Tag: phenomenology

Free Association in Psychoanalytic Training: Beyond the Institute Model

Free Association in Psychoanalytic Training: Beyond the Institute Model

Reflection on Chapter 12 of Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity

There is a settled faith that shadows most professional training, even when no one says it outright: if you accumulate the right knowledge, and if the institution that guards the knowledge certifies you, then you become the kind of person who can practice it. Study hard, learn the method, pass the examinations, demonstrate competence, and you will have earned your authority.

In Chapter 12 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson does not merely dispute this faith, he exposes the kind of human relationship it quietly presupposes, and he asks whether that relationship can possibly yield an analyst. His provocation is not that scholarship is worthless, nor that institutes should be burned down, but that psychoanalytic education cannot be reduced to academic education without losing the very sensibility it claims to transmit. When free association is treated as the founding condition of analysis, Thompson suggests, it becomes difficult to regard it as a technique alone; it begins to look like an ethic of formation, a model of how one learns to listen without coercion (Thompson, 2024, pp. 243–246).

This is not only a question for clinicians, even if it begins there. Patients rarely ask where an analyst trained, but they do encounter, immediately and unmistakably, what the training has made possible in the analyst’s presence: whether the room is a place where speech can unfold, or a place where speech is quietly pressured to conform.

Free Association in Psychoanalytic Training: Why the Question Matters

Technique or formation: what is actually being taught?

The title of Thompson’s chapter presents itself as a technical query, almost bureaucratic in tone, as though the question were simply where to file free association in the educational syllabus. Yet the force of the chapter comes from the fact that Thompson does not accept the premise that analysis is first a body of content to be mastered and only later a relational practice to be performed. Psychoanalysis, in his telling, concerns the conditions under which one human being can meet another without turning the other into an object to be managed. If that is what psychoanalysis is for, then education cannot be a matter of training candidates to reproduce an approved discourse; it has to be a formation of character and sensibility, the slow acquisition of an ability to bear what is uncertain, unflattering, and ethically demanding (Thompson, 2024, pp. 243–244).

So the question “What is being taught?” becomes sharper than it first appears. Are institutes teaching a procedure, a method that can be applied from the outside, or are they cultivating an inward capacity, a kind of disciplined openness, without which method becomes a form of evasion? Thompson’s wager is that free association, properly understood, does not sit comfortably inside the academic model precisely because it is not a content-area. It is a way of being with experience, and it is therefore a way of being with another person.

Notebook representing free association in psychoanalytic training

Thompson’s Critique of the Academic Model

Why book-knowledge cannot substitute for lived authority?

Thompson’s opening declaration is deliberately unsoftened: “The academic model of education is ill-suited to train and educate people to become psychoanalysts” (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). The sentence is blunt enough to provoke defensiveness, and Thompson anticipates that response by insisting he is not speaking as someone unfamiliar with academia. His point is not that universities should have no place in psychoanalytic education, but that academic formation, by its structure, tends to treat knowledge as something possessed, verified, and then licensed.

The most striking feature of his critique is how quickly he locates the psychoanalytic task in the moral texture of ordinary life. He writes that psychoanalysts are “concerned with the way human beings treat each other,” and that they help others come into their own by treating them with “respect, compassion, and honesty” (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). This is not a sentimental aside, it is the ground of his argument, because once psychoanalysis is framed as a matter of how persons treat persons, the fantasy that authority can be granted by institutional proof begins to look naïve in the pejorative sense, a wish for certainty where uncertainty is constitutive.

Academic training, at least in its prevailing form, is built upon a tautology: you learn by reading what others claim to know, and you prove learning by repeating, with increasing sophistication, what has already been said, until the institution determines you may finally practice. Thompson names this directly, noting how psychology programs presume that students can learn to be therapists by studying books and then being evaluated on how well the material has been absorbed before they are permitted to treat (Thompson, 2024, p. 243). The problem, for him, is not the reading. The problem is that the reading is too easily mistaken for the capacity to stand in the analytic situation without substituting knowledge for contact.

Training as confrontation with one’s own suffering

Thompson deepens the critique by moving from epistemology to experience. If analysis is not primarily the application of knowledge, then what grants authority? He gives an answer that is both simple and difficult to tolerate, because it does not flatter any institutional procedure: “We learn about human misery from our own suffering, and we learn to relieve it by coming to terms with the suffering that we have experienced and continue to experience every day of our lives” (Thompson, 2024, p. 244).

This sentence is the hinge of the chapter. It shifts training from an external sequence of requirements to an inward confrontation, and it does so without romanticizing suffering, because the point is not that pain automatically ennobles, but that unworked suffering easily becomes coercion. An analyst who has not begun to come to terms with his or her own misery will be tempted, in the consulting room, to manage the patient’s misery as a way of managing his own, which is to say, to impose an agenda under the guise of care.

Thompson therefore defines psychoanalytic training as the practical task of getting in touch with the roots of one’s suffering and devoting oneself to alleviating it from a psychoanalytic perspective, so that one can eventually accompany another without pretending to stand above the human condition one is addressing (Thompson, 2024, p. 244). In this light, “authority” is not granted by the institution, it is earned in the slow work of being educated by experience, which includes, unavoidably, the experience of one’s own limitation.

Free Association as a Model for Psychoanalytic Education

Self-disclosure, openness, and the refusal of an agenda

Thompson is attentive to the way free association becomes a cliché precisely because it is so familiar. One of the benefits, he says, of attempting to define it is discovering that it resists final definition; it is recognizable, yet elusive, and any concise account tends to falsify it (Thompson, 2024, p. 245). This matters because what cannot be finalized cannot be owned, and what cannot be owned cannot be administered with the same confidence as a curriculum.

