An Introduction to the Transference Unconscious

Let's be categorical: in psychoanalytic anamnesis, what is at stake is not reality, but truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the scant freedom through which the subject makes them present.

The first thing to say about the unconscious is what Freud says about it: it consists of thoughts. (Lacan, 1968)

When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious. One knows.

If you don't take the unconscious as the subject of the unconscious, then you're taking it as a memory, where everything is already written, and it's a matter of getting to read what's already written. On the contrary, if one takes the unconscious as a subject, the ‘it's written’ lies in speech itself.

Introduction

My specific concern in this paper is the transmission of Freud's hypothesis of the unconscious through the work of Lacan. Though Lacan's starting point in his unceasing discussion of the unconscious is in an ethology of the image (Lacan 1953, 2006a, & 2006b), followed by the reformulation of the unconscious through structural linguistics, arguably his most famous contribution, his endpoint at a non-structured real unconscious has often been overlooked.

In 1931, we find Lacan's first published references to the notion of the unconscious. Just one year prior to his thesis defence in which he would unfold the disorderly contradictions of diverse psychiatric accounts of paranoia, he writes disparagingly of ‘the technicians of the unconscious’, avowing their impotence in curing paranoia. Two years later, when publishing his amicus curiae of the Papin sisters' violent crime, Lacan employs the term ‘unconscious’ as an adjective trait of an aggressive drive. “We could call it unconscious, signifying that the intentional content which translates it into consciousness cannot manifest itself without a compromise with the social demands integrated by the subject, that is to say without a camouflage of motives, which is quite precisely the whole delusion” (Lacan, 1933). The aggressive drive deserves the qualifier unconscious insofar as it can only attain consciousness through distortion. This proposition is in agreement with Freud's dynamic theory of unconscious formations and their modification by displacement, condensation, and transposition. Further on Lacan alludes to those “psychoanalysts themselves, who when they derive paranoia from homosexuality, style this homosexuality as unconscious, as ‘larval’ (Lacan, 1933). These first adjectival uses of the term ‘unconscious’ do not imply a theory of the unconscious as an entity, but seemingly resemble more the pre-psychoanalytic theories of Hering and Butler (Butler, 1920) and the earliest Freudian writings (Freud, 2001c), employing a theoretical style which Freud progressively leaves behind in 1900 favouring the dynamic, ontological formulations of 1915 instead of the descriptive use of the term found at the beginning of his career.

The transition from ‘unconscious’ as adjective to the conception of the unconscious as an entity, real or hypothetical, in the Freudian archaeological model or in the Lacanian linguistic structure, constitutes the founding axiom of psychoanalysis and the point of separation from Cartesian psychologies of consciousness (Braunstein, 2013)2. Once one gifts the unconscious a genuinely real ontology, as a mental entity, and does not simply consider it a description for what remains outside consciousness at any given

moment, it is no longer synonymous with non-consciousness. Then the unconscious is no longer reducible to the state of sleep:

In neither [normal subjects nor neurotics], however, does the efficacy of the unconscious cease upon awakening. Psychoanalytic experience consists in nothing other than establishing that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field. The presence of the unconscious in the psychological order—in other words, in the individual's relational functions—nevertheless deserves to be more precisely defined. It is not coextensive with that order, for we know that, while unconscious motivation manifests itself just as much in conscious psychical effects as in unconscious ones, conversely it is elementary to note that a large number of psychical effects that are legitimately designated as unconscious, in the sense of excluding the characteristic of consciousness, nevertheless bear no relation whatsoever, by their nature, to the unconscious in the Freudian sense. It is thus only due to an incorrect use of the term that “psychical” and “unconscious” in this sense are confused, and that people thus term psychical what is actually an effect of the unconscious on the soma, for example .

The Freudian unconscious is a limited subset in the vast ensemble of mental activity that remain outside consciousness. In this way Freud moves from a descriptive to a scientific formalisation of the unconscious; it is not simply what has been repressed. It is synonymous neither with the absence of consciousness, nor with the autonomous organic functions of the body, of the nervous and endocrine systems, which remain stable beyond any need of the subject's will. (This is of course a simplification of Freud's continual reformulating of his discovery; 1915, 1920, 1923, 1926 each constitute major turning points in Freud's topology of the psychic apparatus, but are beyond the scope of this paper).

