Unthought known is a phrase coined by
Christopher Bollas
Christopher Bollas (born 1943) is a British psychoanalyst and writer. He is a leading figure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.
Early life and education
Bollas was born in the United States in Washington, DC. He grew up in Laguna Beach, Ca ...
in the 1980s to represent those experiences in some way known to the individual, but about which the individual is unable to think.
At its most compelling, the unthought known stands for those early schemata for interpreting the object world that preconsciously determine our subsequent life expectations. In this sense, the unthought known refers to preverbal, unschematised early experience/
trauma
Trauma most often refers to:
* Major trauma, in physical medicine, severe physical injury caused by an external source
* Psychological trauma, a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a severely distressing event
*Traumatic i ...
that may determine one's behaviour unconsciously, barred to conscious thought.
Prehistory
It has been suggested that behind Bollas's concept lay a comment reported by
Freud from a patient to the effect that he had always ''known'' something but he had never ''thought'' of it.
The term also has been linked to
W. R. Bion
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO (; 8 September 1897 – 8 November 1979) was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.
Early life and military service
Bion was born in M ...
's idea of Beta-elements – psychic experiences which cannot yet be processed in any way by the mind.
Central elements
Bollas saw several elements as going to make up the substance of the unthought known. Persistent
moods can be considered to preserve elementary but preschematized states of mind into later life; the complex early interplay of self and (primary) object may also be preserved in the unthought known; early aesthetic experience – pre-verbal – can again form part of the unthought known.
Bollas also linked the concept to
D. W. Winnicott's notion of the
true self.
Systems theory
In terms of
systems-centered therapy, the concept refers to the boundary between ''apprehensive'' knowing (non-verbal) and ''comprehensive'' knowing – what we can allow ourselves to formulate in words.
Therapy
In therapy, the unthought known can become the subtext of the therapeutic interchange – the therapist's role then becoming that of picking up and containing (through
projective identification) what the patients themselves cannot yet think about.
[Wallin (2007), pp. 3, 183]
See also
*
Uncanny
The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as not simply mysterious, but creepy, often in a strangely familiar way. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context. ...
References
{{Reflist, 22em
Further reading
*Christopher Bollas, ''The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known'' (1987)
*Christopher Bollas, ''Cracking Up'' (2003)
*Gabriele Schwab, 'Words and Moods' ''SubStance'' vol 26 no 3 # 84 (1997) 107–27
External links
Ian Hunt, "The Unthought Known"
Psychoanalytic theory