In the chapter, Thompson treats free association as inseparable from self-disclosure and openness, not in the confessional sense of saying everything for its own sake, but in the existential sense of speaking from where one actually is, rather than from where one believes one should be. Its most distinctive feature, as he emphasizes, is the absence of an externally imposed agenda: there is no plan the patient is expected to follow, no sanctioned trajectory that would reassure both patient and analyst that the “right” material is being produced (Thompson, 2024, p. 245).

If this is what free association is, then one can see why Thompson is drawn to it as an educational model. An education modeled on free association would not be organized around predetermined outcomes, because predetermined outcomes are precisely the temptation that free association resists. Instead, education would have to cultivate a capacity to remain with what is unexpected and unfinished, and to allow understanding to arise as something earned in relation, not delivered as doctrine.

The cultivation of naiveté

At the center of Thompson’s argument is a line that should not be rushed past, partly because it is easy to sentimentalize and partly because it threatens every credentialist fantasy: “The key to analytic education isn’t the acquisition of knowledge but the cultivation of naïveté” (Thompson, 2024, p. 246).

Naiveté here does not mean ignorance. Thompson defines it as an “open state of mind,” an attitude that is antithetical to skepticism in its cynical form, but aligned with the phenomenological demand that one meet what appears without immediately explaining it away (Thompson, 2024, p. 246). The analyst’s knowledge, however extensive, can become a defense, a way of neutralizing the patient’s otherness by translating it too quickly into categories. In that sense, knowledge can function as a way of not listening, because it tempts the analyst to hear only what fits.

Thompson’s claim is that analytic candidates must be educated into a disciplined openness that is capable of letting experience teach, including the experience that contradicts one’s favorite theories. In my reading, this is not a rejection of theory but an insistence that theory remain answerable to the lived encounter, which is always more singular than the conceptual net we throw over it. A training that loses this capacity may produce therapists who can speak fluently about analysis while quietly fearing the very thing analysis requires: not knowing.

When Institutes Become a “Tight Ship”

Compulsion, obsessionality, and the longing for certainty

Thompson’s critique sharpens when he turns from education in principle to institutes in practice. In his account, many institutes embody a structure that is opposed to the spirit of free association, because the institutional imperative is to control, standardize, and legitimate. He describes the “tight ship” atmosphere, the “air of military precision,” the rigidly defined roles and rules, and he notes the irony that a discipline devoted to ambiguity should so readily construct training environments that defend against ambiguity (Thompson, 2024, p. 247).

He reads this rigidity not merely as a sociological quirk but as a psychological and ethical problem, because it tends to recruit and reward an obsessional sensibility, and that sensibility can be mistaken for seriousness. Thompson observes that analytic candidates are often driven, dedicated, and studious, and that these virtues can slide into humorlessness, ambition, and a defensive posture of control when the institutional environment invites it (Thompson, 2024, p. 247). One can pass such training by becoming increasingly adept at appearing certain, and one can become increasingly frightened of what cannot be made certain.

It is here that Thompson invokes Hans Loewald, who warns that what we call reality can itself become defensive. Loewald writes that reality can take on the quality of “a hostile-defensive integration, akin to the obsessional mechanism” (Loewald, 1980, p. 30, as quoted in Thompson, 2024, p. 247). The implication is unsettling: institutions that claim to teach analysis may end up reproducing, at the collective level, the very psychic defenses that analysis exists to illuminate at the individual level.

Thompson’s point is not that all institutes are uniformly corrupt, nor that discipline and standards have no place. It is that the longing for certainty, when it becomes the organizing principle of education, is not neutral; it shapes the analyst’s temperament, and it shapes the room the analyst later builds with patients. A training that rewards control will not easily cultivate the capacity to bear the patient’s uncontrolled speech.

A Salon Instead of an Institute

Seminar circle symbolizing mentorship-based psychoanalytic education

Equality, conversation, and psychoanalysis as philosophy

Thompson does not end with critique, and his alternative is not a utopian fantasy, but an experiment grounded in a particular historical moment. In 1988, invited by students who wanted training but were dissatisfied with conventional institutes, he and colleagues formed a psychoanalytic salon in San Francisco. They called it Free Association, a name he treats as a double entendre: it aimed to help students learn the free association method, and it understood itself as an association of equals devoted to the free dissemination of ideas (Thompson, 2024, p. 248).

What matters here is the ethos. The group included psychoanalysts, philosophers, historians, and others with backgrounds in phenomenology or psychoanalysis, and Thompson describes them as viewing psychoanalysis as philosophical in the Socratic sense, meaning that psychoanalysis belongs to a tradition in which ethics is conceived as a therapy for suffering, not merely a set of professional rules (Thompson, 2024, p. 248). This is a profound reframing: psychoanalysis is not simply a clinical technology housed in an institution, it is a practice of inquiry into the human condition, and education should resemble inquiry rather than indoctrination.

No curriculum, and the courage to meet the unexpected

The salon model becomes concrete in Thompson’s refusal of curriculum. He states, with an almost mischievous clarity, that their curriculum did not resemble conventional curricula because they did not have one (Thompson, 2024, p. 248). The point was not to be anti-structure for its own sake, but to avoid the subtle coercion of predetermined outcomes, the way a fixed sequence of requirements can quietly teach candidates that the goal of learning is compliance.

Instead, Thompson describes an atmosphere meant to invite students to grapple with what is unexpected, unexplained, and ambiguous, by approximating, as much as possible, the experience of a psychoanalytic session (Thompson, 2024, pp. 248–249). This is where free association becomes educational: education becomes a milieu in which one is asked to tolerate not knowing, and to let thought arise from encounter rather than from the safety of advance conclusions.

