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… [My writing] completely follows the dictates of the unconscious, on the well-known principle of Itzig, the Sunday rider. “Itzig, where are you going?” “Do I know? Ask the horse.” … On the other hand, I do of course believe in the conclusion.
I postulate an essential paradox, one that we must accept and that is not for resolution.
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
In spite of their fundamental differences, the alternative readings of Freud offered by Castoriadis (1987) and Lacan1 are similarly motivated by the desire to restore Freud's radical view of the unconscious as a distinct and irreducible dynamic force in psychological life in the face of subsequent neo-Freudian and ego-psychological revisions. In essence, both of these writers insist on preserving the full impact of Freud's Copernican revolution. For both of them, however, this radical tendency co-exists with other agendas which profoundly shape the way they trace the “return to Freud.” Lacan, for one, is equally concerned with the preservation of psychoanalysis as a rigorous objective science rather than merely an exploration of (inter)subjective experience, which explains his turn to structural linguistics as a source of method for the study of the unconscious. Castoriadis, on the other hand, wants to avoid deterministic reduction which to him poses a threat to the autonomy and authenticity of individual agency, and he institutes the psyche as a radically creative origin of all human endeavor, the source of method rather than its