Intimacies of the impersonal

This paper is focused on the kinds of awareness that are exposed by clinical work conducted in the depth psychological tradition. The paper begins with an examination of Freud's clinical methodology, which is a description of a particular kind of attentiveness that reveals material normally obscured from conscious awareness. This type of awareness is thought to reveal the contents and the specific organizational features of the unconscious. In this paper, the organizational processes of the unconscious are interpreted to actually be the referents of a privileged type of perceptual awareness leading to a unique relationship to the immediate world. This is taken to be an assumption that is implicit in the models of psychotherapy authored by Jung and Reich. Both developmental and clinical researches are used to support this position. The differentiation between this awareness and the more traditional modes of awareness is further highlighted by an examination of the phenomenon of transference. Finally, a clinical example is presented to support the theoretical claims in the paper.