Mentorship, Apprenticeship, and the Here-and-Now of Seminars

Provocation over indoctrination

Thompson’s educational model leans toward apprenticeship, not because apprenticeship is simpler, but because it keeps education tethered to the lived authority of persons rather than the impersonal authority of an institution. He describes seminars organized around the instructor’s predilections and current professional concerns, and he portrays the value of such seminars as lying in their capacity to provoke, to generate controversy, and to inspire independent study, rather than to transmit a sanctioned orthodoxy (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

There is a quiet ethical claim here. Indoctrination offers the comfort of belonging and the relief of borrowed certainty, but it risks producing analysts who cannot think, or worse, who can only think within the approved dialect of their school. Provocation, by contrast, can feel destabilizing, even threatening, but it is closer to what analysis requires, because analysis is not the repetition of doctrine, it is the encounter with what resists doctrine.

History as a living dimension

One of the most intellectually serious dimensions of Thompson’s salon model is his insistence that psychoanalysis be situated in an historical context broad enough to include its prehistory. He describes seminars devoted to phenomenological method, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and self-disclosure, and he traces free association to antecedents in meditation, Christian mysticism, and Montaigne, while linking neutrality to ancient skeptical traditions and abstinence to German Romanticism (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

This is not antiquarianism. It is an attempt to keep psychoanalysis from collapsing into the cult of the new guru or the latest institutional fashion. History, for Thompson, is not a museum of dead ideas; it is a living dimension that keeps education from becoming captive to a narrow present. When the analyst learns to hear psychoanalysis as part of a longer conversation about suffering and truth, the analyst may become less tempted to treat technique as a proprietary invention that must be defended, and more able to treat it as an ongoing ethical task.

Standards, Authority, and the Ambiguity of “Completion”

Self-selection and the limits of evaluation

The predictable objection to Thompson’s model is the one he himself anticipates: without curriculum, without standardized evaluation, what becomes of standards? Thompson’s reply is not to deny the need for seriousness, but to refuse the fantasy that seriousness can be guaranteed by procedure. He describes the Free Association model as self-selecting in a strong sense: anyone may join seminars, students choose supervisors, and even the practical terms of work, such as whether the patient sits or lies down and how frequently sessions occur, are left to the discretion of the analyst and patient rather than being dictated by institutional templates (Thompson, 2024, p. 250).

He acknowledges that this absence of official criteria can seem alarming, and he turns the alarm back upon the objector by naming what everyone in training already knows but rarely says: standards are often arbitrary, the evaluation process is never neutral, and the question of “completion” is inherently ambiguous, in much the same way that termination in analysis is ambiguous (Thompson, 2024, p. 250). In other words, the demand for certainty in training repeats the demand for certainty in life, and analysis exists partly to expose the impossibility of satisfying that demand without distortion.

The deeper question is what kind of authority we are seeking. If authority means institutional sanction, then Thompson’s model will always look suspect. If authority means the capacity to remain ethically present in the analytic situation, to tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into control, then standards may need to be reconceived as matters of character and judgment that cannot be fully captured by checklists.

Creating Psychoanalysis Anew

Institutions, succession, and why renewal matters

Toward the end of the chapter, Thompson places his argument inside a recurring historical pattern. Freud, Sullivan, and Laing founded their schools by gathering students around themselves, and after their deaths institutes were created in their names, which then grew into institutions (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Thompson does not treat this as a scandal so much as an almost inevitable drift, the way living traditions harden when they are preserved rather than enacted.

His most radical claim follows from that diagnosis: it may be that the only way to preserve the psychoanalytic instrument is to periodically create it anew, forming new institutes and dismantling old ones, so that successive generations can discover its “uncanny uniqueness” for themselves rather than inheriting it as doctrine (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Free Association, in his telling, tried to enact this principle by refusing succession, hierarchy, and the competitive promise of spoils, and by aiming to train a group and then disband when the work of that moment was complete (Thompson, 2024, p. 254).

Thompson’s closing caution is sober and recognizably true to clinical life. Psychoanalysis is isolating, alienation is not merely an intellectual theme but an occupational reality, and loneliness can tempt the analyst to compromise what he most values, not out of malice but out of an all-too-human wish to belong (Thompson, 2024, p. 254). Education, then, is not only a matter of learning the instrument. It is also a matter of remaining vigilant about the ways one’s own needs can infiltrate one’s professional life and bend it toward corruption.

Therapy room emphasizing listening and the free association method

Conclusion

What this approach protects in the consulting room

Thompson’s Chapter 12 is, on its surface, about psychoanalytic training, but its true subject is the ethical architecture of the consulting room. If free association is treated as a technical rule, it becomes procedural, and procedure always risks becoming a defense. If free association is treated as an educational model, it becomes formative, shaping the analyst’s capacity to remain open, to resist coercion, and to bear ambiguity without prematurely converting it into certainty (Thompson, 2024, pp. 245–250).

For patients, what is at stake is not a debate about institutes, but the quality of presence they encounter when they speak. A room governed by the analyst’s need to know, to classify, to control, can feel subtly violent even when it is polite. A room governed by an educated naiveté can feel, paradoxically, more serious, because it does not flee from what is difficult by hiding behind explanations.

Connecting Thompson’s chapter to FAC’s clinical orientation

At Free Association Clinic, our work in psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy is grounded in this deeper ethic of listening, where technique is always answerable to encounter. For clinicians drawn to this orientation, you can learn more about our training program, or contact us to begin 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

Kirsner, D. (2000). Unfree Associations: Inside Psychoanalytic Institutes. London: Process Press.
Loewald, H. (1980). Papers on Psycho-Analysis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (1994). The Truth About Freud’s Technique: The Encounter With the Real. New York: New York University Press.
Thompson, M. G. (2024). Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis: On the Primacy of Authenticity. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Thompson, M. G., &Thompson, S. (1998). Interview with Dr. Otto Allen Will, Jr. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 34(2).

