The unconscious and its images

Pro Edu, 2019

The psychic is not homogeneous, uniforms, undifferentiated, linear, but it is present in various forms. It has a great functional and existential differentiation and uniformity. It manifests itself in the form of conscious psyche, subconscious and unconscious. The relationship between them, their harmony or conflict, determines the originality of human nature. The unconscious as a form of the psyche constitutes the most controversial level of organization of psychical life. It is stated that psychology stopped placing the notion of conscience in the center of its theoretical and practical preoccupations, making place for the unconscious. The unconscious is not only whatever became automatism, but also what I suppress. Freud explains suppression by a conflict between Superego (which represents the childhood interdictions which became interiorized) and Id, the natural pulsations which we were taught in childhood to blame. Freud urges us, through this, to regain the conscience of what is unconscious. The Superego is a necessary stage in the forming of moral conscience, but it should not be mistaken for the moral conscience itself. The genuine moral conscience does not reduce itself to the Superego. A psychological explanation of the origin of the Superego does not replace the foundation of the moral conscience. Psychoanalysis cannot account for values.

2018

Cristi Bodea's book entitled Hiatus. Problema fenomenologică a inconștientului (Hiatus. The Phenomenological Problem of the Unconscious), which stands as the edited version of the author's PhD dissertation, defended at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, under the supervision of Professor Virgil Ciomoș, focuses on the relationship between Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical approach and Marc Richir's phenomenology, pursuing the articulations of the theme of the unconscious in both theories. In the phenomenological attempt of exhaustively conquering subjectivity as the ultimate source of meaning, the problem of the unconscious stands as a recent milestone, for it unveils an additional layer of subjectivity which seems to complete the scheme envisioned by an entire phenomenological tradition. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, was the one to discover, and, thereafter, to bring into discussion the unconscious as the core structure of subjectivity. Consequently, the inquiries of both contemporary phenomenology and

Word and Text, 2023

The unconscious (das Unbewusste; etymologically, that which is unknown) is a relatively modern concept that naturalized areas of the unknown previously explored by literature, mythology, and metaphysics. Each in their own domain, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three 'masters of suspicion' (according to Paul Ricoeur), debunked the hubristic claims of modern rational consciousness, exposing its social, existential and psychological grey zones. 1 Inspired by, yet critiquing humanity's confidence in the power of reason, their acknowledgement of the limits of the Enlightenment is emblematized in Freud's charting of the conflictual relations between the orderly ego and the unruly id. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud characterized the unconscious as 'inaccessible' and 'incomprehensible'. 2 Building on Freud's structural topology, several strands of psychoanalysis derived from Freud's structural topology have sought to expand on his discovery of the psyche's unconscious dimension, from Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Didier Anzieu, to Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, or Slavoj Žižek, among others. The impact of Freud's discovery has also been registered in trauma theory, by scholars such as Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Dominick LaCapra, as well as in literary and film theorists of various persuasions. 3 In the wake of Shoshana Felman's epoch-making 1977 issue of Yale French Studies titled 'Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading Otherwise', 4 there have been many attempts to keep up the critical spirit of an alternative 'analysis' of literary texts.

Self: an approach to a theoretical construct of a transpersonal psychology of self to other This paper, the first of three, offers a journey made by the psychological self as it travels from philosophical speculations found through the period of German Idealism to early proposals in classical and humanist psychology, then on to Attachment theories and developments of a neurobiology of emotional development, embraced within the framework of the family triad. The study overall, approaches a contemporary perspective on psychological theory and growth stages. The current paper covers a period of development running through Storm and Stress, German Idealism, and Weimar Aesthetic traditions. This preparatory period for the emergence of contemporary psychology runs from around 1800 and the concept of the unconscious, a focus of these times, became well known to the German speaking world then to a lesser degree to Anglophone regions. French and English rational thinking precluded studies of the subconscious and Naturphilosophie, the ontological ground explored here. As proponents of the subconscious and psychology per se, a scientific model also appears through this period. The subconscious, as a necessary agency, comes to support a creative interactive psyche, commonly found within psychological theory. With this in mind Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Carus, Hartmann, Fechner, Wundt, and Goethe, are explored as those presenting support for the appearance of Freud and Jung.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019

