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III. D. Unconscious in the French Tradition Post-Freudian France has been the scene of astounding theoretical energy and output. Ripples of this intellectual explosion have had impact on other French-speaking psychoanalytic communities in Europe and North America. English translations of this work have also been influential in some sectors of North America and Great Britain. Keeping themselves partially distant from the object relation perspective while maintaining a view of the unconscious closer to the Freudian one and more inclined to view their work as an elaboration/dialogue with the Freudian oeuvre, French analysts share some general suppositions concerning the concept of the unconscious. Adhering mostly to the Topographic point of view (First Topography), for the French, there is an absolute separation between the preconscious/conscious and the unconscious. Moreover, the unconscious cannot be revealed by observation, but only deduced after the event in an après coup deduction. The ego ( le moi ) is defined as much by its identificatory “alienation” in the desire of the Other as by its capacity for adaptation; it is thus subjective, more a self than the defensive and reality-oriented creature that ego psychology depicts. For French analysts everything that is ego is listened to as emerging from the unconscious. There is an absence of the idea of a conflict free sphere. The moi is also composed of unconscious objects and part objects. Where Ego Psychology speaks of the analyst as maintaining a certain constant distance from the patient, French authors, especially Bouvet and somewhat later, Green, McDougall, and Roussillon, early on proposed a flexible approach to patients, paying attention to their reaction to distance. Moreover, and due to the great influence of Jacques Lacan, French analysts have been obliged to reflect on the function of speech and language not only in the analytical situation, but also as the structuring principle of the unconscious. Jacques Lacan´s (1993) dictum that “the unconscious is fundamentally structured, woven, chained, meshed, by language” (p 119) has been influential for the succeeding generations of analysts whether they have accepted it or opposed the idea. A large group of analysts in the Paris Psychoanalytic Society , including among others Pasche, Marty, Lebovici, Diatkine, Fain, Braunschweig, McDougall, Green, and Neyratt, opposed Lacan´s theory and refused to compound drive and language. For Lacan, the unconscious is not something given, waiting to be interpreted; rather, the unconscious is revealed in an act, mostly but not exclusively, in a speech act. Lacan further warned against misunderstanding the unconscious as the seat of the instincts pure and simple. To Lacan, the term unconscious concerns the very idea of how to conceptualize the subject. His whole project is accordingly the study of the unconscious subject. Lacan (2004) recast Freud’s terminology of representations as signifiers, in the Saussurian model of language. Lacan was convincing in his emphasis on the combinatory possibilities of the signifier, which determine the ultimate expression of drives. Something (repression) blocks the expression of signifiers, which circulate in the unconscious. In his version, the unconscious consists of repressed signifiers that in turn control access to drive derivatives. This presents a less biologically reductionist and ultimately more culturally sensitive model of the psyche than one based on supposed erogenous sources of activation.
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