Unconscious Experience in Psychoanalysis: Being, Meaning, and the Limits of “Knowing”

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

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.

Psychoanalysis as an Ethic of Experience: The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis as an Ethic of Experience: The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis

Reflections on Michael Guy Thompson’s “The Sceptic Dimension to Psychoanalysis,” in Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Many people enter therapy with a hope so quiet it can be mistaken for common sense: that somewhere behind the confusion there is a final account, a settled explanation, a true story that will not change tomorrow, and that the right clinician, armed with the right theory, will be able to pronounce it. Therapists, too, can be tempted by their own version of this hope, which appears as a hunger for the correct technique, the clean formulation, the conceptual mastery that would protect them from being surprised by what a patient says and from being shaken by what the encounter evokes in them.

In Chapter 7 of Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis, Michael Guy Thompson disrupts this mutual fantasy without ridiculing it, and he does so by shifting the ground beneath the clinical conversation. Psychoanalysis, he argues, is best understood as an ethic of experience, not as a technology for manufacturing certainty, and the stance that makes analysis possible is, in a deep sense, sceptical, not in the modern sense of reflexive disbelief, but in the older sense of disciplined inquiry that refuses premature closure (Thompson, 2024).

This sceptic dimension matters in the analytic situation because psychological suffering is often organized around a particular kind of desperation, the desperation to stop experience from moving, to arrest it in a diagnosis, a moral verdict, a story of causality, or a metaphysical explanation that promises relief by promising control. Thompson’s wager is that psychoanalysis does not truly meet this desperation by satisfying it, because satisfaction would simply reinstall the very defence that suffering depends upon; it meets it by creating the conditions under which experience can be endured, thought, and eventually spoken more honestly.

Why Thompson begins with ethics, not technique

Thompson begins his chapter with a claim that can sound oddly anachronistic in a clinical culture that prefers methods, protocols, and outcome measures: psychoanalysis is an ethic, a “moral art” concerned with how one lives, how one bears oneself in the midst of conflict, disappointment, and desire (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118). In this framing, ethics is not synonymous with morality. Morality, he notes, pertains to distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, while ethics, in the Greek sense, concerns the pursuit of a form of happiness whose mark is equanimity, a freedom from mental anguish that does not depend upon eradicating life’s difficulties (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

Once psychoanalysis is understood this way, the usual clinical questions begin to change their meaning. Symptoms are no longer treated as isolated malfunctions to be corrected by explanation, as though explanation were always the same thing as truth. Symptoms become intelligible as compromises within a life, as strategies of endurance that have become costly, and the analytic task becomes inseparable from an inquiry into the patient’s ethos, the customs of a life, the characteristic ways of thinking and avoiding and relating that both protect and imprison (Thompson, 2024, pp. 117–118).

This is also why Thompson can insist, without romance and without cynicism, that psychoanalysis revolves around work that “succeeds or fails,” because the question is not whether the clinician has produced a brilliant interpretation, but whether the encounter has fostered a transformation in the patient’s relation to experience itself, including the parts of experience that cannot be mastered, cured, or made to disappear (Thompson, 2024).

working through in existential psychoanalysis as a gradual process over time

Scepticism in psychoanalysis as inquiry, not cynicism

In contemporary speech, “skepticism” often implies dismissal, a posture that prides itself on not being taken in, and that treats belief as stupidity. Thompson’s usage is almost the opposite. The sceptic stance he retrieves is not a performance of superiority, but a discipline of open-ended inquiry, an insistence that experience is not to be replaced by a conclusion simply because a conclusion is soothing (Thompson, 2024).

He marks an important historical distinction that is also clinically clarifying. There were sceptics he calls the Academics, preoccupied with epistemological refutation, devoted to proving that certainty is impossible, and thus capable of producing an impressive, sterile negativity that ends in a cul de sac; and there were the Pyrrhonian sceptics, whom he calls the Therapists, who rejected epistemological questions “in principle” and devoted themselves to developing an ethic, a therapeutic method, oriented toward happiness understood as ataraxia, equanimity, freedom from psychic conflict (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Annas & Barnes, 1994). Where academic knowledge privileges abstraction, these sceptic “therapists” emphasized the here-and-now of immediate experience, and in that emphasis Thompson hears an ancestor of analytic work, not because psychoanalysis repeats antiquity, but because it inherits a practical problem that never disappears: how to live when certainty cannot do the work we demand of it (Thompson, 2024, p. 121; Groarke, 1990).

Burnyeat’s famous question, “Can the sceptic live his scepticism?”, is not merely an academic puzzle from the history of philosophy, because it describes, in another register, the clinical problem of whether one can inhabit a stance of suspended certainty without collapsing into paralysis, despair, or fanaticism (Burnyeat, 1997). Psychoanalysis, at its best, does not answer that question with an argument. It answers by staging a relationship in which the refusal of premature certainty becomes tolerable, and in which the costs of certainty can become visible.

Epoché in therapy, the suspension of judgment as a clinical attitude

The centre of Thompson’s chapter is epoché, the suspension of judgment. The term can easily be misunderstood as a recommendation to become vague, or to “hold space” by refusing thought, or to adopt indifference in the name of neutrality. Thompson means something more exacting and more demanding. Epoché is the capacity to attend to experience as it unfolds, “from one unpredictable moment to the next,” while bracketing the reflex to explain, justify, moralize, or reduce what is happening to an already familiar schema (Thompson, 2024, pp. 121–122).

This suspension is not passive. It requires abandoning theoretical, conceptual, or causal considerations as a first move, not because such considerations are always false, but because they are too often seized as an escape from the shock of experience. It is, in Thompson’s language, an “emptied” mind, a negative capability, a willingness to be with the not-yet-known without forcing it to become knowable on command (Thompson, 2024, p. 122).

