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CLINICAL NOTES

Jacques Lacan (1973). ‘The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,’ The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan and edited by Jacques-Alain Miller (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 17-28.

The unconscious is, according to Jacques Lacan, one of ‘the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis’ along with the drive, repetition, and the transference.

Lacan makes this important claim in Seminar XI in an attempt to clarify the fundamentals of psychoanalysis.

This seminar, which was originally published in French in 1973, was published in English for the first time in a translation by Alan Sheridan in 1977.

It is a good point of entry into Lacanian psychoanalysis though not all the sessions included in this seminar are equally comprehensible.

This seminar is also important because it was the first of the Lacanian seminars that was attended by Jacques-Alain Miller. Miller not only participated as Lacan’s interlocutor in this seminar but has also edited this volume.

Though Lacan discusses four concepts, the one that he began with was the unconscious. These clinical notes will summarize the main points raised by Lacan in his attempt to differentiate the ‘Freudian unconscious’ and ‘ours.’

What does this mean?

Is Lacan saying in the context of the ‘return to Freud’ that we need to compare the Freudian unconscious and what Lacan means by the unconscious so that we know what we are doing in the seminar?

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Or, is he saying that the Lacanian approach to the unconscious is in fact the correct interpretation of the Freudian unconscious? Therefore, it is possible to speak interchangeably of the two forms of the unconscious?

While Lacan does his share of comparisons, he is making the latter claim.

The conceptual comparisons are more a way of staking a claim that a linguistic approach to the unconscious is what is really at stake in redefining the Freudian unconscious (by invoking the axiom that the ‘unconscious is structured like a language.’)

Once the importance of this innovation is understood, Lacan felt that it would be possible for him to dig out the ‘poetics of the Freudian corpus.’

That is, he will call attention to not only the literary qualities that animate the Freudian text, but also the fact that the very conceptual structure of psychoanalysis is to be re-thought and formally represented in terms of the ‘differential linguistics’ of Ferdinand de Saussure and the ‘structural anthropology’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Saussure differentiates between langue and parole (i.e. language and speech). In his Discourse of Rome (1953), Lacan had already set out a number of reasons for why he thought the structuring aspects of language will help analysts to make sense of the revelations of the unconscious.

In this session of the seminar, Lacan reiterates his reasons for justifying this axiom in an interactive form - unlike in Rome where he spoke like an oracle.

Lacan also introduces the concept of the ‘split-subject’ in cognitive acts as simple as counting.

So, for instance, Lacan poses the question of whether the subject who counts should count himself?

If so, how should he reckon the difference between the ‘subject that counts’ and the ‘subject that is counted?’

So when the hypothetical subject that he invokes is asked how many brothers he has, his reply is: ‘I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me.’

Whether this is the correct enumeration or not depends on whether the reader understands the concept of the split subject.

Is Lacan merely playing with words here?

Why is this example so important? I think it is important because he is trying to situate where the unconscious is in this example.

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As any Lacanian will tell you, the unconscious is in the gap between the subject that counts and the subject that is counted. That is why Lacan makes heavy weather out of this example.

Lacan identifies the combinatory structure within which the subject counts as a specific instance of what gives the unconscious its status as a ‘structure.’

The main focus for Lacan is not on the dynamic aspects of the unconscious since that predates the Freudian discovery of the unconscious.

There is, as Lacan points out, a huge literature on the ‘unconscious before Freud’ and on the unconscious after the Freudian movement split.

Lacan’s main preoccupation here is to differentiate the structural approaches to the unconscious from these.

The main advantage, he argues, with the structural model of the unconscious is that it will help to make sense of cause.

The importance of this theoretical move should not be overlooked.

There is a strand in psychoanalytic theory and in philosophy which attempts to differentiate between the concepts of cause and reasons in the explanation of human behaviour.

The philosopher who forced the issue in the context of this analytic distinction was Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Another important question is whether the psychological realm is subject to ‘determinism’ that is as strong in relating cause to effect as the physical realm.

And, if it is, is it possible to demonstrate that objectively to be the case?

While these questions are big enough to generate dissertations and are beyond the scope of these clinical notes, suffice it to note that Lacan is not unaware of these problems.

That is why Lacan invokes the Kantian attempt to ‘introduce the concept of negative quantities into philosophy’ as a specific instance of coming to terms with the structural gap that can serve the function of cause in psychoanalytic explanations of human behaviour.

Lacan also differentiates between the terms ‘cause’ and ‘law’; he points out that the former is more ‘indefinite’ whereas the latter is a form of strong generalization (as in the laws of motion).

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It is between cause and effect that Lacan situates the unconscious.

So it is not the unconscious that causes a neurosis because it is not possible to rule out the possibility of an organic element (like ‘humoral determinates’).

What is conceptually at stake then is the gap itself.

In Lacan’s formulation, ‘what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real.’

What happens to the gap if the analysis is successful?

Since the gap is structural it does not disappear, but it becomes, as Lacan points out, a scar ‘not of the neurosis but of the unconscious.’

Lacan then moves towards his concluding remarks when he mentions that these are problems that Freud addressed in his own way in his attempts to delineate the ‘aetiology of the neuroses.’

What Freud found in the gap, points out Lacan, is ‘something of the order of the non-realized.’

The implications of this formulation for sentence structure, propositional analysis, textual analysis, and the analytic situation is enormous. It will be of interest to linguists, literary critics, and those in the human sciences.

It would not be a stretch to say that implications of this definition of the unconscious itself is the non-realized of literary criticism inspired by Jacques Lacan.

Instead, what Lacan finds is the propensity to stitch this gap, to make it go away. Consider the image from Heinrich Heine that Freud himself would invoke of how the philosopher attempts to suture this gap in his nightgown.

Lacan’s point about his concept of the unconscious being precisely that of Freud is based not only their agreement on the need for a linguistic translation of the ‘formations of the unconscious.’

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It is also based on this moment of similarity in categorically identifying this ‘constitutive gap’ in spatial structures and the function of the ‘non-realized’ as a temporal unfolding as what really characterizes the structure of the unconscious.

That is also why ‘deferred action’ becomes necessary as a source of causal explanation in psychoanalysis.

This is proof – if proof is needed – that the Freudian unconscious is altogether different from those which preceded the Freudian formulation.

Lacan is keen to differentiate the Freudian unconscious from those which are described as ‘romantic, collective, and heteroclite.’

Or, in Lacan’s summary: ‘Freud’s unconscious is not all the romantic unconscious of creative imagination.’

Instead, the Freudian unconscious is associated with terms like ‘impediment, failure, split.’

These terms are invoked in addition to what he has already told us about the function of the ‘gap’ and the ‘non-realized.’

So having told us what the unconscious is not; Lacan tells us what it is not only in terms of the structure of the combinatory, but about how it emerges in everyday life.

Not only does the unconscious emerge, it insists on having its say in a way that appears to rival the consciousness of the speaking subject and which takes him by ‘surprise’ on the couch.

And, finally, Lacan invokes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to situate the unconscious in the analytic situation:

‘To resort to a metaphor, drawn from mythology, we have, in Eurydice twice lost, the most potent image we can find of the relation between Orpheus the analyst and the unconscious.’

This is an image that Lacan will return to again in this seminar when in response to Jacques-Alain Miller’s question, he will not only consider the ‘pre-ontological structure of the unconscious,’ but also the fact that the

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unconscious has a tendency to disappear when we try to represent its structure in language.

This constitutes its pulsative function.

SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN