>Is that your understanding of Freud's unconscious? Like some
>puppetmaster working offstage? And not the precipitate of one's life
>history?
>
That precipitate includes two things: 1. cultural and historical
conditioning -- forces so large and deep and all-encompassing and
obvious that they become invisible and 2. the unacknowledged/unprocessed
experience of our personal life. For the sake of discursive writing
these are separable. Within one's experience they are interwoven.
The process of analysis ideally would make both strands of unprocessed (unconscious) experience, conscious. No freedom is possible (no matter what govt is in place) without an awareness of the forces that have shaped us, of our total experience.
Granted that so far psychoanalysis has focused mainly on the strand of personal unprocessed experience, but this is not to say that it has to limit itself in this way.
Joanna