Hello,

And welcome to this (later than usual) edition of Lacanian Mojo, an email newsletter written by me –Neil Gorman.

This week has been a hectic week for me, and I have not had the normal amount of time that I usually have to write this newsletter. But, rather than just letting the week go by without sending you anything, I’ve decided to write a quick and somewhat off-the-cuff essay sort of thing about an aspect of psychoanalysis that has been rattling around in my head for a bit. I hope that it offers you something.

From Freud to Lacan:

My introduction to psychoanalysis was through reading Freud, The Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis in particular. From the start, I was fascinated by Freud’s idea of the unconscious, this part of us that has a mind (i.e., desires) of its own, which influences us in all sorts of unexpected ways in our day-to-day life.

As I read Freud’s lectures (and later his other early writings), I would think to myself, “Yes! This unconscious thing makes so much sense to me! Now I understand more about why I do some of the crazy things I do, and I also think I understand why other people do the crazy things they do! It’s that wily unconscious.”

Then as time went on, I came across something that gave me pause –some text from the introduction to the book Psychoanalytic Politics by Sherry Turkle. The text concerned Freud’s reaction to the American response to psychoanalysis.

Only five years after his American visit, Freud noted that something was going wrong in America. Americans were accepting psychoana­lysis too easily, and Freud took this as a sure sign that they were misun­derstanding it, watering it down, and sweetening it to their taste. […] Freud believed that too easy an acceptance meant that psychoanalysis was being denatured, and he also believed the converse: resistance to psychoanalysis suggested that it was being taken seriously. For Freud, psychoanalysis was so deeply subversive of common-sense ways of thinking about the world that to understand it was to resist it.

This text made me ask myself: Am I accepting the idea of the unconscious too easily? If I am, do I not understand what the unconscious is?

It was after considering these questions that I encountered Lacan’s work. (My initial encounter with Lacan is something I’ll write about one day…)

Lacan & Miller made the (real) unconscious a wild thing again:

When I read Lacan’s work, particularly his later work and Miller’s work, after I entered into my own analysis, I discovered a version of the unconscious that I did not understand.

An unconscious that was wild and beyond the signifier’s power (i.e., beyond both the symbolic’s and the imaginary’s ability to “make sense” of things).

That is to say, and I encountered what is called the real unconscious.

Lacan introduced me to the idea of the real, and by proxy, the real unconscious. Miller’s work on the differences between what he termed the transferential unconscious (or the unconscious of Freud and the early Lacan) and the real unconscious, which is encountered in the late Lacan, was something that I struggled to understand for a long time.

I still struggle with how to think about the real unconscious today, and I probably will always struggle with it. (That’s sort of how the real unconscious works, it’s the stuff that outside of the imaginary, the symbolic, and therefore outside meaning as such.) But I think I understand it more than I used to.

What is the Transfereential unconscious –Gorman’s short version:

The transferential unconscious is the unconscious, as Freud articulated it and as Lacan worked with it for some time. The unconscious as a thing, or perhaps a place, within us where all of the things we desire but can’t consciously admit to desiring coalesce. It is the “part of us with a mind of its own” that is operant in parapraxis, things like

• Slips
• Forgettings
• Repetitive bungled actions
• In jokes
• In daydreams and fantasies
• In dreams

The transferential unconscious was the unconscious that was repressed through socialization. The unconscious is made up of desires that can’t be destroyed but can be banished. The unconscious where these banished desires send coded messages “ciphers” that an analyst might tune into and re-describe to an analysand in a way the analysand can hear and take in.

The transferential unconscious is the unconscious we might be able to “make sense of” if we pay attention to it.

I’d say that working this way is genuinely useful for many people. When we are working with/through the transferential unconscious, we are working under the assumption that we can discover some hidden truth for the analysand. We are making meaning of the seemingly non-sensical messes that he/she keeps making in his/her life. It takes the symptom, which is a mystery, and “makes sense” of it. Or, more accurately, when we work with and through the transferential unconscious, we work with an analysand to make sense of most of their symptom, but we can’t ever completely solve the mystery of the symptom.

However, even when the work we do with or through the transferential unconscious is very good, very helpful, very practical, there will always be something of the analysand’s symptom that remains unexplained. There will always be something of the symptom that we can’t understand or make sense of. Today many Lacanian analysts call this opaque remainder the real unconscious.

What is the Real Unconscious –Gorman’s short version:

The real unconscious is what is beyond.

• Beyond the pleasure principle
• Beyond the symbolic
• Beyond the imaginary
• Beyond our ability to think and speak about it
• Beyond our ability to make sense of things

It is the part of the symptom (the sinthome) that can’t be given up. It is the lack that needs to be lack for the subject to exist as a lacking (castrated) subject.

It is the part of the symptom the analysand can’t talk about with words. Instead, it is revealed in body events, such as unexplained tears, panic attacks, passing out, insomnia, and sometimes as things like calorie restriction, body modifications, or self-injury.

Only after an analysis starts, then lasts a good long time, that an analyst and analysand pair might be able to catch enough of a glimpse of this real unconscious together. If and when this happens, the analyst might be able to use something beyond interpretation to communicate something of the enigma of the real unconscious to the analysand in a way that allows the analysand to re-orient him or her self in relation to the core of their symptom (i.e., their lack, their sinthome, etc.)

Fin:

I wrote all the above in one take. I honestly don’t know how it will be received by anyone who reads it.

Regardless, I remain yours, in psychoanalytic solidarity.

-N