Unconscious
From Information Habitat
These days, unconscious is a commonplace idea; it shows up frequently even in casual speech (particularly as an adverb: "maybe you unconciously wanted..."). In many circles it's even considered rather banal; among the dominant schools of US psychology, for example, and generally outside the Freudian / Lacanian tradition, theories of the unconscious are often widely neglected. But the idea is an important one, in philosophy and psychology, and therefore in critical theories that consider questions of knowledge, subjectivity, and so on.
The term "unconscious" already had a substantial history when Freud adopted it. Coleridge refers to a "region of unconscious thoughts", for example, though he doesn't offer any theory about how the "unconscious" might work. As early as 1800, the German philosopher Schelling (who may have been the first to use the term) wrote extensively about the role of unconscious desire in ethics. But it was Freud's ideas - which struck a chord in the zeitgeist of High Modernism - that popularized the idea of an "unconscious" and unconscious motives and desires.
So the unconscious I'm referring to here is an idea that comes out of Freud and his successors. There are other conceptions of the unconscious, and some theorists have found those ideas productive. Guy Claxton's The Wayward Mind: An Intimate History of the Unconscious is supposed to be a good informal history of conceptions of the unconscious, though I haven't read it myself.
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Freud's Unconscious
Over his long career, Freud revised his thinking on the unconscious a number of times, but there are a handful of major ideas that have been especially influential. One good starting point is "The Anatomy of the Mental Personality", an essay based on a 1932 lecture.
Here Freud starts with a common-sense definition of unconscious: the unconscious mental processes are the ones we don't have direct knowledge of, so we have to infer their existence.1
This means that for Freud the unconscious is more a category of mental phenomena than a structure in the mind. By "the unconscious" he means simply "any of various mental processes that we can't see directly". So he made relatively few generalizations about the unconscious as a whole.
What the Unconscious Isn't
The unconscious is a realm of the psyche - that is, it's one part of the whole mental state of an individual. But it's not, as its name might seem to imply, everything which that person is not conscious of. At any moment, we're each not conscious of a great many things we could be conscious of: things we're ignoring in our immediate environment, memories we aren't recalling at just that moment, knowledge that we might not be able to volutarily retrieve but that can be evoked by association (eg the meaning of a foreign word we learned once, which we might recall in context; the face of a casual acquaintance which we'll recognize when we next meet).
The unconscious is instead a collection of mental things which cannot become conscious, at least not under ordinary circumstances. (Hold off for a moment on just what sort of "things" they might be.) Material from the unconscious "erupts" into consciousness, but always in an altered form. The unconscious is the location of repression and the "drives" - fundamental psychic processes.
What the Unconscious did for Freud
Why did Freud incorporate the idea of an unconscious into his psychological theories?
The unconscious was key to solving several problems for Freud. First, as a general theorist of the psyche, he needed to explain why people cannot simply recall the kinds of mental formations he posited, such as the Oedipal relationship and the death drive. Most of Freudian psychoanalytic theory simply doesn't work if "normal" subjects have reliable insight into the workings of their own minds.
Second, as a clinician, he was professionally concerned with understanding mental disorders, both neurotic (irrational behaviors in subjects who can nonetheless function "normally") and psychotic (phantasies mistaken for reality). And because he was dealing with specific patients, he needed not only a general theory of these problems, but a way to gain some understanding of (or, for his more cynical critics, invent some story about) their specific symptoms. He found that what they could tell him (about feelings, dreams, etc) did not in itself make sense as a diagnosis of their problems; but that it could be translated into a diagnosis by assuming that it was the result of unconscious images and ideas being distorted in various ways - inverted, compressed, metaphorically connected, and so on. So the unconscious had to be not only inaccessible but also the source of ideas that were transformed as they forced their way into consciousness.
The unconscious also let Freud advance the key concept of repression. The conscious mind could reject certain ideas as unpalatable (such as unbearable memories or fantasies of violating taboos), but Freud believe those ideas weren't simply lost. They went to the unconscious, from whence they could return (in distorted form) to bother the conscious mind.
Lacan's Unconscious
Lacan identifies the unconscious as one of the "four fundamental concepts" of psychoanalytic theory (along with transference, the drives, and repetition). The other three might be debatable, but it's probably fair to say that Freud's conception of the unconscious is his greatest theoretical contribution, and Lacan went to great lengths in elaborating it in many fascinating directions. Whether you think Lacan's theories of the unconscious represent or model (however partially or reductively) a real aspect of the human mind, or are only a useful cognitive structure for thinking about mind, or are merely an important contemporary myth for theorists, his ideas can be employed to produce intricate and productive meanings about the motivations and behaviors of human subjects.
