When you’re reading a book a certain phrase will sometime stand out to you. When you’re listening to music a certain lyric is heard with a greater force than the others. When you’re listening to a friend a particular image they use will sometimes feel oddly prominent. These are common experiences which all embody the role of unconscious communication in the sense that an aspect of what you encounter evokes something in you which is not immediately present to your consciousness.
These experiences often prompt reflection and elaboration. We might play the song on repeat, dwell on the phrase from the book or find ourselves returning to the unsettling image. There are a wide range of mental activities associated with such reflection and elaboration. It might be quite analytical (“why did that bother me so much?”) just as easily as aesthetic (i.e. continually returning to a track over the course of the day) or creative (i.e. writing something as you mull over what you’ve read). In doing so these actions often lead to further things which grab our attention, move us in some way and direct our attention in ways which cannot be explained by what is immediately present in your consciousness. In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud described this in terms of a network:
The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.
We can explore this meshwork through free association, creative practice and through analysis. But we build the meshwork through everyday actions of objects in the world evoking things in us which lead us to act in a range of ways. Bollas suggests in The Evocative Object World a kind of magnetism in which “organised inner compositions … attract further impressions and serve as the self’s creative articulation of the inner compositions themselves” (pg 30). If we’re already occupied by a particular effect of a recent object then things are likely to evoked in us which reflect that as associations bind together into particular clusters within the meshwork. Crucially this is something we can do with other people outside analysis. Indeed it’s a common experience as Bollas suggests on pg 14:
Indeed, in free dialogue, when two people free associate in the course of a long conversation, as is typical of friends, they create unconscious lines of thought, working associatively, as they jump from one topic to the next. This is easy to do because we are open to such unconscious mutual inlfuence when relaxed in the presence of another.
This process is underway across all communication. What we encounter in others evokes things in us which are not reducible to the contents of our consciousness i.e. it’s all the reactions we are having which aren’t simply a matter of what we are explicitly thinking about. The same process is happening in reverse in ways which lead the other person to act in relation to us, much as we are acting in relation to them. This in turn then produces an emergent relational layer which provides its own source of evocative objects which feed into the interaction.
What makes the analytical process unique is that it formalises this feature of interaction in order to make it apparent. The analyst’s subjectivity is used as a device to bring the unconscious into explicit form as an object for the interaction. However the practice of free association itself can be done just as readily outside of this setting, even if it might remain restricted to the preconscious:
The treatment is begun by the patient being required to put himself in the position of an attentive and dispassionate self-observer, merely to read off all the time the surface of his consciousness, and on the one hand to make a duty of the most complete honesty while on the other not to hold back from any communication, even if (1) he feels that it is too disagreeable or if (2) he judges that it is nonsensical or (3) too unimportant or (4) irrelevant to what is being looked for. It is uniformly found that precisely those ideas which provoke these mentioned reactions are of particular value in discovering the forgotten material.
In practice this is attending to what comes to mind and how you react to it. Then narrating it internally or externally, with a view to evoking something else. It’s the same mode of relating to evocative objects, it’s just that an internal object is evoking something within you. The things you feel reticent to explore are exactly what is most interesting to do this with. It also suggests a parallel practice of cultural engagement centred on dwelling on what is evoked when reading, watching, listening etc. This isn’t delving into repressed contents strictly speaking but it enables a generative engagement with unconscious process with the capacity to change one’s relationship to it.
The thing which fascinates me here is the relationship between evocation and articulation. When objects evoke something within us they are contributing to the meshwork and through our articulation, trying to put what has been evoked into words, we are steering the subsequent elaboration of that meshwork. This is the essence of creativity I think: the relationship between what Freud called the ‘psychic intensities’ of everyday life (contributions to the meshwork and the stuff of dreams) and practices of symbolic expression which remain in contact with those psychic intensities.
Mark Carrigan 