Unconscious Thought in Lacan

Abstract

This chapter examines the role of unconscious thought in Lacan’s linguistic structuring of unconscious processes and in the definitions of the Imaginary and Symbolic orders of the psyche, and the Real. Jacques Lacan (1901–81) is considered to be the most important post-Freudian writer on the science of psychoanalysis, or the science of the letter as Lacan calls it. Lacan’s concept of unconscious thought combines an analysis of Freudian dream work with an analysis of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. In this way Lacan was able to make a substantial development of Freudian psychoanalysis. Lacan’s concepts also owe much to classical and medieval concepts of unconscious thought, in particular to Plotinus. For Lacan, the unconscious is language, the Other, so unconscious thought can only be conceived with the same linguistic structure as conscious thought. Unconscious thought is present in conscious thought as an absence. The mechanisms of the transition from the unconscious thought to the dream image in Freudian dream work, condensation and displacement, are the linguistic mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy. For Lacan, the Imaginary order of the psyche involves the role of the image or imago in imagination and sense perception; the Symbolic order is the matrix of language into which the imago is inserted, which is the unconscious. The Real is that which is inaccessible to both the Imaginary and Symbolic, and can be compared to the One of Plotinus, that which is inaccessible to nous poietikos and nous pathetikos, unconscious and conscious thought.