Lacan liked to claim that everything he said could be found in Freud, but this is clearly the Lacanian analyst's idea of "found" - many of Lacan's ideas are forever buried in the unconscious of Freud's writings, if they're in there at all. While Lacan does build on Freud's conception of the unconscious, he shifts it into an entirely new register by incorporating key concepts from the theoretical mode of his day: structuralism. From the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss he took ideas about the (purportedly) universal organization of human society, such as the generalization of the "Law of the Father" into an endogamy taboo (ie, the prohibition against incest), and read them as internal to the unconscious. From the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (and Roman Jabocobson, etc) he took the concept of the sign and signifying systems as networks of negative terms - in other words, that signs are defined in opposition to each other, and not by any content of their own.
Also, for Lacan the unconscious is the true locus of the self. "I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think", he writes.2 It's also relevant to all aspects of psychoanalysis: "the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field" ("Agency" 163).
The Voice of the Other / Che vuoi?
In the Freudian / Lacanian model, the unconscious is not directly accessible, but it makes itself known by various effects on the conscious mind. These include things like misspeaking (parapraxis, the "Freudian slip") as well as the more dramatic neurotic and psychotic symptoms; and they also include ideas that "come to mind" but seem somehow foreign or intrusive. That leads Lacan to declare that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other" ("Agency" 172) - a formulation he repeats in several places ("Subversion" 312, etc). Lacan offers nearly infinite complications of this idea, but the basic concept is simple enough: we hear our own unconscious as the voice of the Other; we carry alterity within ourselves.
A related idea that Lacan explores is the role of the unconscious in the dialectic of desire. The dialectic of desire, a concept Lacan adapts from Hegel, is the desire to be desired, to be the object of the Other's desire; and also the desire to have one's own desire recognized. Thus he says that what the subject hopes to hear from the unconscious (which is heard as the voice of the Other) is the question Che vuoi? - "What do you want?". And then it is the analyst's job to help the subject reformulate that as "What does he [sic] want of me?" ("Subjection" 312). In other words, we want the unconscious to ask us what we want; we have to learn to ask what it wants from us.
Structured like Language
Near the beginning of "Agency of the letter", Lacan declares: "what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language" (147). In fact, this idea - that the unconscious is structured like language - is the central thesis of this essay and much of what Lacan says about the unconscious.
Some of the implications:
- The unconscious has a structure. It's not just a chaotic sea of drives.
- That structure is a network of terms that are only meaningful in relation to each other.
- Linguistic structures, particularly metaphor and metonymy, can be found in the unconscious.
- Some of the phenomena of the unconscious are rhetorical. Lacan makes a number of arguments about the rhetoric of the unconscious.
- Lacan believes in something like Chomsky's deep structure - that the rules of language are biologically wired into our brains, and only the contingencies of particular languages (vocabulary, etc) have to be learned.
- This structure is repeated not just in the unconscious and in language, but in many human phenomena, because it's an essential part of us.
- The clinical talking cure can work because language reaches into the structure of the unconscious.
The Imaginary and Symbolic Fields
Lacan divides the unconscious into two main parts or "fields": the Imaginary field and the Symbolic field.
The Imaginary contains images and other imagined or remembered sensory impressions. The Symbolic holds only structure - the network of negative terms that makes up language and law. When ideas arise from the unconscious, the Imaginary supplies their content and the Symbolic their form. The two fields "map over" each other in the operations of the unconscious, but the lack of a firm connection between each element in the two fields is what lets signifieds slide under signifiers.
In Schema R, the half of the square above the diagonal, labeled I, is the field of the Imaginary; the other half of the square, labeled S, is the Symbolic. Part of the Imaginary near the diagonal is R, the "field of reality", which combines two relationships: between the subject and reality, and between the subject and the Real, which an unmediated access to reality that we unconsciously imagine we had before the "mirror stage" (ie, before we perceived our own incompleteness).
At the apex of the Imaginary is φ, the Phallus, which for Lacan here means the image that signifies the subject as a living being; it's the quintessential part-object that is both an image of plenitude and an image of vulnerability. The S that Lacan shows next to the Phallus represents the subject's understanding of self as living being.
At the apex of the Symbolic is P, the Name-of-the-Father (Père in French), the quintessence of law. It represents the most extreme form of the discourse of the Other, represented by A (Autre) on the graph.
The other two corners of the square are labeled I and M, for the ego-ideal and primordial object respectively. ("I" is for Ich, Freud's term for the ego; "M" for Mère, French for "mother", since the infant most often identifies the mother as its first object of desire.)
