STRANDS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

LIED Inezinha Brandao

"...language is truly whatever can move

ahead only by twirling, spinning, and twisting..."

J. Lacan. A Terceira

Do as I do, do not imitate me. Lacan humorously used to advise his audiance. It is a lacanian challenge that establishes the requeriment to advance without imitating another person. This belief allowed Lacan work with Freud’s teachings, putting Freud’s work in its right place and value, but, constantly questioning Freud and himself as we can appreciate when Lacan says: "To be able to interpret the unconscious as Freud did, it would be necessary to be an enciclopaedia of arts and muses as Freud was, apart from being a constant reader of the Fliegende Blätter. And the task of submitting ourselves to subtle allusions and statements, play on words and equivocation wouldn’t be easier".

An obvious conclusion that springs to mind: to say you follow freudian does not mean you imitate Freud, just as to declare you follow lacanian does not imply you imitate Lacan. This forms something vital in our praxis – the singularity. Being an unusual psychoanalist, Lacan took this role as a master, leaving us psychoanalists the effects of his fecund teaching.

Connected to Freud’s invention of the unconscious, Lacan specified with strict inventive rigorour: the unconscious is structured as a language.

While in Seminar 22 Lacan put on the three records – Real, Symbolical, Imaginable – the Freudian trinary – Inhibition, Sympton and Anguish, and he amazes us by placing the unconscious at the unusual position; a place of ex-sistence with three different consistencies like the Bo knot. In the diagram, the unconscious is placed outside, external to areas delimited by the consistency of the three circles.

Among these complexities we invite the reader to pay close attention to this view – the placing of the unconscious at an external site of the Bo knot – thus taking advantage of some of the effects of the lacanian supposition.

As a first approach to the proposed subject let’s consider what Lacan says about ex-sistence at the referred seminar: "(...) if the ex-sistence is defined in relation to a certain consistency, if after all it is nothing but this outside, which is not a non-inside, if this ex-sistence is somehow the surrounding thing from which a substance evaporates, (...) this does not result less than the notion of failure, the notion of a hole in such an extreme so that the ex-sistence preserves its sense, as has been said (...) that it exists a repressed in the Symbolical, there is also something in the Real that provokes a hole and also in the Imaginable – and Freud was aware of it – and it is exactly because of that that he refined everything that drive^* in the body as being centered and linked to the passage from one orifice to another".

In this passage Lacan makes a relational definition of the ex-sistence and "a certain consistency" is implied. If something ex-sists, according to the heideggerian terminology, it exists outside of and, we can say it here, outside of the consistency. But it is not only a place outside because he adds that "it is not a non-inside". To ex-sist is to exist in a position of eccentricity in relation to something. Placing the unconscious this way is "the one that falls from definitions from other places, but to which it is not incorporated".

What from this unconscious is ex-sistence made ? What does ex-exist from the unconscious is the one which maintains and supports the symptom. And the sympton, says Lacan at the Seminar RSI, "is what can be translated by a letter in the unconscious".

It is necessary to consider another point about the ex-sistence of the unconscious. In the referred seminar, RSI, Lacan refers to the unconscious as "this break between these two consistencies". If there is a break, there is a pause, a gap, "a between" in the conscistencies. This blank space, ready to the eruption of the unconscious "obstacle, failure, fracture. In a pronounced, written statement something crashes.(...)". As a pulsating function of the unconscious, of opening and closing, indicates the "discontinuity in which something appears as vacilation".

We know about the unconscious through its results or its formation – dreams, jokes, symptoms and Freudian slips. Effects of the unconscious on a subject. This way the subject is "hit" by something meaningful that comes suddenly⁷ in the so called parlêtre.^*

The place of the unconscious in the diagram marks a progress, one of untying the unconscious from the profound. Lacan unveils the idea of unconscious as being something hidden and profound, as long known through Freud’s inappropriate denomination of "profound psychology". The profound is nothing more or nothing less than the superficial.

The unconscious is on the surface, most precisely on the discourse surface and as a result we conclude that the "unconscious is structured as a language", in other words the unconscious and language have a common structure. Language here is not as the linguistics understand it, as a system of codes to convey correct messages but mainly the language that make holes in the real. The possibility of perfurating, of making holes, it is the possibility of making thelangue (lalangue).

In Rome, during the conference A Terceira, Lacan pointed out that in the known aforeism there is something that escapes, there is something beyond, "(...) that the

unconscious is structured as a language and if that is the best we have, it doesn’t show without doubt, that the unconscious doesn’t depend strictly on thelangue (...)"⁸At this Conference, occuring simultaneously to the Seminar RSI referred to, we find the same Bo knot diagram of three, slightly altered in its form but keeping the same placement of the unconscious, outside the limited Symbolical area, away from sense but in line with symptom. The referred line supports the lacanian statement that "(...) there is coherence, there is consistency between the symptom and the unconscious".⁹ And if as psychoanalists we we can operate over the symptom it is only because the symptom is the result of the Symbolical invading the Real.

Lacan when considering the unconscious as ex-sistent concedes to undoing of the idea of absorption of the unconscious by the symbolical because the former does not reduce itself to the symbolical. The ex-sistence is a characteristic from real and "belongs in this area supposed by the rupture."¹⁰ For this reason "our interpretation must turn to the main thing found in the play on words not to be the one which nourishes the symptom of sense"¹¹, as the outcome of sense in analytical speech "has to be real".¹² The clinic witnesses that a neurotic believes that his symptom to have meaning and looks to analysis to decipher his mistery. So, what can be real in an effect sense?

At the same seminar, Lacan recalls the relationship between the sense and "good form", a highly valued Gestalt concept. In which we, for example, "naturally" tend to take on na image. Lacanian indication is precise, that the sense equally chases the "good form", "the complete form", and so, from sense to sense, senseoversense the symptom gets nourished.

The symptom as na extent of the Symbolical over the Real can only concede through the equivocal, when the psychoanalist’s intervention is able to break the expected and "natural good form" that is stored in the sense. Instead of increasing the sense, it breaks it. In the conference A Terceira, Lacan reinterates that "the interpetration is not the interpretation of sense but a game with the equivocation, (...)"¹³ and it is there that we can get to the real of an effect of sense. If the neurotic symptom is reduced and vanishes in the equivocation it is because "(...) the interpretation operates with thelangue".¹⁴

The fact of housing the language is not without traces to the parlêtre. This is considered in the unconscious, what "(...) is implicate to be heard"¹⁵, opening a way to read the tangled letter in the strands of the unconscious. Insinuated, wide open letter, it does not matter. Effects, traces of singularity.