Freud theorized his conceptual system, regarding the Unconscious, as one formed of three distinct psychological domains: the Unconscious, the pre-conscious and the conscious (Brooker, 2003, 258; Freud, 2005). Instincts, internal conflicts and unacceptable desires (the drives) gravitate to the first of the three categories, being excluded from the conscious mind through processes of censorship, displacement and denial (Elliott, 2001, 18). Evidence of the Unconscious has been found in dreams, slips of the tongue, obsessions and psychological symptoms of diverse traumas (Freud, 1920). When these unconscious elements try to enter the conscious stage, they do so in a compromised form ‘after having undergone the distortion of censorship’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, 474). This psychological function of censorship operates like a selective barrier that excludes of the conscious and preconscious domains feelings - such as physical attraction towards parents, or other unsocial instincts - that are related to the child’s initial sphere of raw emotions. These prohibitions are successively internalised by the subject, as failure to do so might lead to hysteria, or other psychological illnesses (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, 390).
The preconscious is what evades immediate awareness, without being unconscious in the strict sense of the word: e.g. knowledge and memories still accessible to consciousness at will, but not yet present, or recalled in it (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, 325-326) - like the residues of dreams. The main difference between the Unconscious and preconscious is dictated by the presence of censorship in the former that does not allow unconscious contents and processes to pass into the preconscious without undergoing the transformations mentioned above. To be more precise, a ‘secondary censorship’ is likewise present in the passage from the preconscious to the conscious, the main function in being is to distort unconscious memories, rather than select them, in order to prevent disturbing thoughts from reaching consciousness. In this way, a person is freed from the unconscious burden and this allows attention to focus on a subject (ibid., 326).
Finally, consciousness is situated at the frontier between the outside world and the mnemic system, as it receives information both from external and internal sources, transforming
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quantitative phenomena into qualitative form (ibid., 84-86). It operates as a defensive system against numerous memory traces and external sensory stimuli, gradually allowing into consciousness some of the repressed material that has slipped through the preconscious system. This process of transposition to consciousness does not, however, imply a real integration of the repressed into the preconscious system, as such a process needs to be complemented by an effort to overcome the communication resistance between the Unconscious and the preconscious systems. The mechanism of forgetting acts as a self-protective manoeuvre to shut away and therefore to repress desires in conflict with external reality (Elliott, 2001, 51). The subsequent split between the conscious and the unconscious mind arises from the emotional force buried in our Unconscious that can be glimpsed in the dreams, distortions of memory etc. already referred to. Thus, the processes of socialisation, education and, especially, learning to speak in childhood become subjects that need to be studied in order to assess the extent to which a certain amount of repression has taken place, or certain repressed instincts find their articulation in (pre)conscious spheres (Craib, 1994, 65). Moreover, as repression is never complete, it reveals inevitably, through its cracks and imperfection, the unconscious desires and instincts that are meant to stay hidden and inarticulate (Craib, 2001, 23; Elliot, 2001, 51).6.2 Lacan, the Unconscious and the Imaginary
The ‘return to Freud’ in Lacan’s theory developed within a historical and social climate during the sixties in France when the so-called structuralist movement was in full swing. Structuralism can be defined as ‘a mode of analysis of cultural facts which originates in the methods of contemporary linguistics’ (Barthes in Culler, 1975, 3). This movement provided a generation of scholars with the analytical tools to investigate structures of meaning in distant cultures and civilisations, as in anthropology, or to analyse films and advertisements with the same rigour and subtlety traditionally devoted to literary works (Barthes, 1993; Lévi-Strauss, 1972). In a way, this movement can be considered the French equivalent of British Cultural Studies, widening
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the concept of what the analysis of culture should include in its agenda, and admitting into the academic domain the study of mass products and of consumer orientation once despised by the intellectual elite. The contributions in each discipline influenced and contributed to theoretical advancements in other fields of knowledge, within a process of cross-cultural fertilisation and reflexivity. Basic structuralist assumptions were founded on the theory of structural linguistics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure in the twenties (Saussure, 2005), according to which language has a privileged role in determining the structural relations of meaning in cultural practices, based on an articulated system of differences, as anticipated on chapter 1 (paragraph 1.2.9).Lacan’s notion of the Unconscious as being structured like a language (Lacan, 1994, 20) has to be set in the context of this intellectual domain, as it emphasises the linguistic aspect of the split in the Unconscious, suspended between the urgency of unconscious desire to find an expression and the necessity of censorship to prevent conflictual emotion from emerging at the conscious level. For this reason, according to Lacan, the acquisition of language, essential for human development, never achieves the aim of establishing a connection between the word, the signifier, and the thing it describes, the signified (Craib, 1994, 64-65). This relationship is rather conventional: naming one thing, or one emotion, does not put us in a condition to recover the lost dimension, or object of the experience that invoked the emotion in the first place, as language is experienced primarily as a loss of some sort of ‘primary’ meaning. This becomes apparent in the famous infant’s game described by Freud, where the mother disappears for a while, to reappear again after a short while. It is in this gap that we can locate an unconscious fear of losing something/someone we have already lost (Craib, 1994, 65; Lacan, 1994, 25). From this perspective, the Unconscious is ‘that split through which that something is for a moment brought into the light of the day’ (Lacan, 1994, 31). To cope with this fear of loss, we have to internalise an experience, an image, or an object that will enable us to bear the separation from the caretaker. Language itself does not offer this possibility, as we are engaged in a constant struggle to express what we mean without ever succeeding entirely. Furthermore, Lacan’s theory offers the possibility of looking at psychosis in linguistic terms: as when the connection between words breaks down and the psychotic slides from word to word with no apparent order (Craib, 1994, 65). In this case, an
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internal reality of disorder has become an external reality of lack of verbal control, since the censorship system has let through too much psychic energy from the Unconscious to be safely managed by the conscious domain.Similar to the linguistic image, Lacan’s mirror stage (which I briefly introduced at 3.2.4) is based on the idea that the infant, between the age of six and eighteen months, becomes aware of his/her own body by seeing it reflected in a mirror as an image. The French scholar claims that the mirror stage is an identification in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: ‘Namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’ (Lacan, 1977, 2). The identification is not an identity, but a fiction, an imaginary projection, the ideal-I, that needs to be constantly reinforced throughout life. This identity is ultimately based on a relationship and a process of communication, as the child at the very young age requires the caretaker’s assistance to look in the mirror, as if the sense of self can be validated only by the presence of some ‘other’ (Clarke, 2003, 109). The resulting corporeal image of wholeness, corporeal unity, that the mirror provides is opposed by the lack of physical coordination that the child actually experiences. This obstacle, this lack, is overcome by the intervention of another person who helps the child in the process of discovery, ultimately triggering the mechanism of identification, which is based on an illusion of self-sufficiency. Thanks to this imaginary projection, the subject discovers, through self- reflexivity, both his/her position within the symbolic domain of language, and the interplay between individual desires and social constraints (Fuery, 2000, 27). In other words, ‘The original experience of misrecognition generated by the mirror stage becomes the basis of all subsequent experiences of interpersonal relationships, of family ties and friendships, of social and communal bonds, and most importantly of intimacy and love’ (Elliott, 2001, 54).