Within the field of reality R, a and a' represent the unending series of objects of desire. Lacan calls these objets petit a, "little objects a", where the a stands for autre - this is the "little-o other" in the English translation. objets petit a are various real objects that people choose as objects of desire - material possessions, lovers, etc - in an eternal process of deferring their desire for the big-o Other, which can never be satisfied. In the graph here M represents that Other of desire that can never be achieved, and the series of objets petit a are the lifelong series of things we substitute for it.
The two remaining symbols on the graph, i and m, represent the two aspects of the subject's narcissistic investment in itself: the ego-image (how we think of ourselves) and the specular image (how we actually see or otherwise experience our own bodies).
While this model is clearly very complicated and certainly highly contestable, it does show how Lacan tried to understand the unconscious as not simply an abyss of inexplicable urges, but a collection of specific elements and relationships, with a set of dynamic but defined functions that determine how our mental faculties unfold.
Some Other Theorists of the Unconscious
Jung
I haven't studied Carl Jung's work, but my understanding is that the key feature of his theory of the unconscious is his idea of a collective unconscious, shared by everyone. His interest in archetypes, myths, etc is in some ways similar to Lacan's adoption of structuralist anthropology, but in Jung's case seems to have been much more mystical.
Deluze and Guattari
In the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deluze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, the unconscious is linked to the potential for radical political action. Thus Deluze and Guattari reconceive manifestations of the unconscious, such as neurosis and schizophrenia, as having political causes and consequences.
For Deluze and Guattari, desire is not the sign of lack (as for Freud) or eternal deferral (as for Lacan), but a productive force. They see capitalism as a repressive channeling of desire.
Unfortunately, Deluze and Guattari have a tendency to bury ideas beneath sweeping and dubious generalizations, and to push wildly conceited metaphors well past the point where they can reasonably be sustained.
The Freudian / Lacanian Tradition
A number of thinkers have taken up Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, some largely in agreement and others contesting some of its most basic ideas.
Psychoanalytic Feminism
Though both Freud and Lacan are frequently criticized for phallocentrism - and indeed because of it - a number of feminist theorists have engaged Freudian / Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The French Feminists, including Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Catherine Clément, offer powerful critiques of the gender politics of Freudian / Lacanian thought and extensive theories of their own. (Note that of the four mentioned, only Clément is actually originally from France; Irigaray is Belgian, Kristeva is Bulgarian, and Cixous was born and raised in Algeria.) Irigaray is perhaps best known for her essentialist theories of gender. Kristeva has written extensively on semiotics and abjection. Cixous is interested in the relationship between sexuality and language; she has also written on issues of colonialism. Clément has collaborated with Kristeva and Cixous.
There are many psychoanalytic feminist contributions to the Freudian / Lacanian tradition from the anglophone world, too. Examples include some of the essays in the collection In Dora's Case and Nancy Chodorow's Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan is a well-known commentary on some of Lacan's essays by a prominent feminist critic. Major feminist psychoanalytic theorists in the US include Judith Butler and Theresa de Lauretis.
Film Theory
Freudian / Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, particularly in conjunction with semiotics, has been popular in some schools of film theory. The journal Screen is particularly noted for publishing this work.
One famous psychoanalytic film theorist is Kaja Silverman, author of The Subject of Semiotics and The Acoustic Mirror.
Žižek
The most famous proponent of Lacan today must be Slavoj Žižek (aka the Mad Slovene), whose inimitable style and striking personality have made him one of contemporary theory's major stars. (On this see Geoffrey Galt Harpham's excellent study The Character of Criticism. For a taste of Žižek's unabashed wackiness see the interview "Enjoy your Žižek" from Lingua Franca - one of that rag's rare quality moments.)
Freud often seemed to regard the unconscious as a sort of mental organ, functioning more or less properly, its complaints to be diagnosed from its oozing emissions. For Lacan the unconscious becomes foundational, the explanatory ground of last resort, a transcendant numinous mystery of human subjectivity. Its aberrations could be diagnosed and analyzed, but for Lacan the unconscious always has an aura of the marvelous about it.
But Freud and Lacan were both clinicians, employed to treat patients. While Žižek has had a variety of positions and titles ("Ambassador of Science" is one of my favorites), he is an academic, employed in teaching (though he admits he's not very interested in it) and writing (he's a prolific writer, and generally quite readable and engaging). And what I find in his work is a vision of the unconscious as something quite commonplace - which of course it is, if you believe in anything like the Freudian line - and comfortable. Titles like Enjoy Your Symptom! tip you off to Žižek's usual attitude: sure, we have this psychic realm that we can never have any direct access to, that eludes and undermines our reason. So have fun with it! Take pleasure, however perverse, in the foibles of subjectivity; they're what make us human.
