Jacques Lacan:The Subject of the Unconscious
THE UNCONSCIOUS AS GAP OR RUPTURE
The unconscious must "be apprehended in its experience of rupture, between perception and consciousness, in that nontemporal locus... Freud calls another scene."[1]
The unconscious manifests itself at those moments in which processes beyond conscious thought disrupt speech, points when language fails. Lacan defines the unconscious in terms of "impediment", "failure" and "splitting". The unconscious is precisely this gap or rupture in the symbolic chain.
Freud distinguished between "word-presentations" -- the product of the secondary processes of conscious thought - and "thing-presentations" - the product of the primary processes of the unconscious.
These are very complicated ideas in Freud and he never explicitly spelt out what he meant by them.
That the unconscious is structured like a language is Lacan's central thesis and probably his most influential contribution to psychoanalysis
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977.: 56