Here Lacan is arguing against various other post-Freudians who attempted to make the Freudian unconscious synonymous with biological instincts. When he claims, “The unconscious is neither the primordial nor the instinctual, and what it knows of the elemental is no more than the elements of the signifier”, Lacan's structuralist manifesto could not be clearer.

The justification for Lacan's critique of the neurophysiological reading of Freud's discovery jumps out at the reader once one compares Freud's Gesammelte Werke with Ernst Jones' Standard Edition, where the German term Trieb was rendered in English as instinct. This is no minor occurrence of traduttore, traditore; the axiomatic distortion involves a core assumption. Freud's (2001d, 2001f) Trieb possesses grammatical structure, as does language. By rendering Trieb as instinct, this connotation of structure disappears; it is replaced by connotations of innateness, permanence, and organicity. Whereas Freud clearly located the drives on the frontier between the soma and the psyche, the instincts in Jones' system belong to the soma. The transformation of Trieb to Instinkt equates psychology with physiology. Such an equivalence is in line with the current dominant paradigm of neuropsychology, in which physiology and psychology are treated as synonyms in the correlative study of behaviour and neurological models. The axiomatic chasm between Jones' and Freud's lexicon reveals their models to be, in Kuhn's words, incommensurate.

Perhaps one could ascribe Jones' translation and its wholesale acceptance by the Anglo-Saxon community to a positivist refusal of any psychological division which does not reside in a visible corporal division. Freud's hypothesis of the drives obliges one to assent, even provisionally, to the notion of a psychological/linguistic space which is not clearly determined by biochemistry. In his first published work, On Aphasia, Freud (1953) criticises localisationist presumptions, preferring a dynamic approach (Solms, 2000): “As much as possible, we wish to separate the psychological point of view from the anatomical”. This breaking point crystallised in his Project for a Scientific Psychology, when the choice of not publishing, or even completing the Entwurf, marks Freud's distancing from anatomical neurology in favour of psychoanalysis.3

Was the Freudian notion of the unconscious as possessing structure and being distinct from instincts, from emotions—after all, Freud (2001g) directly claims that affects and emotions are never unconscious—too close to metaphysics for protestant American taste?4 The Lacanian approach that endorses a return to Freud's psychoanalytic

unconscious is vastly more popular in predominantly catholic countries like France and many nations of Latin America. There is also of Freud's claims that the ego is subjected to the drives, ideals, and external reality, claims that go directly against the limitless optimism of the American Dream, of Calvinist ethics and the evergreen advice, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. The treatment plans of ego-psychology, producing a stronger ego, would seem then to represent a direct refusal of Freud's intuition on power relations between the demands of the body, the family, and more general reality upon the self.

In any case, the Anglo-Saxon insistence of correlating the Freudian topologies with the evolutionary division of the hindbrain, the midbrain, and the forebrain appears time and again in the literature. Let us consider Dr. W.H.R. Rivers' theory of the unconscious.

I propose, therefore, to adopt ass the distinguishing marks of one class of instincts: firstly, the absence of exactness of discrimination, of appreciation and of graduation of response; secondly, the character of reacting to conditions with all the energy available; and thirdly, the immediate and uncontrolled character of the response. It is interesting to note that Head and Gordon Holmes have found these characters to hold in large measure of the activity of the optic thalamus, the essential nucleus of which they have shown to be the central representative of the protopathic aspect of the peripheral sensibility and the central basis of emotive reactions. As I have already pointed out, it is clear that in this case we have to do with a structure which has come down from an early stage of the development of the nervous system. The optic thalamus is now hidden away within the interior of the brain, overlaid and buried by the vast development of the cerebral cortex. Just as I have supposed that emotive and instinctive reactions are buried within the unconscious, hidden from consciousness by the vast development of those reactions which are associated with intelligence, so do we find that the organ of the emotions and instinctive reactions

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has been buried under the overwhelming mass of the nervous structure we know to be pre-eminently associated with consciousness (Rivers, 1920).

