot be understood without acknowledging this vulnerability.

If “mystification in therapy” is to mean anything, then, it cannot mean only that patients lie, resist, or distort. It must also name the more uncomfortable possibility that therapy itself can become a site of mystification when the therapist uses interpretation to override experience, or uses technique as a way of winning, or treats the patient’s reality as raw material to be managed. Thompson’s Laing is not simply warning against bad clinicians, he is exposing a structural temptation within the therapeutic situation: the temptation to convert an encounter into an operation, and thereby to reproduce, under the banner of help, the very distortions that have injured the person’s relation to reality.

Truthfulness in psychoanalysis, not as virtue, but as condition

Thompson’s chapter culminates where it began, with ethics, though the ethics here is not an external code but the condition under which psychoanalysis remains psychoanalysis. He argues that if we hope to resolve the dilemma of living amid disappointment and betrayal, the first step is not to explain the person away but to have one’s experience of the past confirmed rather than dismissed as “pathology.” The clinical rationale is existential, because the wound is often compounded by the denial that the wound exists, and the denial becomes a second trauma, a forced estrangement from one’s own perception.

From this vantage, the ethic of truthfulness in psychoanalysis is not a moral ornament, and it is not reducible to the therapist’s sincerity. It is the scaffolding of the analytic relationship, and it binds the therapist as much as the patient. Thompson notes that therapists, in their zeal to effect change, can resort to questionable tactics and transform therapy into a contest where the clever protagonist “wins,” a perversion of the work that is especially insidious because it can masquerade as clinical effectiveness. Laing’s technique, Thompson suggests, can be reduced to a single preoccupying concern, how honestly therapists are behaving with their patients, and how honest they are capable of being, a concern he links explicitly to Freud’s “fundamental rule,” the pledge exacted from the patient to be candid about what comes to mind.

Thompson then refuses the easy fantasy that the fundamental rule is simply a compliance instruction. Freud discovered that patients are loathe to disclose, because disclosure threatens their secrets and what those secrets might reveal about themselves. Laing adds a different emphasis, that many patients have learned, through experience, that it is wrong to think or feel as they do, so that concealment is not merely defensive but historically instructed, and the person may have “forgotten” what they think and lost the sense of who they are. In that context, truthfulness is not an order one can give. It is a relationship one can slowly make possible, if and only if the therapist’s neutrality is not coldness but a form of acceptance, and if the encounter is grounded in mutual respect rather than coercion.

Thompson ends the chapter with Freud’s blunt warning, the line that is easy to quote and harder to live: “psychoanalytic treatment is founded on truthfulness,” and it is dangerous to depart from that foundation. The point is not sanctimony. It is that psychoanalysis, when it is faithful to itself, cannot proceed by lies and pretenses without betraying its own authority, because the authority at stake is not social status but the credibility of the relationship in which truth can be spoken.

For existential psychoanalysis, this returns us to the first problem, the fragility of reality. If psychotics are not only anxious but confused, then the imperative is to understand the nature of their confusion and to avoid doing or saying anything that increases it, which means that deception, whether in the family, in the culture, or in the consulting room, cannot be treated as peripheral. Thompson recounts Laing’s insistence that victims of duplicity can be devastated when truth is discovered after long concealment, because they can feel as though their reality has been taken from their grasp, leaving them lost between the world they thought was real and the world that is suddenly thrust upon them. In that light, therapy is not the imposition of a “correct” story but the slow repair of a person’s relation to reality, which is also the slow repair of a person’s capacity to trust experience without surrendering it to someone else’s authority.

A man in a suit stares at his reflection in a shattered mirror, his expression tense and searching. The broken glass distorts his face, suggesting inner conflict, identity fragmentation, and the painful journey of self-confrontation. Books behind him, including Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, hint at psychoanalytic themes

Conclusion

Chapter 11 is not merely a comparison of Laing and Freud, and it is not a rehabilitation of Laing through Freudian credentials. It is a meditation on deception as an existential force, on trauma as what happens when reality becomes unstable, and on truthfulness in psychoanalysis as the ethical core without which technique becomes, at best, empty, and at worst, an instrument of mystification. Thompson’s contribution is to show that Laing’s work does not stand outside psychoanalysis as an ethical protest, but stands inside it as a demand for fidelity to experience, and as a warning about what happens when care becomes a vehicle for disconfirmation.

At Free Association Clinic, this question remains central to our understanding of depth psychotherapy, whether the struggle presents as anxiety, depression, relational deadlock, or the more diffuse suffering of not having one’s experience believed. If you want to learn more about our psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy services, or about how these questions appear in the work of couples therapy, you can also contact us when you are ready for a conversation.

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)

References

Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1914/1957). On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1915/1958). Observations on Transference-Love: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924/1961). The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). Hogarth Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). On the Essence of Truth. In Basic Writings (D. F. Krell, Ed.). Harper & Row.
Laing, R. D. (1960). The Divided Self. Pantheon Books.
Laing, R. D. (1969). Self and Others (2nd rev. ed.). Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., Phillipson, H., & Lee, A. R. (1966). Interpersonal Perception: A Theory and a Method of Research. Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R. D., & Esterson, A. (1964/1971). Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin.

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.

unconscious experience in psychoanalysis, emergence into awareness

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.

layers of experience in psychoanalysis

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.

existential psychoanalysis and lived experience in the therapy room

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.