Patients tend to recognize, often with ambivalence, why this matters. The rush to certainty, whether it takes the form of self-diagnosis, moral condemnation, or a fixed narrative about one’s history, can function as a way of not having to feel what is being felt, and of not having to admit what is being avoided. The analytic encounter becomes ethically distinctive when it refuses to collaborate with this rush, not by withholding interest, but by insisting that experience be allowed to appear before it is disciplined into a conclusion.

For therapists, epoché is equally unsettling because it deprives the clinician of the fantasy that competence is equivalent to immediate knowing. In this sense, epoché is not simply a technique, it is a posture of humility, a constraint placed on the clinician’s wish to be right, and a safeguard against using theory as a shield. Wachterhauser’s collection on phenomenology and scepticism can be read as a reminder that this problem is perennial: how to keep inquiry open without dissolving into incoherence, and how to hold openness without turning it into dogma (Wachterhauser, 1996).

Neutrality as a sensibility, not a rule, and why that distinction matters

Thompson’s argument becomes clinically concrete when he turns to analytic technique and insists that what is usually taught as “neutrality” is better understood as a cultivated sensibility, an ethos, rather than a rigid method (Thompson, 2024). He is explicit that scepticism and neutrality are not rules to be obeyed mechanically, and that the language of rule-following can itself become antithetical to the analytic attitude, because rules invite a defensive performance rather than a receptive attention (Thompson, 2024).

When Thompson traces neutrality back to Freud, he emphasizes that Freud’s recommendation is not a performance of detachment for its own sake, but an attempt to protect the work from the analyst’s presuppositions. The stance entails making no assumptions, abandoning pretensions to knowledge, letting the patient’s experience determine the course of the work with minimal interference, and cultivating an “evenly-suspended” attention that does not seize selectively upon what confirms the analyst’s expectations (Freud, 1912/1958; Thompson, 2024).

Freud’s language is unambiguous about the discipline involved:

“Thus we are warned against introducing our own expectations into the material. We must allow ourselves to be taken by surprise and always meet the patient with an open mind, free from any presuppositions.”
(Freud, 1912/1958)

If neutrality is misunderstood as coldness, it is often because both patient and therapist feel, in different ways, the anxiety that openness evokes, and they seek protection by turning the encounter into something predictable. Yet neutrality, understood sceptically, is not the refusal of relationship. It is the refusal to coerce the other into one’s own conceptual comfort. It is an ethical gesture toward the patient’s experience, including the aspects of experience that are inconvenient to the clinician’s preferred theory.

psychoanalytic working through resistance in the therapy room“free association and resistance in existential psychoanalysis

Montaigne, Freud, and the ethic implicit in free association

Thompson’s chapter becomes historically vivid when he suggests that the sceptic attitude “insinuated itself” into Freud’s conception of technique, even as Freud sought to secure psychoanalysis within a scientific idiom, and he locates this sceptic inheritance especially in free association and the sensibility of neutrality (Thompson, 2024, p. 128). He is careful about the limits of historical certainty, yet he notes that Freud became acquainted with Montaigne “around the time” Freud’s technique took what Thompson calls “a more sceptical turn,” roughly between 1912 and 1915, and he reads Montaigne’s counsel as an anticipatory version of the analytic attitude (Thompson, 2024, pp. 128–129).

Montaigne’s formulation is worth quoting because it clarifies the ethical seriousness behind what can otherwise sound like a mere method:

“It is an act of love to undertake to wound and offend in order to benefit.”
(Montaigne, 1925, Vol. 4, p. 307)

In a therapeutic culture that often confuses kindness with reassurance, Montaigne’s sentence can feel severe, and it should, because it names a difficulty that patients know intimately: honesty hurts, not because truth is inherently cruel, but because our attachments to belief, to self-image, to fantasy, and to the protection those provide are passionate, tenacious, and often desperate. Thompson pushes the point further by suggesting that the intensity with which we defend our “sacred assumptions” is not merely an intellectual habit, but a root of psychopathology, because such defences organize avoidance and distort relationship (Thompson, 2024, p. 129).

When this is brought into the analytic room, free association ceases to look like a clever technique and begins to appear as an ethical demand placed on speech. It asks the patient to risk saying what is inconvenient, shameful, contradictory, or seemingly senseless, while the analyst risks not knowing in advance where the speech will go or what it will demand from them in return. In that reciprocity, the fundamental question is not whether the right interpretation will be delivered, but whether experience will be allowed to speak without being prematurely silenced by certainty.

When theory becomes an escape from experience

Thompson is not anti-theoretical, and the chapter does not lapse into the familiar anti-intellectual gesture that pretends experience is self-interpreting. His scepticism is aimed elsewhere. It is aimed at the way theory can become a refuge, a way of avoiding the encounter with what is actually happening between two people by replacing it with the comfort of conceptual recognition. The sceptics, he reminds us, rejected rote learning and emphasized immediate experience, and Thompson reads this as a clinical warning: the mastery of theory does not by itself produce the capacity to listen, because listening is not the passive reception of content but an exposure to what is unpredictable, disturbing, and morally consequential (Thompson, 2024, p. 121).

For therapists, this warning cuts against a common training fantasy: that competence is achieved by accumulating knowledge until one is immune to uncertainty. In reality, the analyst’s wish to know can become as defensive as the patient’s wish to know, and the analytic situation becomes distorted when theory is used to stop inquiry rather than to deepen it. At that point, schools of thought can function as shelters from experience, offering certainty as an identity, and certainty as an identity is always tempted by dogmatism.

For patients, the same point is often lived from the inside as a feeling of being reduced. When the clinician rushes to diagnosis or explanation, the patient may feel temporarily understood, but they may also feel quietly erased, as though their living experience has been translated into a concept that is easier for the clinician to handle than the person themselves. Thompson’s sceptic ethic would regard that translation as a danger, because it replaces the person with a theory of the person.