This paper is about a central and mostly overlooked aspect of the unconscious as manifested in the clinical work of psychoanalysis. This is its proleptic nature. The unconscious is proleptic in that it performs futural possibilities for the subject. These futural possibilities emerge as potentially significant in the now and the next of the analytic hour-that is,

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

Psychoanalysis, the theory and practice of the 'unconscious', has an unconscious of its own, in the sense of containing unacknowledged assumptions that continue to affect it. The unconscious of psychoanalysis can be seen in the implicit models that it holds of the nature of the human subject, and particularly in the manner in which psychoanalytic 'knowledge' is disrupted by persistent assumptions and recurrent blind-spots that are at best partially recognised. These operate especially strongly in relation to 'otherness'. In this paper, some lingering effects of psychoanalysis' 'unconscious' assumptions are explored. It is argued in particular that the colonial elements of psychoanalysis' heritage are visible in its conceptualisation of violence and primitivity, and specifically in thinking of violence as an 'atavistic' reproduction of a foundational savagery that, in its imagery and in its substance, is caught up with divisions between civilised and barbaric with very particular sociohistorical resonances.

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 2008

speech. The text and the reader's interpretation acquire their own space and role in the generation of meaning. Both are crucial to its production. Thus, the meaning of letters is mobile and volatile. It has feet of clay, sums up the author, who presents a strong groundwork for her views. As can be clearly seen-and as was announced at the beginning of this reviewthe construction of meaning, language and thought are the objects of the manifold approaches included in this volume. The subject is thoroughly and comprehensively explored from a variety of angles and perspectives, which renders the reading extremely profitable and enriching. As a result, the book is highly recommendable to researchers and anyone interested in this subject.

2024

From the very beginning of Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre, but with increasing intensity, one can find expressions that are either explicitly taken from psychoanalysis, or at least have a psychoanalytic meaning. This paper aims to contribute to the existing discourse on Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis by examining the meaning of Bourdieu's most frequently used term, unconscious, which is also a key one in psychoanalysis, in Bourdieu's writings. In a brief introduction, I outline Bourdieu's relationship to psychoanalysis based on the literature and Bourdieu's texts, and argue that although Bourdieu's relationship with psychoanalysis remained controversial over the years, there is a growing integrative tendency, with psychoanalysis playing an increasingly important-even if sometimes hidden-role in his texts. In the main body of the paper, I argue that this tendency does not fully cover Bourdieu's approach to the unconscious, and that although his approach to the unconscious is not independent of the tendency discussed in the previous section, a dichotomy can be observed from the beginning to the end of the oeuvre, namely the parallel use of the unconscious in the sociological and psychoanalytic sense, and the lack of clarity regarding the relationship between the two. Finally, in the last section, I point out that socioanalysis, as an emancipatory project, should have clarified its position on the unconscious, because it marks the limits of the actors' potential for self-reflexivity, which can also shape political strategies.

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly , 2023

The author questions the conceptual basis of the unrepresented, a set of terms including: the unstructured unconscious, figurability, and reverie. Because this terminology proposes a profoundly different metapsychology than Freud developed, the author contextualizes the fate of Freud’s meta- psychology in America and how it was confused with the authority of the classical analyst. Then excerpts of texts by Howard B. Levine, one of the main proponents of the unrepresented, are analyzed to show that the decisive element in Levine’s claim of creating meaning for patients is figurability. The author does a close reading and elaboration of French analyst Laurence Kahn's very thoughtful critique of figurability. Kahn’s scholarship is brought to bear on Freud’s metapsychology, showing how what is at stake are presentations not figures. Figuration and reverie are founded on the projection of referential and narrative coherence onto what is presented by the patient. But the unconscious does exactly the opposite, it presents to consciousness its noncoherent derivatives (presentations). Kahn illuminates Freud’s mode of thinking using the critique of figurability as a springboard to show us what is essential in conceptualizing unconscious functioning.