Freudian Unconscious and Ours

SAK Juana Nora


In his text "About Psychotherapy" Freud states that his conception about the unconscious is not the one philosophers postulate, that they qualify as psychic which corresponds to a phenomenon of conscience. In Freud’s The Ego and the Id he tells us that psychoanalysis does not see on conscious the psychic essence, instead, only a quality of itself, and that our unconscious has as a point of departure the theory of repression .

I’m going to choose a passage from the clinical history of Lucy R. which allows us to see the way Freud operates when he adopts this hypothesis: that the patient knew everything that could have, a pathogenic importance related to the causal determination of the symptoms. In this case Freud tells us that when a patient expresses that nothing occurs to him he replies that it is not possible, that he has certainly realized that which he is looking for, but he refuses to admit it. When he recognizes the moment when Lucy succumbs to the hysterical conversion, Freud deduces that among the premises from the trauma, there had to be something voluntarily kept in silence, forced to be forgotten . I – quote his interpretation.: "I don’t believe, -I told her that all these reasons that you have given to me are good enough to justify your love for the little girls…I rather suspect that you are in love with the father, perhaps without realizing it, and that you don’t loose the hope that you could take the place of the missing mother……You fear that your hopes will be discovered and that they will mock you". To these words of mine the subject replied:

-" Yes, I think that you are right" .

-And if you knew that you loved the girls’ father, why haven’t you told me until now?

To which Lucy answers: "I didn’t know it until now. That is, I didn’t want to know it, I wanted to get it off my mind, not to think about it any more, and I believe that lately I have almost succeeded.

In this passage it is possible to see negation as a defense, or the state in which we simultaneously know and ignore something.

The same happens in the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement. Freud tells us how the theory about the sexual etiology of neurosis was communicated to him through these three people: Breuer, Charcot and the gynecologist Chrobak. The three of them had transmitted to him a knowledge that in fact, they didn’t have. "Two of them negated facts when I later wanted to remind them- says Freud- and the third, Charcot would have probably followed the same behavior if I had had the opportunity to see him again. With respects to myself, these three identical suggestions, misunderstood received, slept inside me for many years, to later one day be awakened under the shape of an idea apparently original" It is in relation to Charcot that Freud listens in astonishment and says: "Mais das des cas pareils, c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours, toujours, toujours". It is in this moment when Freud asks himself: "But if he knows it, why doesn’t he ever say it?" "I know very well that one thing is to express an idea under the shape of a occasional observation and another to consider it seriously, to make it go through all kinds of obstacles and to conquer a place for it among recognized truths". We can observe in this that there should be a kind of telling something without realizing that which we are saying, this deafness is the one we can attribute to the function of the misunderstanding of the ego. Lacan in his text "The stage of the mirror" reveals to us the way in which the ego constitutes itself in a line of fiction, being the ideal identifications which conform it. .

It is because of Lacan that we can read, how in the analyzing experience a dialect game is operating between the function of not knowing the ego and the recognizing of the desire. To say recognizing of the desire, means recognizing the unconscious as what it is.

What constitutes Freudian unconscious is the unconscious in its formations, such as dreams, riddles, and all the psychopathology of everyday life. It is in the case of a young homosexual girl that Freud poses an objection to his conception about the unconscious.

Is it possible that the unconscious lies? There he will tell us that the dream is not the unconscious, and that we should trust it. Lacan, in his seminary about the four fundamental concepts of Psychoanalysis, tells us that at the level of the formations of unconscious there is the order of what is achieved. The dream is the disguised performance of a repressed desire, the lapsus(slip-up) is a succeeded speech. In a joke, the laugh sanctions the passage of a message that has arrived and resounds in the unconscious. The formations of unconscious are naming the subject as an effect, and we have there the return of a repressed truth. In the case of the young homosexual girl, the dream carries a message, whose symbolic dimension couldn’t be heard by Freud. He took the imaginary aspect from transference in the sense of "she wants to deceive the way she deceived her father".

In his text "Negation" of 1925, Freud emphasizes that the recognition of the unconscious from the ego, shows itself by means of a negative formula "I have never thought about it". Its translation would correspond to "that is what I have always been thinking about". In the negation articulated in the speech, Freud teaches us that there is the perception of what is repressed although it is not accepted. Freudian experience, Lacan tells us, designs in the Ego the place itself of the Vemeinung. Because the Ego is a function of not knowing it impedes the reading operation. It is preferable for that who takes the place of the analyst to be aware of this function of not knowing.

Lacan teaches us to conceive the unconscious as that talking knowledge without consciousness, he places it at a level of the talking subject. He tells us: "the unconscious is that which has learned to talk and it is because of this that one has left to suggest by the language all kinds of things." Here we find language as a condition of the unconscious, which is the dimension where the subject determines itself in the development of the effects of the word. What belongs to the order of the unconscious "is not being, nor not being, is not achieved, - Lacan tells us, finding there the function of the cause.

Upon Freud’s interrogation: "if you know it why don’t you say it?" Lacan responds that the subject of the unconscious does not know what it says nor what he is talking about. Lacan makes us aware that it is in this analytic experience, that the dimension of telling has a place, and it is that which makes it possible that this unknown knowledge is possible to be known when told. We know that it is in transference and by the function of desire of the analyst that the subject can receive his own forgotten message in an inverted form, or from the place of the Other.

I consider that the implemented function of the analytic rule: "Say everything that comes to mind" is a bet of the function "desire of the analyst" upon "saying everything" in order to recognize that which he says: a double meaning that there is something more to be said at the point to seize another resonance of the word and the fact in itself of saying as an act of the subject. The recognizing of the lack of the Other or the castration is an act, which means saying itself..

Juana Nora Sak

 

Escuela Freudiana de la Argentina