As John Forrester observed, Rivers' position with regard to Freud's unconscious diverges, simultaneously substantiating Freud's method of dream interpretation while discrediting his theories.5 A major historical figure in the introduction of Freud's method of dream analysis to England, Rivers (1920) also published outspoken criticisms of Freud's propositions of the unconscious and the drives. And a quick perusal of the above quotation reveals multiple points of separation from Freud's theory. Rivers collapses the Freudian unconscious and the emotions into the same space, a view Freud argues against in his 1915 text on the unconscious.6 Moreover, Rivers founds his psychobiology on the supposition that the unconscious belongs to the deep of the human psyche, in order to construct the metaphor—one we consider of dubious scientific rigour—that the unconscious is located in the optic thalamus, since both would be hidden, one beneath the ‘overwhelming mass’ of the cerebral cortex, the other beneath consciousness. This metaphoric forcing, that macroscopic brain anatomy has anything to do with mental functioning, is akin to claiming a computer's motherboard must be located closer to the surface of the earth than RAM or the hard disk since it is the foundation of the computing system.

In opposition to this searching for an anatomical notion of depth that would correlate to the conjecture of the unconscious, the Lacanian perspective argues that the unconscious appears in a liminal space, insofar as it manifests itself at the surface level of speech and language, in a clockwork-like system of words and syllables uttered by a person, sometimes against his or her will, sometimes without awareness.7 It is this surface phenomenon that causes one to always say more than intended. To paraphrase Foucault, the ‘unconscious’8 has nothing to do with an “underlying reality on which we might try, with difficulty, to get a hold, but rather a great surface network” (Foucault, 1990, p. 105). Treating the unconscious as a great surface network implies that instead of memory storage, the unconscious is to be found in the variable separation between the 'ribbon of sound' and retroactive word choice. But let's return to Rivers.

Rivers continues to separate himself from Freud, declaring the cerebral cortex to be “pre-eminently associated with consciousness” and thus distinct from the awaited location of the unconscious. Freud did not share such hypotheses of anatomic compartmentalisation. What's more, the current state of anaesthesiology is one of ignorance as to the locations of actions and mechanisms involved in the production of reversible loss of consciousness. To quote Hameroff (2012, p. 1), “Despite 170 years of research, we as a specialty are clueless as to how anaesthetics cause reversible loss of consciousness, behaviour and memory. We know how to safely deliver anaesthesia, but quite literally, we don't know what we are doing”. Let us presume that anaesthesia is the inverse of the state of consciousness. Current research into locating the anaesthetic action finds no evidence that anaesthetic molecules exert their effects on particular protein receptors in cell membranes (Eger, 2008). Nor does anaesthesia appear to involve an inhibiting or stimulating effect on a macroscopic region of the brain. Instead anaesthetic potency is directly correlated with cell membrane permeability, which would imply that the anaesthetic effect takes place inside cells (Seifriz, 1950). If we accept anaesthesia as the inverse of consciousness, then the field of anaesthesia research, from Claude Bernard until now, contradicts Rivers attempt to locate a modular theory of the psyche in the anatomic divisions of the brain. Freud himself warned against the epistemological error of confusing psychology with physiology so prevalent in academic psychology.

Research has given irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the Brain as with that of no other organ. The discovery of the unequal importance of the different parts of the brain and their individual relations to particular parts of the body and to intellectual activities takes us a step further—we do not know how big a step. But every attempt to discover a localisation of mental

7. “The dream's manifest content, he tells us, deserves to be placed once again in the foreground. On this point, there follows a very confused discussion, based on this opposition between the superficial and the profound, which I beg you to rid yourselves of. As Gide says in The Counterfeiters, there is nothing more profound than the superficial, because there isn't anything profound” (Lacan, 1978, p.153).

