“at the very end of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that “Whether we can attribute reality to unconscious wishes I cannot say” “a descriptive unconscious from the unconscious as he saw it – a separate system that has a distinct character and plays by different rules. For Freud, we are not talking about a non-conscious, like another version of consciousness, or even a sub-conscious at one level ‘deeper’ than conscious, but something distinct in itself, as if on a second stage or in another scene”-have to look for the unconscious as a system that operates on the connection between the conscious and unconscious “This ‘first text’ is just the material that unconscious processes work on. But it is the distortion itself that we are interested in, what happens between the first and second texts.”-focus on the interaction between the two Freud hypothesised a psychical dynamism involving censorship, repression, and compromise formation that takes place between a wish on one hand, and a defence against the wish on the other. “There is a single inscription of the thought – it exists in either the conscious or the unconscious, and whether it is one or the other depends on the level of (libidinal) investment (what Strachey translates as ‘cathexis’) it receives, as if a different light were being shone on the same thing. This he calls the functional hypothesis”-advantage in that it explains how something becomes in the first place; however, does not explain how the unconscious idea stays in place; because wouldn’t repressed unconscious thoughts constantly be pushed into the consciousness? “double inscription of the thought – the same thought exists in both the conscious and the unconscious systems at the same time, so there is a qualitative difference between the two systems. The ‘two texts’ in question therefore are not just the manifest content of the dream and the latent thoughts, but a double inscription of the same thought. This he calls the topographical hypothesis.”-advantage in that it may explain how we can still accept an idea consciously and also recognize its unconscious status, however, it doesn’t account for why one cannot shift an unconscious complex just by pointing it out and drawing attention to it. “Politzer wanted to emphasise the individual, personal, and subjective status of the unconscious. In this sense his was a fundamentally phenomenological position. The unconscious, for him, expresses a first-person drama via a “personal dialectic…Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud’s impersonal characterisation of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology, and he thought Freud’s metapsychology had created just that.” “For the rest of his career, as Politzer saw it, Freud pursued this path: the psyche was the battleground of warring forces or agencies like the ego and the id; the censorship operated like a nightwatchman or a border guard between the unconscious and consciousness; life and death drives vied over civilisation itself just as they did within the individual, and so forth.”-believed there was no disguise, just people expressing the same thing in different ways: instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn’t derivative of anything – like an interplay of psychical forces in conflict, as Freud thought. It is simply the same idea expressed differently. We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them-still emphasizes the intentionality of the unconscious as a driving force; Instead of looking for alternative modes of ‘expression’ of a fully conscious idea, the notion of a ‘dynamic’ unconscious means that the output of the unconscious will bear the mark of its processes. Interpretation therefore involves interpolating the manifest text as if the unconscious were a kind of lost discourse “… The unconscious would not be a ‘content’, but a ‘force, and the dream would be nothing but the treatment of preconscious thoughts in the mode of unconscious functioning”-Instead of an unconscious that articulates a wish in the first person, Lacon sees the unconscious as a series of processes that operate independently of the subject; things change depending on the context its placed in “There may be a totally different inscription of the same signifier in consciousness and in the unconscious. These inscriptions are the same on the plane of the signifier, but they are, on the other hand, different in that they turn their battery to occupy topographically different places. That a certain signifying formation can be at one level or another is precisely what will ensure it a different import in the chain as a whole”
- The unconscious is a dynamic system characterised by a series of processes that operate according to fundamentally different rules to those of consciousness/pre-consciousness.
- In this sense the unconscious is an entirely different reality – as if in another scene or on another stage to that of consciousness – but not simply a ‘sub’-conscious or another form of consciousness.
- We should therefore approach it as a second text. Even if the terms it uses are the same as those of consciousness (a double inscription), the mechanisms of its writing are particular to it.
- The unconscious can be said to transmit a meaning, but this meaning does not imply an intentionality. We can never pin an unconscious meaning down to a single wish expressed in the optive, first-person form ‘I want….’. The unconscious only finds expression in a contradictory, combinatorial character.
- To quote Laplanche’s own beautifully concise conclusion, “The unconscious is a phenomenon of meaning, but without any communicative finality”. The unconscious, in other words, communicates nothing. There is no ‘intentionality’ on the part of the unconscious to push a certain meaning or signification forward.