Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

12-1981

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

Psychology

Major Professor

Charles P Cohen

Committee Members

Harold J Fine, Leonard Handler, F Stanley Lusby

Abstract

This study examines the psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious as formulated by Jacques Lacan and some of his followers. Widely respected in France, Lacan is becoming known outside of his own country as a curious blend of orthodox Freudian and radical revisionist. Lacan's teachings are surrounded by controversy and the parameters of his thought appear impenetrable at first glance. His texts are impossible to follow without a commentary for two reasons: intellectual complexity and deliberate obscurity. Careful examination of his theories reveals that the respect he has earned from his countrymen is not ill-founded as his ideas provide a revitalizing structural perspective on psychoanalytic subjects--particularly, the unconscious.

Lacan advocates a return to the early Freud of the time of The Interpretation of Dreams and the topographical theory of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. From his point of view, the fact of the existence of an unconscious was Freud's greatest discovery and attempts to revise or improve upon the original theory are viewed as efforts to deny or repress the unsettling implications of this discovery. Lacan is not simply a purist, however, as his own theories go far beyond Freud. Applying the models of linguistic theory along with the method of structuralism to parapraxes, dreams, and free associations. Lacan opens new vistas in theorizing about the origin and structure of the psychoanalytic unconscious.

One of Lacan's well-known slogans is that the unconscious is structured like a language. This orientation provides the initial focus of this study--the Lacanian unconscious as a linguistic structure. An examination of one of Lacan's essays, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud," serves as an introduction to Lacan's thinking in this area. Lacanian analyses of two examples of clinical phenomena elaborate further. Freud's forgetting of the name Signorelli is presented as an example of the unconscious as a gap in the conscious discourse. Anthony Wilden's analysis of this parapraxis provides a forum for a discussion of related points. The second clinical example is the dream of a patient in Lacanian treatment. Serge Leclaire's analysis of this dream permits an excursion into drive theory and a unique interpretation of the death instinct.

The theoretical origin of the unconscious was an issue Freud sidestepped which the Lacanians tackle head-on. Lacan's writings reveal a theory of development which relates the acquisition of language to the birth of an unconscious. Followers of Lacan have elaborated this process by associating it with the concept of primal repression. In the second section of this study, Lacan's developmental theory is presented along with six theoretical positions on primal repression.

The structure of the unconscious is then examined from three different perspectives. The first is Lacan's ontological categories of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. Situating the unconscious within this theoretical framework demands that one speak of different forms of the unconscious. Although different in structure, these forms of the unconscious are created by only one process-- negation. This particular interpretation of primal repression is explicated using Wilden's communication theory model, the analog-digital relation. An original model of development is then presented which relates the different forms of unconscious to different stages of negation. In this model, differentiation of self and reality is represented in terms of a movement from zero dimensional space to a three dimensional perspective. This structural interpretation is seen to be in keeping with some of Lacan's more recent formulations regarding unconscious structure and function.

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