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.
Development
1915
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In The Unconscious (1915);The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
1992
reworked by Jean Laplanche
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.
In Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012 (2012);The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (1992);New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987)
Undated
introduced by Sigmund Freud
The word was in use among philosophers before him, but the psychoanalytic concept, an unconscious formed by repression whose contents reach consciousness only once resistances are overcome, is Freud's; Laplanche and Pontalis call it the single word that sums up his discovery.
In The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967)
Relations
- 1915 developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1992 reworked by Jean Laplanche
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.
- introduced by Sigmund Freud
The word was in use among philosophers before him, but the psychoanalytic concept, an unconscious formed by repression whose contents reach consciousness only once resistances are overcome, is Freud's; Laplanche and Pontalis call it the single word that sums up his discovery.
Works
- 1900
Freud's book on dreams, issued by Deuticke in November 1899 with the imprint date 1900, argues that a dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. It sets out a method of interpreting dreams through the dreamer's associations and distinguishes the manifest content of a dream from the latent dream-thoughts. The dream-work turns the latter into the former through condensation, displacement, considerations of representability and secondary revision. The seventh chapter proposes a model of the psychical apparatus made up of the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious, with a censorship between them and two modes of functioning, the primary and the secondary process. The book is also the first printed statement of the theme Freud later named the Oedipus complex. Freud enlarged it in many later editions.
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1915
The longest of Freud's metapsychological papers of 1915, first printed in two parts in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse. Freud argues that unconscious mental processes have to be assumed, and separates three senses of the word unconscious: descriptive, dynamic and systematic, the last referring to the systems unconscious, preconscious and conscious and the censorships between them. He asks whether feelings can be unconscious, and describes the topography and dynamics of repression in terms of the withdrawal of cathexes and of anticathexis. The system unconscious knows no negation or doubt, is governed by the primary process with its mobile cathexes, is timeless, and replaces external reality with psychical reality. A final section draws on the speech of schizophrenics to distinguish thing-presentations from word-presentations: a conscious presentation includes both, an unconscious one only the thing-presentation.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
- 1973
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.
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- 1987
New Foundations for Psychoanalysis
Published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1987, and translated into English by David Macey (Blackwell, 1989) and by Jonathan House (The Unconscious in Translation, 2016). Laplanche draws together research going back to Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, to his earlier work with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Serge Leclaire, and to the first five volumes of his Problématiques seminars, to show how his positions connect. The book gives the first major statement of the general theory of seduction, which he refined for the rest of his life. Holding Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 to have been a going-astray, he generalises seduction from a pathogenic event into the founding situation of every human being. The adult addresses to the child enigmatic signifiers, compromised by the adult's own unconscious, which the child must try to master and translate. Primal repression is the failure of this translation, and its untranslated remainders form the unconscious. On this basis Laplanche extends Freud's translational model of repression into a translational model of après-coup, of trauma and infantile sexuality, and of the constitution of the human subject as a self-narrating, self-theorising creature.
- 1992
The Unfinished Copernican Revolution
A collection of twenty-nine papers by Laplanche written between 1967 and 1992, published by Aubier in 1992 under the subtitle Travaux 1967–1992, reissued in the Presses universitaires de France's Quadrige series, and translated into English by Luke Thurston as The Unfinished Copernican Revolution. Its title essay of 1992 argues that Freud's discovery decentred the human subject toward the other, as Copernicus decentred the earth, but that Freud repeatedly fell back on self-centred, endogenous and phylogenetic explanations. For Laplanche the unconscious is neither inborn nor the expression of an instinctual id: it is an alien within the subject, formed from the untranslated remainders of the other's messages. The other papers trace the path from his readings of Freud in the late 1960s to the general theory of seduction. They treat defence and prohibition, the originary place of masochism in the sexual drive, the principles of mental functioning, the ego and the self, psychosis, anxiety, Melanie Klein, the death penalty and penal retribution, the translation of Freud, temporality and translation, transference as provoked by the analyst, and masochism within the general theory of seduction.
- 2012
Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012
Nicholas Ray's obituary of Jean Laplanche in Radical Philosophy 174 (2012) combines a biography with an account of Laplanche's thought. It follows his life from his birth in 1924 into the family that owned the Château de Pommard in Burgundy. It covers the Lycée Henri IV, where he met Jean-Bertrand Pontalis; the Resistance; the École normale supérieure, where his teachers included Alquié, Bachelard, Hyppolite and Merleau-Ponty; a year at Harvard; his analysis with Lacan until 1963; and his medical thesis on Hölderlin. Ray describes the split of 1963, Laplanche's presidency of the Association psychanalytique de France, his chair at Paris VII from 1970, the journal Psychanalyse à l'Université, the seminars published as Problématiques, and his direction of the French complete works of Freud from 1988. On the work, Ray presents the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967) as a historical dictionary of Freud's concepts and Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970) as the start of a project to 'put Freud to work'. He presents the general theory of seduction, first set out in Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (1987), as a move of seduction from the origin of a pathology to the foundation of every psyche, owing nothing to the therapies of recovered memory. Ray reads Laplanche's whole project as a lifelong analysis of Freud in the service of Freud's own Copernican demand. He ends with analysis as an unweaving, like Penelope's, that allows new knots to form.
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References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973Evidence for a relation
- Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–20122012Evidence for a relation
- The Unfinished Copernican Revolution1992Evidence for a relation
- New Foundations for Psychoanalysis1987Evidence for a relation
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967Evidence for a relation
- The Unconscious1915Evidence for a relation
- The Interpretation of Dreams1900Evidence for a relation