1915: "divide the dream into two 'text's - the manifest text, the part Freud remembers when he wakes up, and the latent text, the thoughts and associations that come to him when thinking about the dream. Rather than one being conscious and the other unconscious, it's clear that both texts' are in fact conscious or perfectly capable of becoming conscious. So we have to look for the unconscious in a system that operates on the connection between the two"
Common currency of two systems (conscious + unconscious): thought. What constitutes "a thought"?
1928: Georges Politzer's Critique of the Foundations of Psychology
"The unconscious, for [Politzer], expresses a first-person drama via a "personal dialectic" as he called it (Politzer, p. 69). The job of interpreting the formations of the unconscious - dreams, for example - is one of uncovering these intimate rather than conventional significations... Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud's impersonal characterization of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology"
"Instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn't derivative of anything... It is simply the same idea expressed differently... We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them"
1960: "This second text is inscribed, but we need to look for its inscription in strange places, which he says may range from the body, memories, distortions of memories, semantic evolution, and cultural traditions (Ecrits, 259)"
"Prägnanz is the idea, drawn from Gestalt psychology, that our visual perception has the tendency to organize the images we see into a neat, regular cohesion... for Laplanche, this provides a model for how unconscious and conscious systems interact"
Leclaire: "The unconscious is not the ground which has been prepared to give more sparkle and depth to the painted composition: it is the earlier sketch which has been covered over before the canvas is used for another picture. If we use a comparison of a musical order, the unconscious is not the counterpoint of a fugue or the harmonics of a melodic line: it is the jazz one hears despite oneself behind the Haydn quartet when the radio is badly tuned or not sufficiently selective. The unconscious is not the message one strives to read on an old parchment: it is another text written underneath and which must be read by illuminating it from behind or with the help of a developer" (quoted by Lemaire, p. 137-138)
The way this article frames the unconscious, it seems like the semiotics of the unconscious becomes a necessary task. However, if knowing the unconscious becomes impossible, perhaps a better approach would be an "unconscious of semiosis"?
I arrived at the end of this article with a distinct feeling of "Totally, yes, this seems like a good synthesis of the three major psychoanalytic dialectics being juxtaposed." AND, I found myself thinking, BUT, would this track across other cultures, types of ability, cognitive developments, etc.?
Both Wilson and Hewitson discuss the unconscious as processes and systems of processes and entanglements and engagements and of things which don't simply add on top of one another but combine and synthesize into entirely new realities/sciences/dialectics. This makes sense in the language we share, but I can't help thinking about how this would translate (or more likely not translate) into differently arranged cognitive, linguistic, developmental, and cultural systems.
For example, the idea of consciousness as topographical or economic, place-based or exchange-based, may not work in cultures which see place in an entirely different fashion, e.g. as parts of their shared biology (water as part of the same 'us' our bodies and trees and spirits occupy). Or in which the conception of 'things' is continuous, rather than discrete, such as the Pirãha tribe who treat both color and number as continuous, relational concepts which cannot be separated or disarticulated as a red scarf or three horses. Similarly, would this model work for someone who is blind and dreams without image, or someone who is deaf and dreams without sound? For infants or people with developmental differences who operate without language, with or without a sense of separateness of 'I' from 'Other', or in a culture in which meanings are rigidly fixed, where no meaning is ever fixed and in which every thing is relational already?
Fundamentally, I think I agree with the final (dis/re)articulation of the unconscious in Hewitson's five clear arguments, especially to the nature of the unconscious as a different reality, subject to its own rules and writing, but I simply don't agree with the lack of intentionality. I think both of these articles would have benefitted from the discussion of affect and sensation - of how one feels sensationally and emotively about a dream, how the dream itself felt. So many of my own dreams go the same way - mazelike buildings, trying to accomplish something but coming up against roadblocks every few steps, grand architecture to explore - but the feeling tends to tell me more about the dream than the content. Sometimes these journeys feel exploratory, evocative of awe, and sometimes they are stressful, sometimes frightening, occasionally resulting in a cold sweat, bolt out of bed awakening. This, to me, says more about the dream than whether I was navigating a literal maze, a maze of people, a confusing building, etc.
