Why do we need a theory of the unconscious? What critical and political advantages flow from such a concept?
For a clinician, a theory of the unconscious is indispensable for understanding both the unhappiness of everyday life and the miseries of severe mental disturbance. Specifically, such a theory gives the clinician some guidance about how to navigate the experience of a session: gaps, contradictions, phantasies, dreams, parapraxes, emotional storms, and the entrenchment of defense. And with luck and time, the opportunity to provide some kind of aid or care.
It is, perhaps, a little less clear what a theory of the unconscious offers those involved in the business of critique. When a theory of the unconscious is deployed for interpretive ends other than the transferential (philosophical, literary, anthropological, or historical analysis, for example), its political scope changes. And often those contemporary uses of the unconscious do not fully register, or struggle to accommodate, what has been most unruly about this idea. In particular, they can become too knowing about what a theory of the unconscious can deliver politically.
But first, let’s back up a little. What are the key tenets in Freudian and post-Freudian theories of the unconscious? A theory of the unconscious emerged slowly in Freud’s work—initially in relation to his treatment of hysterics in the 1880s and 1890s and in his self-analysis and epistolary analysis with Wilhelm Fliess around the same time. It is in the final, magnificent chapters of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) that Freud first lays out a detailed theory of the unconscious. His metapsychological essay on the unconscious in 1915 gives the most concise account of the characteristics of the unconscious at this time. Amongst other things: there is no negation in the unconscious; there are no narrative links between ideas (Vorstellungen) in the unconscious; there is no grammar, syntax or logic as they usually operate in conscious life; there is no passage of time in the unconscious; there is no distinction in the unconscious between reality and phantasy. Freud coined the terms primary processes and psychic reality to describe the implausible, phantastic logics of unconsciousness.
There are two things to note at this juncture. First, it has become routine in psychology textbooks and common parlance to think of the unconscious as the buried part of an iceberg—it is that 9/10ths of the ice that is submerged below the waterline (and consciousness would be the small part of the ice that we see above the water). However, this iceberg model misses something crucial. It implies, against everything that Freud argued, that the unconscious and the conscious are made of the same psychic stuff—that they operate by the same mental logics. Under the sway of this metaphor, we might imagine that if we were to lift the iceberg up from the water, we could make the unconscious conscious simply by bringing it to the light of day. However, drawing on a claim by the nineteenth-century psychophysicist Gustav Fechner, Freud (1900) is clear that the “scene of action of [the unconscious] is different from that of waking mental life” (536). That is, the unconscious and conscious are incommensurate and torqued against each other. Lacan would call the unconscious “another scene.” There is something very strange, then, about the spatiality of mind in Freud’s theory of the unconscious that the model of an iceberg is unable to apprehend.
Second, Freud’s theory of the unconscious contains an irresolvable tension: is the unconscious a psychic place or a psychic state? While it is easy enough to imagine the unconscious as a place (topos), Freud is clear that there is no simple relation between the unconscious and, say, neurological locations. More broadly, topographical metaphors of the unconscious being below or beyond consciousness, its contents buried, or in the case of Norman Bates’s mother stashed down in the basement, don’t fully capture what is at stake. In addition to these topographical models of the unconscious, Freud argues, we ought also to think of the unconscious economically—that is, in terms of the circulation, intensification, and attenuation of psychic energy (cathexis). For example, thinking topographically, a repressed idea is in the unconscious (moved, perhaps, from its location in the conscious system); thinking economically, a repressed idea has no particular location, but is instead an idea that has had its cathexis withdrawn and this is what makes it inaccessible to consciousness. In an economic model of mind, it is energy, not the idea, that is mobile. Freud carefully and deliberately places these models of mind athwart each other—each is a plausible enough account of the unconscious, but each is also insufficient as a theoretical gambit. In the end, Freud argues, it is not possible to decide on whether the unconscious is a place in the mind or whether it is a changeable state of mind. To put this another way, the unconscious is enigmatic not simply because repressed ideas cannot be directly known, but also because theorization itself is inadequate to the task of describing mind.
Of course, not long after his influential 1915 papers on metapsychology, Freud proposed a second topography of mind: id, ego, super-ego. He doesn’t refute the first topography of The Interpretation of Dreams, but from around 1920 onwards we might say that Freud’s work becomes less interested in the unconscious (a noun) and more interested in the modifying work of “unconscious” as an adjective: unconscious defenses, unconscious affects, unconscious functions of the ego (Laplanche and Pontalis).
After Freud, the major thinkers of the British Kleinian and Middle schools were also less likely to think of the unconscious as simply a psychic place. Melanie Klein worked more with unconscious phantasy than an unconscious in the topographical sense. In a Kleinian model, unconscious phantasies color all mental activity, and they are “internal” in a very broad sense, but they are not locatable in a specific agency of the mind (Spillius et al.). Wilfred Bion (1962) reconfigured the primary processes of the unconscious into alpha function (which transforms the unthought into thought, and in so doing differentiates conscious and unconscious states of mind) and beta elements (the raw, non-symbolic, unthought stuff of experience which must be evacuated from the mind). The dictionary of Winnicottian theory doesn’t even have an entry for the unconscious (Abram). Moreover, as a theory of transference was elaborated in the post-Freudian period to include the countertransference, and then the importance of the mutual experience of the clinical relationship (Mitchell and Aron), an explicit theory of the unconscious seems to fade from the forefront of clinical thinking and practice. The contemporary analyst and writer Thomas Ogden, for example, suggests that “the unconscious is not a place or a thing, but it is a quality of one’s thinking, feeling, experiencing . . . Freud’s unconscious is another world, but it is in this one, in consciousness, not behind or below it” (41).
