Is the unconscious an obsolete notion ?

LACOTE Christiane


The hypothesis may be put forward that as the media are making us familiar with such concepts as the unconscious, they deprive them of both their original virulence and their relevance and impact. That is particularly so when we are dealing with what, in our psychic economy, we wish we did not know, though we would not by any means be denied the enjoyment granted by that mock ignorance of ours.
Being aware of what such familiarity implies seems most important at a time when fundamental texts of psycho-analysis - in our opinion mostly Freud's and Lacan's - have ceased to be supported by their authors who, not being alive any longer, cannot express their theories or enact them through transference in the course of a therapy.
Even those among us who knew Lacan have become readers. The problem is that a text may be read in such different ways. One of them in particular consists in considering Freud's and Lacan's discoveries as references with which the reader has a feeling he has always been familiar, readily considering his own the area they frame. The impression of " already known ", though not incompatible with the humouring - through a narcissic process - of the exquisite feeling of giddiness described by Freud in Das Unheimliche is a way of numbing what is opened up by the inconscious. Let us try and analyse the process involved.
Recognising symbols is one thing, reading is quite another. This distinction is familiar to all those who are close to children encountering difficulties in learning to read. Similarly, while reading the fundamental texts of psycho-analysis some people today seem to be content to identify references in which thus remaining unaware of the fact that the books written by Freud and Lacan were totally unprecedented.
Freud himself entertained doubts when his disciples read his writings - in particular Die Traumdeutung - with excessive enthusiasm, or when mythology was over-interpreted. The numerous letters he wrote to his disciples make this point very clear.
Besides, they are indispensable to anyone who wishes to understand the points that checked the progress of Freud's elaborations ; and they also show how Freud's speculations were inextricably bound up with transference.
Therfore, when, by a refashioning of his theories, Freud swept away the basis of his disciples' speculations, his aim was - so I believe - their training. Freud showed that what man seeks is not necessarily the gratification of his desire, but the lowest possible tension - i.e.death - achieved through a repetitive process. His disciples ignored the concept of death drive, which is sometimes considered, even today, a flaw in Freud's reasoning. Lacan and M. Klein were the only psycho-analysts who took up the concept again - though each of them through specific reasonings. I have shown elsewhere that with Jenseits des Lustprinzip, written in 1920, Freud totally redefined the concept of unconscious.
An appraisal of the scientific implications of this redefinition may be the only way of assessing such Lacanian concepts as the Other and jouissance (enjoyment). Which means that Lacan's theories ought to be understood as stemming from both the points that checked the progress of Freud's elaborations and the difficulties he encountered in transmitting psycho-analysis.