Freud “specifies that the ideational representative is 'a succession of inscriptions and signs' - not signs o/a drive, but signs by means of which the drive is delegated a place in the unconscious. The energetic component of the drive and its ideational representative become 'fixed' together during the act of primal repression which constitutes the unconscious as a system distinct from consciousness, separated by a barrier of censorship.”
“we have reason to assume that there is & primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the instinct being denied entrance to the conscious. With this, a fixation is established, the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it”
-this seems to signal some morality or ethical repression; or at least a time with history and past that can strengthen by way of imprinting on the unconscious
“The drive is thus bound up with representation or signification as soon as it is capable of psychical registration. Indeed this is its condition of psychical existence. The drive can be lived or experienced only in so far as it acquires a significance.”
-aligning the drive with a sense of meaning
“A stimulus from the external world impinges on nerve endings at the surface of a sense organ. To become conscious, this impulse must undergo a number of inscriptions and transformations. The unconscious resides in that gap or instant between a perception's impingement on the nervous system and its (deferred) conscious registration.”
“the elements which stand out as the principal components of the , manifest content of the dream are far from playing the same part J in the dream-thoughts. And, as a corollary, the converse of this assertion can be affirmed: what is clearly the essence of the dream-thoughts - its content has different elements as its central point”
“As thoughts, wishes, and associations are condensed into singular dream images, the dream is always capable of being situated within the subject's associative chains and memories, thus providing the possibility of interpretation”
-discusses how Freud takes a different approach---one that is more grounded on subjectivity and cryptic clues
“How the dream work utilizes the unchanging unconscious wish and the subject's recent and past experiences to form the dream's manifest appearance is the really interesting and individualizing psychological question. It displaces the intensity and meaning of the unconscious elements onto their conscious delegates, and links the manifest dream-images, through multiple connections, to a number of associated terms in the preconscious and the unconscious.”
-need to remember that the dream report, rather than the actual dream, is the focus on psychoanalysis; it’s not a narrative, which means the entire plot and story does not need to be respected or given equal importance
“Latent dream-thoughts are highly rational, intelligible, ;preconscious thoughts. These are in sharp contrast to the associative chains, which are chaotic, apparently random and linked by 'superficial' connections. Freud mentions that relations of assonance, ambiguity, contiguity, similarity, puns, and jokes are all used in recalling associative links.”
“to explain the functioning of the unconscious. If the 'unconscious is structured like a language', then it is plausible to claim that linguistics and semiotics are necessary for an understanding of the unconscious.”
-The signifer is the material component and the signified is the conceptual/meaningful component, and together, they are the bases of all languages and representational systems; can only be described as what they are not; “'A psychoanalyst should find it easy enough to grasp the fundamental distinction between signifier and signified and to begin to use the two non-overlapping networks of relations that they organize”
“A psychoanalyst is uniquely uninterested in meaning per se, but must instead address the fluid ambiguity and multiple meaning of terms, the duplicity of a language that allows itself to be used in indeterminate, open-ended contexts with several meanings at once”
“He equates metonymy with the process of displacement, that 'veering off of signification' which primary processes utilize to evade the censor. The metaphoric process, the submersion of one term underneath another, provides the general model for the unconscious symptom: the term having 'fallen below the bar', becomes repressed, and the signifier which replaces it or becomes its symptom.”
-Metaphor or condensation freezes and privileges repressed signifiers, leaving them active but confined to their own realm.
Freud posits four key characteristics of the primary processes and the unconscious system they serve:
-the unconscious admits no degrees of certainty or doubt, no forms of contradiction, no logical, grammatical, or causal relations. All that exists in the unconscious are positive contents, signifiers, cathected with more or less affect. Because they are usually visual in form, they can only be regarded as positive rather than differential terms, terms with no relations between them;
- unconscious processes are not temporally regulated - they are not arranged chronologically, and they are not subject to the normal processes of decay and fading. The unconscious is a permanent, unchanging, system whose dynamic comes from its individual contents striving for consciousness. The unconscious content has no index of age, and always functions as a current force;
- unconscious processes are regulated by the pleasure principle, not the reality principle. Unconscious ideas or signifiers have no 'indications of reality' which could guarantee a distinction between whats the product of fantasy, and what is an effect of reality; and
- the libidinal energies of the unconscious, although diminished through the processes of repression, have a relatively free mobility compared to preconscious/conscious wishes. By means of metaphor/condensation and metonymy/displacement, the libidinal cathexes of an unconscious idea can be shifted onto expedient substitutes, and through them it can gain some pleasure in compromise form through evasion of the censor.
-Lacan elaborates by discussing how the primary processes by which the unconscious acquires a delegate in conscious life are metaphor and metonymy, therefore, even if the unconscious signifiers are primarily visual, they are treated as if they were verbal à They can only be interpreted when positioned in a verbal context by means of the chains of association; psychoanalysis is indeed 'the talking cure'. Its only techniques are linguistic or literary (listening, deciphering), its object is nothing but discourse, its questions are directed to the location of enunciation - who speaks in and as the subject? And the processes of 'cure\ where this occurs, are the result of the positioning of symptoms, and indeed the subject's desire, within discourse. Psychoanalysis has no aim, object, procedures, or techniques other than those given by language