8. ‘Sexuality’ in Foucault's version

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processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve cell and of excitations as migrating along nerve fibres, has miscarried completely. The same fate would await any theory which attempted to recognise, let us say, the anatomical position of the system Cs.—conscious mental activity—as being in the cortex, and to localise the unconscious processes in the sub cortical parts of the brain. There is a hiatus here which at present cannot be filled, nor is it one of the tasks of psychology to fill it (Freud, 2001g).

Now, having considered the far-reaching transformations of Freud's discovery by his English-speaking colleagues, we can delineate Lacan's place in the history of psychoanalysis with more clarity. His ‘Return to Freud’ was a necessary counterbalance to the biological reductionism of other post-Freudians, who in their quest to grant scientific dignity to psychoanalysis, assimilated the geography of the brain with psychoanalytic ideology. Lacan (1968) declined this detour through neurophysiology, bolstering himself instead in the Freudian discovery of the essentially cognitive or linguistic structure of the unconscious. “The unconscious is neither the primordial nor the instinctual, and what it knows of the elemental is no more than the elements of the signifier” (Lacan, 2006h). Lacan's structuralist manifesto was a classic example of an anti-discipline, in which the introduction of a previously ignored field of study prevents a given scientific field from descending into scientism. In this way, Lacan's structuralist theory of the unconscious, from 1953 to around 1972, treats psychoanalysis as applied linguistics instead of a subset of physiology. For the structuralist Lacan, free-associations and unconscious formations follow Saussure and Jakobson's rules of synchronic versus diachronic relations and metaphor versus metonymy (Lacan, 1990).

1953, Structure & Otherness

Finally, as Lacan (2006f) frequently affirms in the structuralist period of his teaching, “the unconscious, it is the discourse of the Other.” This phrase is a translation of Freud's assertion that the unconscious is always eine andere Schauplatz to Lacan's lexicon (Freud, 2001c). But, not so fast, we just mentioned how Jones' transformation of Trieb to Instinkt drastically modified the connotations of this fundamental psychoanalytic concept. One should note the same is true for ‘discourse’. Schauplatz, the meaning of which we might translate loosely as the historical moment in which a story inscribes itself, doesn't necessarily have self-sufficient discursive coherence. Lacan's addition of the term ‘discourse’ imports structuralist notions of organisation and rule-based form. Hence, the unconscious' linguistic structure. But the attribution of discursive order to the unconscious is not a permanent feature of Lacan's hypotheses. Otherness, on the other hand, is. No matter whether we speak of the imaginary unconscious of the Mirror Stage, or the symbolic unconscious of the structuralist epoch, or the real unconscious, the autistic unconscious of the last Lacan,

that is to say from his seminar Sinthome on, the psychoanalytic unconscious is always the field of the Other. What can that mean?

In order to read this formula, the unconscious is the discourse of the other, let us use Lacan's structuralist definition of the Other from the fifties: the Other is the treasure of the signifiers, the set of phonemes and words of a language. As such, even before his/her birth, the language that a new-born's family speaks, a language that will mark the new-born's body, exists. The sexual relation between parents that the young child will interpret in his/her manner exists prior to birth. In light of this, one observes that as the unconscious reality constitutes a sexual reality, the patient's unconscious or at least his/her fundamental fantasy can be attributed to an interpretation of the parent's sexual relationship. If these prior assertions are correct, then the fundamental relation of a speaking being to language is one of jouissance and cognition, and not simply one of communication.9 What one can think and can communicate depends entirely on the words and language available. Lacan will eventually go beyond this hypothesis, throwing the optimistic notion of communication to the wayside and focusing on the regulatory function of language on the body experience10, on what he calls Furthermore, this language along with the unconscious which consists of

Lacan proposes that the manifestations of the unconscious always possess an uncanny, foreign essence. The subject experiences his slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and dreams, even eventually his fundamental fantasy as otherly, opaque to his experience of continuity of being. “The fact that the symbolic is located outside of man is the very notion of the unconscious. And Freud constantly proved that he stuck to it as if it were the very crux of his experience” (Lacan, 2006g). It is for this reason that Lacan selected the donut to represent the shape of the unconscious subject; in Lacan's reading of psychical reality, mental life is structured around an axiomatic fantasy which organises psychical life, but this founding axiom remains out of grasp; it is a constitutional blind spot. The genesis of the subject that implies the installation of subjective division13 forever excludes a part of being, rendering it inaccessible. Whether it is primary repression, negation, or foreclosure, the unconscious will always be experienced as alien, whether as hallucination or forgetting. In later Lacan, this foreignness of the Other scene moves to the body as an extimic experience.

