ABSTRACT

As the subtitle of this work is Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious, the reader might think that its content gives very unequal treatment to the first and the second. In fact, there is recognition because there has been misrecognition. As for the latter, it seems it is inevitable. In analysing its forms throughout the preceding chapters, and in as complete a manner as possible, I have said implicitly what has to be recognized if the subject is to be able to live the conflicts between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in a way that is tolerable.Am I claiming that consciousness is recognition? There is no reason to think so.Where there is recognition there is prise de conscience, insight, that is to say, an inwardlooking vision (I have proposed the term introvision).Nonetheless,we are bound to ask ourselves if consciousness is indispensable for recognition.But let us return for a moment to misrecognition.What can be noted about it is the existence of a double grid.Misrecognition is blindingly evident when we enter the heaviest sectors of pathology.One can even argue that, the more the individual is marked by pathology, the greater the misrecognition will be. Psychoanalysis was born and developed, at least during the time of Freud, out of the analysis of the neuroses, forms of pathology neighbouring on normality; I have shown that from the time of the second topography, this was no longer quite true. I have even contended that the modifications which marked the last part of Freud’s work foreshadowed, in a way, the future, that is to say our present. I am quite sure, in fact, that Freud knew intuitively that, in the future,psychoanalysis would have to deal increasingly with non-neurotic structures.1 From the beginning, Freud was obliged to recognize that normality was also inhabited by the unconscious, at least by certain of its particularly rich formations.Thus experiences such as dreams,phantasies, slips of the tongue,bungled actions, acts of forgetting, etc. are common to both ‘ill people’ and ‘normal people’.This is even true of

the experience of transference which is not restricted to the analytic cure and can appear in a variety of circumstances that lend themselves to it. It is not only what I shall call the normality of the ordinary man which shows vestiges of the unconscious; exceptional personalities reveal many aspects of it through their sublimation and their creativity. In fact, the analysis of cultural processes is equally enriching for noting the presence of the unconscious (systems of values, institutions, cultural creations, social organizations, etc.). I have just cited successively ‘ill people’ and ‘normal people’, whether they are ordinary or exceptional. One category is missing, namely, psychoanalysts.That they have to suffer the misrecognition of their unconscious is the very least that can be said, since psychoanalytic training rests on this postulate,without which it would not require the analysis of the future psychoanalyst (second fundamental rule, according to Ferenczi). But that is not all. The fairly detailed examination that I have made of the different doctrines which have occupied the field of psychoanalysis since Freud shows us that they present conceptions of the unconscious that are very different from each other, and even further removed from the work of the founder of psychoanalysis. It is worth noting a current tendency in certain psychoanalytic movements which presents the idea of a continuity between consciousness and unconsciousness. In short, such a conception which, in Freud, could only apply to the system Cs.-Pcs. here embraces the unconscious as well.What is contested, then, is the idea of a radical discontinuity between Cs.-Pcs. and Ucs. And if one adds that with the second topography in which the id replaces the unconscious, the question is no longer even one of discontinuity even but of a real break – which is perhaps the deepest reason for its rejection – then one realizes that adopting this position implies a fundamental disagreement with Freud’s ideas.The answer will be:‘Why not? Does not science consist in demonstrating the errors in the knowledge of earlier epochs?’True enough. But what is at stake here is the consistency and coherence of the psychoanalytic conception of the psyche.As far as my present purpose is concerned, the question raised is that of the relation between misrecognition and recognition.