Introduction to the Debate

In 1960 the psychiatrist Henri Ey hosted an interdisciplinary conference at the psychiatric hospital in Bonneval in Northern France. The theme for that conference was The Unconscious. Among the philosophers present were Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Jean Hyppolite and among the psychoanalysts, Andre Green, Rene Diatkine, and Serge Lebovici. Jacques Lacan was there but didn't present. Two of his students did.

Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire presented a paper for which they wrote alternate chapters. The paper focused on the idea that the linguistic signifier may be taken as the fundamental element of the unconscious: Freud's Vorstellungrepresentanz Des Triebes. Or what we might call in English: the drive representation's representative. The paper was published in French in 1966 and in English in 1972 making it one of the earliest widely available texts from the Lacanian school.

However, the paper contained a disagreement between its two authors on the fundamental character of the unconscious signifier. For Leclaire, following Lacan, the unconscious signifier was necessarily a linguistic element, existing and operating due to language. For Laplanche it had a status outside of language. The debate was thus formed: Is language the condition for the unconscious as Lacan would have it? Or the reverse: Is the unconscious a condition for language as Laplanche argued?

Fifty years on, we have the benefit of considerable elaboration of theory and practice in returning to this debate. However the matter has never been settled. The fundamental semiotic character of the unconscious representative is still in question. That is the reason for today's debate. It is time to settle this question.

What is at stake is our theory of the subject, the ground on which the unconscious rests, and the basis for our clinical interventions.

The subtitle of our conference this week is The Matter of the Unconscious. The enduring questions for this morning's debate are whether this matter exists