The knowledge that inhabits us

There exists a popular fantasy that imagines the unconscious as a dark basement where we keep our most unconfessable secrets, a kind of mysterious trunk that the analyst must force open to extract its hidden contents. This picturesque vision of analytic work couldn't be further from the truth. The unconscious isn't buried in the depths of a psychic well waiting to be excavated; it's alive, active, operating in every word we pronounce, in every act we perform.

This unconscious knowledge that runs through us doesn't need to be discovered but heard. It's already speaking in our slips, in our dreams, in our symptoms. It doesn't require special extraction techniques or forced interpretations. What it needs is a space where it can be said, where speech can unfold freely, without the constant censorship of our rational explanations.

The task of analysis is not to illuminate dark zones but to allow what is already there to emerge, insisting on being heard. It's not a work of archaeological excavation but of attentive listening to that knowledge that already inhabits us and manifests itself in the folds of discourse, in the silences between words, in those truths we speak without knowing we're speaking them.