ABSTRACT
Pascal Sauvayre and Orsi Hunyady have offered an ingenious interweaving of the theories of the unconscious written by Jacques Lacan and Harry Stack Sullivan. The psychoanalytic theories of North America and France have been virtually incommensurable for a very long time. Sullivan’s prototaxic, parataxic, and syntaxic modes of experience are developmental stages that, like Lacan’s real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of experience, also become aspects of psychic functioning that continue throughout life. Sauvayre and Hunyady first give Lacan’s version of this argument, beginning with a quotation from Lacan. Sauvayre and Hunyady focus on what Sullivan called “uncanny emotion” and want to link it to the kind of experience Lacan refers to when he directs to Freud’s patient’s dream of the burning child. Sauvayre and Hunyady want to consider the possibility that the baby takes on the mother’s terrible, unconscious anxiety via what Sullivan calls emotional contagion.
