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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.
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