Equanimity, suffering, and the limits of cure

Thompson closes his chapter by returning to the ethical horizon that began it. If psychoanalysis is oriented toward equanimity, then its aim is not the eradication of suffering but a changed relation to suffering, a stance that can remain “unbothered” by suffering in the sense of accepting it as a condition of life rather than as evidence that life is an error (Thompson, 2024, p. 139). He writes, with a directness that is existential rather than consoling, that the truly happy individual is one who can cope with life’s problems without avoiding them, who can “endure the anguish of living without cursing it” (Thompson, 2024, p. 139).

This is where the sceptic lineage becomes something more than historical color. Sextus Empiricus, the physician of scepticism, suggests that if one can remove the intensity of one’s beliefs, one can endure “moderate suffering” (Sextus Empiricus, 1949). This is not a promise of cure, and it is not a minimization of pain. It is a description of how belief, especially dogmatic belief about what must be true, can amplify anguish by turning suffering into a verdict on existence itself.

Freud’s remark about transforming “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” is often repeated as a sign of pessimism, but it can also be heard as a sober ethical claim about the limits of psychotherapy, and about the possibility that a less defended life may suffer more honestly and therefore with less self-imposed cruelty (Freud & Breuer, 1893–1895/1955). Thompson’s sceptic ethic does not celebrate suffering, but it refuses the fantasy that suffering can be abolished without remainder, and it treats the desire for abolition as one more place where the human being tries to escape experience rather than to live it.

Conclusion

Thompson’s “sceptic dimension” is not a call to doubt everything, and it is not an invitation to cultivate vagueness; it is a disciplined refusal to replace experience with certainty, especially when certainty functions as a defence against the discomfort of living and the vulnerability of relationship.

Psychoanalysis, on this view, is ethical not because it preaches morality, but because it concerns the manner by which a person conducts themselves in the face of conflict and disappointment, and because it asks both patient and therapist to endure what is revealed when judgment is suspended long enough for experience to speak (Thompson, 2024).

At Free Association Clinic, this sensibility informs our understanding of psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy as forms of depth work that take experience seriously and resist the urge to substitute slogans for inquiry. For clinicians, our training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented toward precisely this capacity, the capacity to listen without coercing, to think without retreating into dogma, and to remain receptive in the face of uncertainty. If you want to explore this work as a client or clinician, you can contact us.

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. Routledge.
Annas, J., & Barnes, J. (1994). Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism. Cambridge University Press.
Burnyeat, M. (1997). Can the sceptic live his scepticism? In M. Burnyeat & M. Frede (Eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Hackett Publishing.
Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12). Hogarth Press.
Freud, S., & Breuer, J. (1893-1895/1955). Studies on Hysteria. In Standard Edition (Vol. 2). Hogarth Press.
Groarke, L. (1990). Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Montaigne, M. (1925). The Essays of Montaigne (G. B. Ives, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Sextus Empiricus. (1949). Adversus Mathematicus (R. G. Bury, Trans.). Loeb Classical Library, Heinemann.
Wachterhauser, B. (1996). Phenomenology and Scepticism: Essays in Honor of James M. Edie. Northwestern University Press.

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

The Crisis of Experience in Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Returning to Lived Experience

A Reflection on Michael Guy Thompson’s Essays in Existential Psychoanalysis

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

People often come to psychoanalysis because something in their life is no longer coherent, not only because they suffer, but because their suffering has become strangely impersonal. They can describe what is happening with impressive clarity, sometimes even with moving candor, and yet they leave the hour with the faint suspicion that nothing has truly happened. Insight has been produced, but experience has not been reclaimed. Thompson’s wager is that this is not accidental. It is a consequence of how psychoanalytic technique and interpretation can drift, almost imperceptibly, toward commentary about experience, until the patient is asked to live in explanations rather than to re-enter what is being lived.

A therapist and patient sit in a dim, abstract room where experience seems to dissolve into swirling uncertainty.

Experience is not a concept, it is something you undergo

Thompson begins with a philosophical warning that becomes clinical the moment you take it seriously. Adorno suggests that experience is not simply a private event inside the head, but “the union of tradition with an open yearning for what is foreign,” and then adds the more disturbing thought: “the very possibility of experience is in jeopardy” (Adorno, 1992; discussed by Thompson, 2024).

What makes this relevant to the consulting room is that Adorno’s point is not merely that people are distracted, or that culture is superficial, but that experience itself can be thinned out until it becomes difficult to locate where, and in whom, it is happening. Thompson, drawing on Jay, underscores the conceptual difficulty that follows when “experience” becomes an empty password that everyone uses and no one can define without reducing it to something else, as though definition were always already a kind of betrayal (Jay, 1998; Adorno, 1992). In that light, the therapeutic risk comes into view. If experience cannot be defined without shrinking it, then a clinical method that treats experience as raw data to be processed will tend, despite itself, to process the life out of it.

Thompson’s etymological gesture makes the same point from another angle. “Experience” is linked to peril and to trial, to something tested and undergone rather than possessed, which means that experience is never guaranteed by the mere fact that something happened. It can be embraced or resisted, submitted to or evaded, and therefore it always implies risk, a willingness to be changed by what is encountered (Thompson, 2024). If you hold that thought and then listen to patients, you begin to hear why so many symptoms are not only expressions of pain but strategies for avoiding the peril of feeling what one’s life is doing.

Erfahrung and Erlebnis: being experienced and having an experience

Thompson’s Chapter 6 names a problem that tends to hide in plain sight: many contemporary forms of psychoanalysis risk losing the very phenomenon they claim to treat, the patient’s capacity to have experience, to undergo it, to recognize it, and to speak it as one’s own. This is what he calls the crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: not a shortage of theories about psychic life, but a growing difficulty, culturally and clinically, in remaining answerable to lived experience in therapy itself.

