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It is indeed because something has been knotted to something like speech that the discourse can undo it.
Psychoanalysis is the “talking cure,” by definition, but how we understand this depends on how we understand language and its relation to conscious thought, the unconscious, and subjectivity. These are complex and contested matters. Here I wish to make three points, First, I follow a long tradition that identifies self-reflexive conscious thought with language and speech. Second, I oppose any substantive notion of the unconscious as a repository of repressed representations—wishes or fantasies—and its corollary whereby therapeutic action is viewed in terms of the detection and interpretation of these unconscious meanings. Instead, I highlight a conception of the unconscious that refers to what cannot be symbolically represented and made available to thought. Finally, I support the position that subjectivity lives in language and is maintained by dialogue, in tandem with nonverbal expressions. For each of these points I will make connections to clinical practice.
We can look back as far as Plato (in the Sophist) to link thinking to language. It is easy to forget when we are sitting with patients that we are engaged in exchanges of words, not just talking about important matters to which our words refer. In ordinary relationships we may assume that we share common references in our conversations, but in psychoanalysis we know that is not necessarily the case. Rather than take meaning for