This except of a lecture by Neus Carbonell at the London Workshop of the Freudian Field on November 4th, 2023 gives us a quick look at how Lacan renewed Freud’s discovery of the unconscious by working with language and its equivocal nature. The London Workshop of the Freudian Field is a program under the direction of Jacques-Alain Miller.
Today we have the pleasure of devoting a couple of hours to Sigmund Freud’s unforgettable first four Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. With the exception of the « Introduction”, the first three lectures of Freud’s series are devoted to the parapraxes. Freud clearly felt that an introduction to psychoanalysis should begin there, as he states: “I shall return to the parapraxes, in connection with which problems important for psychoanalysis can be worked out with far greater clarity”.[1] Freud isolates the most important problem for psychoanalysis, that is, language and truth, with all the derivations of this conjunction.
In reading these lectures we begin to appreciate the scope of the Freudian discovery and how it continues to challenge us today. We are also guided in our reading by what we learn from Lacan, who knew how to draw the consequences from the Freud’s texts. In the Écrits « Function and Field of Speech and Language » of 1953, the beginning of his teaching, as he himself wanted to call that moment, Lacan took Freud’s three great works, The Interpretation of Dreams, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and read them in the structure of language. At the end of his teaching, in “The Geneva Lecture on the Symptom” of 1975,[2] Lacan returns to the parapraxes in order to underline the consequences of Freud’s discovery. That is, the effects of language on the speaking being.
From parapraxes to the equivoque
Freud foregrounds the concept of unconscious knowledge as the subject of psychoanalysis. Let me refer to a rather long quotation from Lacan’s « Geneva Conference on the Symptom » which draws out the consequences of Freud’s discovery:
« Freud must have realized that the utterance of a bungled action only acquires value through the explanations of a subject. How to interpret a bungled action? We would be groping about in total obscurity if the subject did not say one or two little things about it, which allow us to say to him: ‘But finally, when you took your key out of your pocket to enter my house, the analyst’s house, that has a meaning anyway—and depending on how far you have gone, the meaning will be explained to you in a different way—either because you think you are in his house or that you wish to be in his house or even, moreover, that the fact of putting the key in the lock proves something that is connected with the symbolism of the lock and the key. […] How to sustain a hypothesis such as that of the unconscious-if one does not see that it is the way in which the subject, if there is any other subject than that which is divided, is impregnated, one could say, by language »[3].
Lacan emphasizes that the signifier is embodied in language, it is jouissance substance. Thus, equivocity constitutes the very nature of language. Unlike the univocal systems of communication that we find among animal species, the species of speaking beings is subject to the equivoque of the language that dwells within each one of us. This is the cause of the existence of the unconscious. And, therefore, the importance of equivocity in the analytic cure lies in the fact that an analysis carried through to the end must be capable of bearing witness to a new know-how with the equivocities of the subject’s history.
[1] Freud, S. “Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis” Complete Works, p. 3168
[2] Lacan, J. “La Conférence à Gènece sur le symptôme” La Cause du Désir, 2017/1 (nº 95), pp 7-24.
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