That's not to say that Žižek is not concerned with mental illness or other serious matters. He's written extensively on psychoanalytic approaches to political problems, for example in the collection Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau), and he's just as capable as any other theorist of getting into a knock-down with other critics. (He and the aforementioned Harpham had a bit of a tussle in Critical Inquiry a few years back, over Harpham's essay "The Žižek Thing".) But Žižek is a fine example of how the Lacanian unconscious can be explored through the viscissitudes of everyday life, and without the sense of dread that seems to haunt some authors.
The Unconscious and Cognitive Science
Cognitive science and related fields - psychiatry, neurology, behavorial sciences, etc - have in recent decades gathered vast amounts of empirical evidence about the operation of the mind's physical substrate (the brain, the rest of the body, and their environment), and based on it made even vaster hypotheses about the operation of the mind. These are a certainly challenge to the models of psychoanalysis - in some cases, they make some of Freud's theories in particular seem quite dubious. But they can also augment psychoanalytic theory with better understanding of how the low-level mechanisms that produce the mind affect the higher-level operations that psychoanalysis seeks to represent.
So, for example, the work of Antonio Damasio and his research team investigating questions such as the relationship between emotion and decision (described in Descartes' Error), or how consciousness emerges from sensory stimuli (The Feeling of What Happens), can actually be seen as supporting the basic assumptions of psychoanalytic theory: that we are not creatures of reason, that we have at best only limited insight into our own motivations.
And even though our more complex understanding of functional aspects of the mind today suggest that psychosis begins with structural or chemical abnormalities in the brain, a theory of the unconscious can help explain the particular symptoms of mental disarray. The idea here is that while the "hardware" of the brain causes, say, schizophrenia, the particular symptoms we see in a given case are conditioned by specific obsessions in the "software" of the mind, and psychoanalysis can help the patient discover these and work through them. Neuropharmacology and other physical treatments may relieve the physical causes, but analysis is necessary to help the patient reconstruct a normal psychic state.
The Unconscious in Theory
How can the concept of the unconscious, and theories of its operation, be used in critical theory? A concept of unknowability might seem somewhat unproductive for theories that seek to interpret or explain something, but the unconscious has been useful in various ways for theorists.
Hermeneutics of Suspicion
The most basic role for the unconscious in theory is to justify what Paul Ricoeur called "the hermeneutics of suspicion" - any interpretive stance which assumes the surface of the object of study (a text, a social construct, whatever) is a disguise for its true purpose and political interests. The unconscious lets us believe in depth, that there might be layers below the obvious. More generally, the unconscious implies that authors may not know their own motivations, releasing us from the trap of intentionality. It can ground resistive readings, contradicting the patent evidence and literal interpretation.
Positive and Negative
In a critical theory, particularly a politically-engaged one, the concept of the unconscious can play both a negative and a positive role.
Certainly the idea of an unconscious plays into the sort of "paranoia" that some critics complain of in many critical theories. If subjects cannot examine, much less control, a dimonsion of their own motivations and interpretations, then predictive human sciences, reason, collaborative action for the common good, and even communication are at risk. At the same time, an unconscious is a problem for the theory itself, as an epistemological limit: if the unconscious is ultimately inaccessible, then any theory of subjectivity can only go so far in understanding the object of its study.
But by the very same token the unconscious can be taken positively by a theory. In its ineffability, it offers a possible way out from any system of human control. Ideology and cooptation by hegemonic power might operate everywhere we can see - but there's always an elsewhere that we can't see, and that means there's some hope for a way out of domination, at least in the psychic realm. Thus some authors (such as Eric Santner, in My Own Private Germany, his study of psychoanalytic theory's most famous psychotic) have found a strange potential for political progress in the unconscious and its disorders.
1. Why assume they're there at all? Because (and this is the whole motivation of psychoanalysis) the visible, surface mental processes don't appear to offer a very convincing explanation of human behavior. Everyone sometimes acts irrationally, and even perversely - that is, against their own interests. Moreover, even "normal" people exhibit various forms of neurosis, habitual behaviors that have no obvious purpose or cause; to say nothing of those who suffer from psychosis and cannot accurately and consistently distinguish between fantasy and reality, or maintain sufficient control over their own behavior to participate in normal society. For Freud, the unconscious explained these phenomena.
2. "The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud". In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 146-178: 166. Henceforth "Agency". I also quote from "On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis", Écrits 179-225 ("Question"); and "The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious", Écrits 292-325 ("Subversion").
-- Michael Wojcik (wojcikm4@msu.edu)
