WERE THERE LACANIAN ADVANCES IN THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS

DANTAS COELHO Maria Thereza Avila

Along Freud's work, the unconscious was considered a structure with its own elements and its own operation laws. However, Freud's preoccupation was not restricted to explicit those elements and laws. The origin of the unconscious was an enigma to him. Updated with the new findings in biology and anthropology, Freud first created the parricide myth and then postulated the existence of a main structure, original and universal, to be always reissued.
It is known that preoccupation with origin is one of the ontological structuralism marks. In that respect, Freud can be considered one of the pioneers of the ontological structuralism in which Lévi-Strauss is one of the most important exponents. According to Lévi-Strauss , all messages can be interpreted based on a code, which at the same time can be transformed into another one; all codes make reference to a Ur-code, a Structure of the structures, that is identified with the unconscious. The fundamental and determinant phenomena in the spirit's life are therefore located in the unconscious thought.

This idea of the unconscious like a structure was affirmed by Lacan in his maxim, which said that the unconscious is being structured as a language . The language by which the unconscious is affirmed is the Other's speech, which as a significant chain, expresses presence and absence, and speaks by a succession of metaphors and metonyms . As a metaphor, the symptom substitutes a symbol by another one and turns its removal obscure. As a metonym, desire is directed toward a substitutive object, turning indecipherable our aims' last objective. Lacan's development still maintains continuity with the Freudian unconscious, and therefore we can state that he is simultaneously Lacanian and Freudian. But what can be said about his other proposition according to which the unconscious is the Real ?

Following this direction, Lacan says that the significant chain comes from the lack of something that is unattainable. That is because there is already a constitutive Absence in which the significant chain assumes the opposition and the difference. His propositions, according to which "the individual's drama is his lack-to-be" and "love makes his object of what lacks in the real", are expressions of this idea . If Structure used to be a Presence that extended through time without changing, now Origin is an Absence that has nothing to do with time or with history. While for Lévi-Strauss the Ur-code is a Structure that determines the others, for Lacan it is an undetermined code that allows all the possible configurations, even those that are contradictory . By turning Structure an Absence, Lacan seems to be exploding the ontological structuralism and generating ontology without structures of any type. Consequently, each structure overcomes the other one and so on, until the non-structured Absence appears.

In this development Lacan seems to have been greatly influenced by the philosopher Heidegger. For Heidegger, the value of a thought is not in what it says, but in what it does not say . Significant chains and structures are the Being manifestations, they make the Being speak without exhausting him in what he says. The Being does not reduce to what has been said. The Being is pure difference. He is not submitted to any structural determination.

Since the beginning of his work, Freud presented an irreducible Absence to language and to knowledge. The dreams' navel and the original repression are expressions of this Absence. From that point of view, the Lacanian conception of the unconscious as the Real would still be Freudian, although expressed by a new conceptual language.

Lacan updated the psychoanalytic theory by talking to the knowledge of his time. He transmitted psychoanalysis with new words, and introduced new concepts. But did such new words and such new concepts produce new ideas about the unconscious? The question I would like to ask for discussion is the following: Were there actually Lacanian advances in the Freudian unconscious?

Member of the Colégio de Psicanálise da Bahia