Back to Table of Contents
unconscious. Thus, opposing Lacan, Laplanche (1999a) contended that the unconscious is not structured like a language, as there is neither a code nor messages in the unconscious. The unconscious consists of isolated signifiers bereft of any ‘referentiality’. To mark his distance from the Lacanian signifier, Laplanche changed his enigmatic signifiers to enigmatic messages . Substituting Freud’s idea of repression with that of ‘ translation ’, Laplanche (1999b, 2011) has paved the way for an inter-subjective explanation of the constitution of the unconscious . Because of the activation of her unconscious sexuality in the course of ordinary caretaking of the child, the adult transmits enigmatic messages. The child will translate these messages as well as he or she can. What is lost in translation constitutes the unconscious of the child. Because the unconscious of the adult is sexual, an infantile sexual , this sexual is what is transmitted to the child as enigma. Placing himself apart from Laplanche and others who have favored Freud’s first topography, André Green has in his numerous writings pointed to the second topography as being more helpful in the work with non-neurotic patients. As a consequence, his approach to the concept of the unconscious has taken a slightly different course from those French analysts mentioned so far. Also referring back to Freud, Green (2005) argues that the unconscious-as- system is made up of representations and affects which “excludes the sphere of word- presentation” and he takes this to mean, “that the unconscious can only be constituted by a psyche which eludes the structuring of language ” (emphasis added, 2005, p 99). With Freud’s introduction of an unconscious ego, the status of the unconscious was modified; it was no longer limited to the contents of the repressed but concerned its very structure. This important development in Freud’s theory has opened the door to the modes of thinking, as Green argues, “that are alien to ordinary common sense” and which we find in non-neurotic structures (ibid. p. 205) In Green’s portrait of the psyche, the economic factor of the drives is essential: the unconscious consists of a branching network of drive derivatives (as presentations of things) seeking a pathway toward discharge. Whether these drive derivatives are representations or presentations and whether they can attain figurability through the mind of the analyst has been a subject of a new Freudian scholarship, theory and debate (Bottella, 2005, 2014; Kahn, 2013, 2014). The dynamic nature of these representations (that represent a primary form of the drive) move them toward action or consciousness. The moving, dynamic aspect of the body-based drives of the unconscious always seeking discharge and determining the actions of the individual has everyday clinical resonance (Green, 2005). Green (1973) was also influential in developing a theory of affect, whereby affect represents a different way of conceiving of the presence of the body in speech. Lacan (1959-60, p. 132) viewed the pursuing of affect in North American psychoanalysis as leading to “an impasse”, since meaning is rather an effect of the signifier. However, in his later seminars (Lacan, 1999), he began to speak about what was not or could not be represented of the (traumatic) Real, as derived from Freud. So here there is a conception of the unconscious by Lacan as the absence of representation and what cannot be spoken and which has become a major focus of French study in recent years.
994
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online