Seminar 4. 13 July 1977. The Italian Seminars

In some ways it is an advantage to me to know that I don't know any Italian, because I think you can be misled by thinking you do know Italian. Patients seem to talk French, or English or Italian, but what we want to hear is not any of those languages. I find it difficult to say what language we need to listen to; the nearest I can get to it is to say that it is the language of what Freud would call “the unconscious”.

I have seen this stated most clearly recently by Dr Matte Blanco, who mentions this peculiar fact of Freud sometimes talking about “the unconscious”, and at other times talking about something as “unconscious”. They are two different things. Furthermore, I have come across material which seems never to have been what Freud would have called “conscious”. Dr Segal described a situation in which a patient says it is obvious that somebody who is playing the violin is masturbating. I had a patient who, I began to feel, wore his mind inside out – that is to say, like clothes worn inside out: what ought to be on the inside is on the outside. Falling back on metaphorical language, I could say that the patient behaved as if his unconscious was outside. So the interpretations which we would think appropriate formulations of unconscious thoughts and ideas are, in fact, ordinary statements to the patient. He has no difficulty whatever in thinking that the analyst is saying things which are obvious. On the other hand, if we resort to ordinary speech, waking thought, conscious thought, the patient says, “I don't know what you mean.” He has no difficulty in understanding a psychoanalytic interpretation of something we could regard as “unconscious”, but he cannot understand the language we talk when we are wide awake, fully conscious and aware of what we call the “facts”, “reality”.