The uses of the unconscious in social and cultural critique usually pay homage to the unknowability of unconscious content or processes that has been made evident by clinical experience, but sometimes they can then go on to be too knowing about what might be at stake politically with this idea.
For example, Amia Srinivasan (2025), in a very engaging essay, sees renewed political and social utility for a theory of the unconscious. In particular, she suggests that such a theory could help illuminate what is going on with the “diverse coalition of authoritarian strongmen, feminists, manosphere influencers, the Catholic and orthodox churches, and centrist liberals” that is pushing back against what they call “gender ideology,” especially in relation to the treatment of trans kids. A theory of the unconscious, Srinivasan argues, might generate conditions in which we can imagine freedom from these transphobias: “the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despairs of our political moment.” Of course, divisions of the psyche (e.g., conscious from unconscious) are precisely what makes the psyche possible and from which no one of us can be liberated, nonetheless the political questions that Srinivasan raises are compelling and complex—the violences of transphobia and anti-gender rhetoric are very difficult to combat with the cool logics of, say, philosophical deliberation. Instead, a skillful deployment of a theory of the unconscious might act as a corrective to the irrationalism of transphobia. That is, a theory of the unconscious could be deployed to undertake the work of progressive/left advocacy. At these moments a theory of the unconscious has been put in the service of a powerful political fantasy: that all the violences of gender fall on just one side (their side), and on the other side, on our side, there is an uncomplicated hunger for justice.
Something similar is operative in Judith Butler’s (2024) concerns about the anxious and frightened “phantasms” that haunt right-wing anti-gender politics. Asking “who’s afraid of gender?” Butler implies that the answer is them. The task for us is to “develop a counter-imaginary strong enough to oppose [this phantasm’s] ruse, scatter its forces, and stop the efforts at censorship, distortion, and reactionary politics that it empowers” (9–10). In arguments like this, our politics seems to be much less imbricated in the unconscious terrors of castration, or the schizoid demands of internal objects, or the aggressions of infantile demand. These psychopolitical difficulties seem to have been smoothed over, in Butler and Srinivasan and elsewhere, by phantasms of gender fluidity and queer antinormativity. Let me be clear: the misogynies, transphobias, and fascistic ambitions of anti-gender crusaders are appalling. But there is nothing in the various psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious available to us in this moment that could assure us that our political ambitions and actions are free from violent phantasies about gender.
Indeed, this division of the political world between violent attachments and progressive attachments must itself be subjected to critique. It has to be read rather than just assumed. As Barbara Johnson (1980) has noted: “the one imperative a reading must obey is that it follow, with rigor, what puts in question the kind of reading it thought it was going to be” (331). To put this psychoanalytically, progressive political critique must be able to encounter, in some way, the unconscious forces that surely undermine the reading that it thought it was going to be. Moreover, for Johnson, such a reading becomes strong “to the extent that it encounters and propagates the surprise of otherness. The impossible but necessary task of the reader is to set herself up to be surprised” (332).
Many of the progressive political responses to transphobia and other cultural violences are about the least surprising things you will read—their authors, even as they declare allegiance to a theory of the unconscious, are almost completely knowing about what is at stake for their political adversaries and allies alike. To say this another way, many political uses of the unconscious foreclose the possibility of being surprised by the otherness they seek to interpret, diagnose, and defang; and they often refuse to engage an otherness within. No longer another scene, no longer even very strange, the unconscious has been made subservient to the everyday logics of political advocacy. If our critical and political ambitions hewed more closely to Johnsonian surprise—if we could be more reflective about what phantasms underlie our own critical and political ambitions—it would complicate, in compelling ways I suggest, the political positions that seem to be so easy to read.
To that end, one thing that theories of the unconscious and Johnsonian critique share in common is a debt to interminability. Where progressive-politics-as-usual searches for clear goals, for resolutions to our contradictions, for sutures that will mend the tears in the social fabric, a theory of the unconscious asks us to permanently suspend such goals and (like critique) just keep reading. How effectively we can develop strong reading practices, and how readily we can subject our knowingness to ongoing interrogation, is the interminable political task ahead.
Elizabeth A. Wilson is a Samuel Candler Dobbs professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. Her most recent book (co-authored with Adam Frank) is A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
WORKS CITED
Abram, Jan, ed. The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott’s Use of Words (2nd edition). London: Karnac, 2007.
Bion, Wilfred. Learning from Experience. London: Routledge, 1962/2023.
Butler, Judith. Who’s Afraid of Gender? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Interpretation of Dreams.” In vols. IV and V of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1900.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Unconscious.” In vol. XIV of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 159–215. London: Hogarth Press, 1915.
Johnson, Barbara. “Nothing Fails Like Success.” In The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness, edited by Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja Valens, 327–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1980/2014.
Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press, 1973.
Mitchell., Stephen, and Lewis Aron, eds. Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1999.
Ogden, Thomas. What Alive Means: Psychoanalytic Explorations. London: Routledge, 2025.
Spillius, Elizabeth Bott, Jane Milton, Penelope Garvey, Cyril Couve, and Deborah Steiner. The New Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Routledge, 2011.
Srinivasan, Amia. “The Impossible Patient.” London Review of Books 47, no.23, December 25, 2025. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n23/amia-srinivasan/the-impossible-patient.