People often come to psychoanalysis because something in their life is no longer coherent, not only because they suffer, but because their suffering has become strangely impersonal. They can describe what is happening with impressive clarity, sometimes even with moving candor, and yet they leave the hour with the faint suspicion that nothing has truly happened. Insight has been produced, but experience has not been reclaimed. Thompson’s wager is that this is not accidental. It is a consequence of how psychoanalytic technique and interpretation can drift, almost imperceptibly, toward commentary about experience, until the patient is asked to live in explanations rather than to re-enter what is being lived.

Why phenomenology matters for psychoanalysis

Thompson’s argument is ultimately a defense of phenomenological psychoanalysis, not as an academic specialization, but as a necessary correction to a drift in psychoanalytic practice. He is explicit that what he has been describing “sounds a lot more like phenomenology than psychoanalysis,” and his response is telling: psychoanalysis is phenomenological, at least in the way Freud conceived it, insofar as it attends to experience as it is lived and spoken, rather than treating the patient as a specimen whose inner life must be inferred from a theoretical grid (Thompson, 2024).

The tension, of course, is that Freud’s unconscious can be read in a way that becomes nonphenomenological, as though something were happening “in” the mind that the person can never experience, as though the unconscious were a parallel theatre whose drama the patient does not witness. Yet Thompson insists that awareness and experience are interdependent phenomena, and that even when a person is “unaware,” what is at stake is often not the existence of a second life but a failure of listening, a failure of being present to one’s own thinking as it occurs (Thompson, 2024).

Here Thompson introduces an important reframing of “unconscious experience.” From a phenomenological angle, the unconscious can be understood less as a hidden content that the analyst discovers and more as a mode of consciousness the patient is not experiencing as consciousness, because the patient did not “hear” themselves thinking it when it occurred. The analytic task becomes reacquainting the patient with that dimension of Being that is typically concealed, so that experience becomes claimable precisely through speech, through free association, through hearing oneself for the first time (Thompson, 2024).
This is where the crisis begins to sharpen. If psychoanalysis forgets that its object is experience as lived and suffered, then it will inevitably become tempted by a different object: correctness, explanation, interpretive authority, and technical mastery.

Interpretation that deepens experience, not explanation that replaces it

In Thompson’s framing, the point is not to abolish interpretation, but to return interpretation to its phenomenological vocation. If speech can deepen experience, then interpretation should participate in that deepening, not by supplying the patient with a superior explanation of what is “really” going on, but by drawing the patient back toward what is being lived and avoided in the act of speaking. When interpretation becomes primarily explanatory, it can function as a defense, not only the patient’s defense but the analyst’s defense against the anxiety of not knowing, against the discomfort of remaining with what is ambiguous, conflicted, or still in the process of taking shape.

This is also where Thompson’s language about degrees of experience matters. Experience is not all-or-nothing; there are levels, and those levels depend on whether we are prepared to undergo the suffering involved in determining what our experience is (Thompson, 2024). In the clinic, this means that the most decisive moments are often not those in which an interpretation is accepted, but those in which a patient, sometimes with surprise, realizes that they have begun to feel what they have been saying, and that feeling is now theirs, not simply a theory about themselves.

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis: when technique outruns lived reality

Thompson’s critique is sharp because it is internal. He argues that not everyone approaches Freud’s conception of the unconscious phenomenologically, and that, as a result, psychoanalysis has “unwittingly contributed” to the broader cultural crisis of experience that has been unfolding since the close of the last century (Thompson, 2024). What is striking is his insistence that even earnest efforts to incorporate phenomenology into psychoanalytic theory have largely “fallen short” of reframing practice along phenomenological lines, which would require a more sustained emphasis on what experience itself entails as a psychodynamic event (Thompson, 2024).

His conclusion is uncompromising: the mainstream of psychoanalysis has, in effect, factored the phenomenological notion of experience out of existence, and even the turn to intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis often retains an empiricist account of experience rather than a phenomenological one (Thompson, 2024).

For patients, this is not an abstract dispute. It names a recognizable disappointment: the feeling of being spoken about, explained, even brilliantly interpreted, while one’s own experience remains strangely out of reach, as though the self were something the therapist can see more clearly than the person living it. For clinicians, it names a temptation that arrives precisely when a treatment becomes difficult, when the analyst begins to prefer the security of the conceptual apparatus over the vulnerability of staying with what is happening.

A solitary figure sits in a quiet room facing a hazy horizon, evoking reflection and ambiguity.

“Unconscious experience” and the problem of parallel lives

To make the crisis concrete, Thompson turns to Kleinian theory and to Susan Isaacs’ explication of “unconscious experience,” which he treats as a revealing contradiction: if something is unconscious in the strict sense, then in what sense can it be called experience at all (Thompson, 2024)? He follows Laing’s critique in Self and Others, where Isaacs is presented as implying that each person lives two parallel lives, one conscious and one unconscious, and that the unconscious life is never available to awareness (Thompson, 2024; Laing, 1969/1961).

If that is your theory of the psyche, then the technical consequences are almost unavoidable. You must infer what is going on “in” the unconscious, because the patient cannot experience it, cannot confirm it, cannot claim it. Isaacs, as Thompson presents her, insists that the unconscious has aims and motives that cannot become conscious and therefore cannot be experienced in the sense under discussion, which means that unconscious fantasy is treated as determining what can be consciously experienced (Thompson, 2024).

