Concept
Unconscious
In psychoanalysis, the part of mental life whose contents are kept from consciousness and cannot be called into it at will, above all repressed wishes and ideas that stay active and find disguised expression in dreams, symptoms and slips. In Freud's first topography it is a system distinct from the preconscious and the conscious; in the second, unconscious functioning extends to the id and to parts of the ego and superego.
Read more- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 8
- Related
- Parapraxis
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1915 Das Unbewußte justifies the assumption of unconscious mental processes and sets out the special characteristics of the system Ucs.: freedom from contradiction, the primary process with its mobile cathexes, timelessness, and the replacement of external by psychical reality.
reworked by
- Jean Laplanche 1992 For Laplanche the unconscious is neither inborn nor the expression of an instinctual id. It is formed from the untranslated remainders of the adult other's messages, an alien within the subject. He calls Freud's discovery an unfinished Copernican revolution: Freud decentred the subject toward the other but repeatedly fell back on endogenous and phylogenetic explanations.
gave rise to
- Parapraxis The parapraxis is defined by its source in the unconscious: an apparently accidental slip or act is the tolerated expression of thoughts and impulses that consciousness does not know of or will not know of. For Freud slips are, with dreams, the everyday evidence that the unconscious exists in the healthy; Lacan treats them as the very place where Freud went looking for it.