Orientation 6
“In 1950 there was a debate in the psychoanalytic movement on the unconscious: is it made of biological traces, is it in ourselves? Is it outside of us?
Lacan proposed the interpretation that the unconscious is a system that is not in us but, as with language, lies outside of us. He had a phrase: ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’. He does not refer to language in the linguistic sense, but to the fact that it is there exteriorly. We respond to a system that is not in our brain and not in thinking it but in being subject to its influences on us.”
Éric LAURENT, “Re-tale Therapy”
Translation: Raphael Montague
Orientation 7
“That the biological substrate of the subject is, in analysis, implicated to its core, in no way implies that the causality which analysis discovers there is reducible to the biological.”
Jacques LACAN, « La psychanalyse vraie, et la fausse », Autres écrits, 1958, p. 166.
Translation: Raphael Montague
Orientation 8
“Whence the unconscious, namely the insistence through which desire manifests itself, in other words the repetition of the demand working through it – isn’t that what Freud says of it at the very moment he discovers it?”
Jacques LACAN, Television, 1974/ 1990, p. 8.
Orientation 9
“Defining the unconscious as a knowledge […] is to take it by the end where it is an automaton. This is why Freud himself puts so much emphasis on the Zwangshandlung, compulsive action. That’s it, the definition of the unconscious as knowledge. Whereas to define it as a subject, is on the contrary to place the emphasis not on automaton, but on tuchè, on random encounters, on unforeseen events, and even beyond on the unforeseeable. To take the unconscious as a subject is not at all to take it as already there and carrying effects, but to take it at the level of the effect […] as something that occurs and manifests itself in a random manner. And in this sense, the subject is an event. It is, in the formations of the unconscious, the event of the unconscious.”
Jacques-Alain MILLER, “Les us du laps”; 15 décembre 1999.
Orientation 10
We went to war. We entered – we had to realise – into a war of knowledge, a war between the subjects supposed to know. There is our subject supposed to know and there is theirs. And the stake is vital for us, because the subject supposed to know is the name of the unconscious qua transferential. There is not the unconscious first and then the transference. The very position of the unconscious, its operative position, lies in the transference as a transference of knowledge.”
Jacques-Alain MILLER, “Notre sujet supposé savor”
Translation: Raphael Montague