Laing’s protest, which is as ethical as it is conceptual, is that things become impossible when someone tells you that you are experiencing something you are not experiencing. As he puts it, “Things are going to be difficult if you tell me that I am experiencing something I am not experiencing” (Laing, 1969/1961; quoted by Thompson, 2024). The point is not that unconscious life is unreal, but that “unconscious experience” becomes a formulation that licenses a particular kind of interpretive sovereignty, in which the patient’s lived experience is treated as a disguise and the analyst’s inference is treated as reality.

Countertransference and projective identification: when the analyst becomes the arbiter

This is where Thompson’s critique of technique becomes especially pointed, because it touches the contemporary fascination with countertransference and projective identification. He argues that the Kleinian conception of projective identification has displaced repression as the prototypical defense, and in doing so has “virtually inverted” conventional notions of transference and countertransference, altering them so radically that they become “virtually unrecognizable” (Thompson, 2024).

The decisive shift is epistemic. Following this line, Bion concludes that the only means available to determine the patient’s unconscious experience is through the analyst’s experience of countertransference, a position that effectively relocates the evidence for the patient’s experience into the analyst’s experience (Bion, 1959; discussed by Thompson, 2024). Thompson quotes Bion describing how the analyst feels manipulated, as though made to play a part in someone else’s fantasy, and he presents this as a crystallization of the problem: psychoanalytic knowledge becomes increasingly grounded in what the analyst feels, rather than in what the patient can come to experience and claim.

None of this requires dismissing countertransference, nor denying that projective processes occur. The question is what kind of authority is created when the analyst’s felt experience becomes the privileged route to the patient’s truth, and what happens to the patient’s subjectivity when their own account is treated as secondary, suspect, or structurally incapable of reaching what is most real. The crisis of experience shows itself precisely here, where intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis can turn into a quiet conquest: the analyst becomes the one who experiences the patient’s life more fully than the patient does. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is, in this sense, a defense of the patient’s right to be the subject of their own experience, even when that experience is conflicted, defended against, or only barely speakable.

Two figures sit closely as their shared thoughts rise into a glowing form, symbolizing the intimacy and complexity of lived experience.

Returning therapy to experience: what changes in the consulting room

Thompson’s most concise description of psychoanalysis’ purpose deserves to be read slowly. The aim is “to return the analytic patient to the ground of an experience,” so that the patient can finally claim the experience as their own in the act of recounting it (Thompson, 2024). Once you take this seriously, the consulting room changes, not because technique disappears, but because technique is subordinated to the patient’s capacity to undergo, recognize, and speak what is happening, rather than to merely receive interpretations about what is supposedly happening.

In practice, this return to lived experience in therapy often looks deceptively simple, because it is less about dramatic interventions and more about a discipline of attention. The analyst stays close to the texture of what the patient is actually living in language, noticing where speech becomes a way of not feeling, where explanation substitutes for contact, and where a word is spoken with the body absent from it. Interpretation, when it arrives, is offered less as a verdict and more as a way of pressing experience downward, toward what Thompson calls the gravity of circumstances, toward the place where a patient cannot merely agree but must either encounter or resist what is being said.

For patients, the difference is often felt as a change in atmosphere: one is not treated as an object to be decoded, but as a subject being asked to re-enter one’s own life. For therapists, the difference is felt as a constraint on one’s own ambition to know too quickly, to be right, to do something impressive, because the analyst’s task becomes protecting the possibility that the patient might finally hear themselves, and be changed by what they hear.

If you are looking for this orientation in clinical work, Free Association Clinic offers psychoanalytic therapy and existential therapy grounded in these phenomenological questions, where interpretation is kept in the service of experience rather than allowed to eclipse it.

What this chapter asks of clinicians in training

Thompson’s chapter does not flatter the clinician, and that is part of its value. The crisis of experience is not only a theoretical failure, it is also a temptation that lives inside training and practice, because uncertainty is hard to tolerate and theory offers a ready-made refuge. When the analyst begins to rely on speculative certainty, especially certainty grounded in their own countertransference as proof of what the patient “really” experiences, the analytic relationship risks becoming a place where experience is taken away from the patient under the guise of explaining it.

For clinicians in formation, this is not a call to abandon psychoanalytic knowledge, but to remember what psychoanalytic knowledge is for. It is for returning the patient to experience, and therefore it demands a kind of humility that cannot be simulated: a willingness to remain with not-knowing; to let the patient’s speech unfold without rushing to translate it; to hold one’s own experience as meaningful but not sovereign; and to keep asking, in every interpretive movement, whether the patient is being returned to the ground of their experience or being displaced from it by a more elegant account.

FAC’s training program in existential psychoanalysis is oriented around exactly these questions, because the point is not to produce technicians of interpretation, but clinicians capable of phenomenological listening, clinicians who can bear the anxiety of experience without replacing it with theory.

Conclusion

The crisis of experience in contemporary psychoanalysis is not primarily a complaint that psychoanalysis has become too intellectual, nor a nostalgic wish for a more “human” therapy. It is a more exacting claim: that psychoanalysis risks reproducing, in the consulting room, the same impoverishment of experience that contemporary culture already encourages, replacing the dangerous vitality of lived experience with commentary, explanation, and interpretive mastery. Thompson’s insistence on phenomenology is therefore not a philosophical ornament, it is a clinical ethic. It asks whether psychoanalysis will remain faithful to the patient’s experience, including what is painful, resistant, and difficult to undergo, or whether it will trade that fidelity for a more comforting kind of knowledge.

If you want to explore therapy where lived experience in therapy is treated as primary, not as an afterthought, you can contact Free Association Clinic.

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.
Adorno, T. W. (1992). Notes to Literature, Volume 1 (S. Weber Nicholsen, Trans.). Columbia University Press.
Jay, M. (1998, November 14). The Crisis of Experience in a Post-Subjective Age (public lecture). University of California, Berkeley.
Laing, R. D. (1969/1961). Self and Others. Pantheon.
Bion, W. R. (1959). “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis.