Gessert Astrid - Introductory Lectures on Lacan

Anouchka Grose

I t's not just in the pub that you meet people who say they don't believe in the unconscious; you also get them on the couch. There is a popular idea that Freud is so outdated and disproven that psychoanalysis surely can't be about all that. If someone knows they've made a Freudian slip, the recognition that they've done so can almost appear to annul it. It becomes a joke, Ha ha, I just said one thing and meant my mother. Knowledge of psychoanalysis is put at the service of defence.

Familiarity with the notion of the unconscious, and all the debate that has sprung up around itplus the current mania for encouraging people to believe they can control everything in their own livesmeans that people are possibly better defended against the concept than they were a hundred years ago. They can see it coming a mile off and can draw on a battalion of reasons not to take it seriously. But still they have symptoms that bring them to therapy. Perhaps the hope is that there will be a number of nice ego-syntonic reasons why they're sufferingbecause so and so was horrible to them and it's not fair, and therapy will help them to get over it. There are plenty of therapies that will aim to do exactly that. But going to psychoanalysis would imply that the unconscious is going to be taken seriously, which is going to mean there's a high chance you might be led to think about things you'd rather not think about; as in, really rather not think about. Which is obviously a strange experience to put yourself through voluntarily.

I will try to describe the mechanics of the unconscious as outlined by Freud. Things often seem to go wrong when the unconscious is depicted as something a bit blurry. Of course the contents of your own unconscious might seem a bit blurry (thanks to repression) but Freud's concept isn't. It's easier to defend oneself against it when it all looks a bit messy and weird. So for clinicians it's important to try to be precise about the machinations of the unconscious, and not be terrorised by people's suspicions around it. But first maybe it's useful to say a bit about the pre-history of Freud's ideas.

The discovery of the unconscious

There's a good deal of debate about how much credit Freud deserves. Did he discover the unconscious? Did he steal the idea from his colleagues? How did the theory come about? Freud himself said, in a short, posthumously published essay, The concept of the unconscious has long been knocking at the gates of psychology and asking to be let in. (1940b, p. 286) According to Freud, the idea had been lurking around in philosophy and literature for centuries, but science hadn't known what to do with it. Freud found a way to talk about it and to theorise it. So there's no claim from Freud that it's a big innovation of his, just that he found a different way to think and speak about it.

Before Freud you have a long history of people trying to understand mysterious symptoms, particularly in women. Why were these things happening that had no obvious organic cause? The way of thinking about itand treating itwas most often that it had something to do with sex. Women were prescribed massages (masturbation by a doctor) in the hope that an orgasm would make them better. This treatment was so commonand impracticalthat the Victorians invented clockwork vibrators to get the job done more efficiently. There was no mention of an unconscious in any of this, but a big question about why these mysterious things happened. Was it demons, gases in the womb, no sex or no babies? Did it only happen to women? And so on.

Outside medicine you had the perfectly commonplace idea that people might do or say things without knowing why. They might also think about things they didn't want to think about, or keep getting into situations that made them suffer, or they might do self-destructive things. But how to understand all that? There was the classic question of fate vs. personal responsibility. Was there an external force, like God, that threw things in your way and made you miserable in order to teach you something? Were you master of your own destiny? Could you control your actions and feelings? There were endless debates about passion vs. reason. Is it best to contain your feelings and try to behave rationally, or does that make you a hollow or desiccated person? Is it better to live according to your emotions, even if you don't know why you have those emotions? Countless philosophical essays, novels, poems, and paintings try to say something about whether people are rational, controlled beings or uncontrollable balls of sentiment. So, there are these big questions about who's in charge, and lots of interest in the question, but none of it particularly scientific.

Immediately preceding Freud there were four very important figures in the medical world looking into questions about the mechanics of the mind. Charcot was a famous neurologist at Salptrire Hospital who developed the idea that some of the physical symptoms he was seeing in the hospital were caused by what he called traumatic hysteria. People would arrive suffering from a variety of seizures, pains, and contractures and his innovation was to link their symptoms to traumatic events in their pastmaybe accidents or crashes. Perhaps they even sustained real injuries as a result of these accidents, but Charcot concluded that it was the unsettling idea of the accident that was the cause of their ongoing illness. He also thought that hysteria had a hereditary component. Freud studied with Charcot in the mid 1880s and was obviously impressed and influenced by him.

Thanks to Charcot, the diagnosis of hysteria became very fashionableanything a bit strange or hard to explain would fall into that category. So here was a super-famous doctor, giving quite spectacular demonstrations. He would induce a hysterical state using hypnosis. There's a well-known painting by Andre Brouillet showing a woman collapsing in front of Charcot and a room full of very interested doctors. The medical establishment had previously been rather suspicious of hypnosis, thanks to associations with Mesmer, who was seen as pretty suspect. Charcot's experiments brought it into the medical mainstream. He attempted to use it both as a cure and as a device to demonstrate the difference between normal and hysterical states. People could be induced to act hysterically under hypnosis. So Charcot was launching himself into a hot debate in an exciting way and sort of spewing ideas out and getting everyone interested. Many of his students took up his ideas, like Freud, Pierre Janet, and Hyppolite Bernheim (who were all interested in hypnosis), as well as Tourette, and a number of others who went on to become important in the medical world. But it wasn't just the medical establishment who was impressed; there was also huge interest from outside.