This brings me back to the question of how people of other types of cognition and culture might experience the unconconscious, and whether more could be determined from the feeling of dreams than from the interpretation of the signifier-signified process/relationship/system.
“at the very end of the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud admitted that “Whether we can attribute reality to unconscious wishes I cannot say”
“a descriptive unconscious from the unconscious as he saw it – a separate system that has a distinct character and plays by different rules. For Freud, we are not talking about a non-conscious, like another version of consciousness, or even a sub-conscious at one level ‘deeper’ than conscious, but something distinct in itself, as if on a second stage or in another scene”
-have to look for the unconscious as a system that operates on the connection between the conscious and unconscious
“This ‘first text’ is just the material that unconscious processes work on. But it is the distortion itself that we are interested in, what happens between the first and second texts.”
-focus on the interaction between the two
Freud hypothesised a psychical dynamism involving censorship, repression, and compromise formation that takes place between a wish on one hand, and a defence against the wish on the other.
“There is a single inscription of the thought – it exists in either the conscious or the unconscious, and whether it is one or the other depends on the level of (libidinal) investment (what Strachey translates as ‘cathexis’) it receives, as if a different light were being shone on the same thing. This he calls the functional hypothesis”
-advantage in that it explains how something becomes in the first place; however, does not explain how the unconscious idea stays in place; because wouldn’t repressed unconscious thoughts constantly be pushed into the consciousness?
“double inscription of the thought – the same thought exists in both the conscious and the unconscious systems at the same time, so there is a qualitative difference between the two systems. The ‘two texts’ in question therefore are not just the manifest content of the dream and the latent thoughts, but a double inscription of the same thought. This he calls the topographical hypothesis.”
-advantage in that it may explain how we can still accept an idea consciously and also recognize its unconscious status, however, it doesn’t account for why one cannot shift an unconscious complex just by pointing it out and drawing attention to it.
“Politzer wanted to emphasise the individual, personal, and subjective status of the unconscious. In this sense his was a fundamentally phenomenological position. The unconscious, for him, expresses a first-person drama via a “personal dialectic…Politzer rejected what he saw as Freud’s impersonal characterisation of the unconscious in terms of agencies, forces, and psychical economy. Politzer was opposed to any abstraction in psychology, and he thought Freud’s metapsychology had created just that.”
“For the rest of his career, as Politzer saw it, Freud pursued this path: the psyche was the battleground of warring forces or agencies like the ego and the id; the censorship operated like a nightwatchman or a border guard between the unconscious and consciousness; life and death drives vied over civilisation itself just as they did within the individual, and so forth.”
-believed there was no disguise, just people expressing the same thing in different ways: instead of two texts in reality we have just one. The dream isn’t derivative of anything – like an interplay of psychical forces in conflict, as Freud thought. It is simply the same idea expressed differently.
We can still say the dream has a meaning, but that meaning is immanent to it in the same way that the theme of a play is immanent to its text, or the laws of gravity are immanent to the forces of nature. It does not exist separately alongside them
-still emphasizes the intentionality of the unconscious as a driving force;
Instead of looking for alternative modes of ‘expression’ of a fully conscious idea, the notion of a ‘dynamic’ unconscious means that the output of the unconscious will bear the mark of its processes. Interpretation therefore involves interpolating the manifest text as if the unconscious were a kind of lost discourse
“… The unconscious would not be a ‘content’, but a ‘force, and the dream would be nothing but the treatment of preconscious thoughts in the mode of unconscious functioning”
-Instead of an unconscious that articulates a wish in the first person, Lacon sees the unconscious as a series of processes that operate independently of the subject; things change depending on the context its placed in
“There may be a totally different inscription of the same signifier in consciousness and in the unconscious. These inscriptions are the same on the plane of the signifier, but they are, on the other hand, different in that they turn their battery to occupy topographically different places. That a certain signifying formation can be at one level or another is precisely what will ensure it a different import in the chain as a whole”