Ubiquity

In Lacan's hypothesis of the field of the unconscious, beyond being the discourse of the other, and the treasure of signifiers, and demonstrating a fundamental subjective division, the unconscious is ubiquitous. “The efficacy of the unconscious does not cease upon awakening. Psychoanalytic experience consists in nothing other than establishing that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field” (Lacan, 2006h). Imagine an adolescent patient who describes his father as disgraceful and unworthy, saying that every time he trespasses the laws of society, his father becomes ‘hysterical’. He claims to be much closer to his mother. Since he has been hospitalised, he claims she is the only one he misses. One he trusts his therapist, he relates his story of sexual abuse at age six. A cousin called him into the garden, far from the other members of his family, where they exchanged fellatio, ‘mamadas’ he calls it. The cousin was fifteen years old. He never told anyone of this, neither his parents, nor his siblings. Then as his fifteenth birthday approaches, he enters a drug rehabilitation centre as an inpatient. During his stay he has his fifteenth birthday, and at that time loses his virginity to a younger boy.

On entering adolescence, he began to hang out with gangs, often escaping from the house and school without his parents' knowledge. His father regularly beat him for this. After intentionally flunking out of an intermediate school his father respected, but which he judged too posh, he encountered drugs. Initially he robbed his parents to for drug money, but after his first internment, he stopped robbing and begins selling drugs for money. At this time stopped attending high school. This path coming closer and closer to narcotraffic continued until the death of his best friend produced a traumatic cut. Whereas his elder brother shares his father's name and style of dress, the patient has always eschewed this style in favour of streetwear.

During his second internment, he dreams regularly of his mother, and of his best-friend who was recently killed. The fifteen, the mamadas, the maternal proximity and unworthy father, his flirtation with organised crime, all these historical narratives show the pervasive influence of the unconscious clockwork on the history of the subject. The laws of the unconscious are traceable in the repetitions of his desire. He remembers, from his childhood, that his mother would always ask him, repeating the old song, “when you grow up, you won't be bad will you?” The case remains unfinished, yet one can clearly observe how this apparently innocuous speech takes on the value of the Other's desire and becomes destiny. This fragment of speech does not account for the specific jouissance of his way of badness, any more than it justifies the underlying hysteric logic of the case. Instead the mode of jouissance and structure combine with the Other's speech in spinning fate.

From this point, one might propose a stronger hypothesis for the superficial, linguistic unconscious; the motifs of the unconscious are present in every speech act of a given subject. As such, searching the depths for the underlying profound being of a patient is unnecessary. The unconscious reveals itself in the most superficial of speech insofar as a person's speech always circles around the unconscious fantasy (Lacan, 1978, p. 184). In this sense, Lacan initially considered that the unconscious is the expression of a patient's history. “The unconscious is the chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be found again;

most often it has already been written elsewhere… What we teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history” (Lacan, 2006d).

Ineradicable Permanence

Finally, a complete disappearance of unconscious impositions on the life of a speaking being would appear impossible. One cannot escape confirming that even at the end of analysis, having traversed the fantasy, or separated from the object, or completed the social rite of the pass, the unconscious, understood here as synonymous with the fundamental fantasy14, still and always imposes itself upon the analyst. Its fate is bound up with the transference, never completely vanishing.

In this case, the unconscious might appear as history, as the subjective registration of life's coincidences and traumas. Immediately, this perspective runs up against the clinical evidence of singular subjects. Why did such an event mark the patient, this trauma instead of another? Why did this shared experience traumatise one and not others? The enigma of the emergence of a fundamental subjective nature poses insurmountable difficulties to a purely developmental, environmental hypothesis, tabula rasa style. As Leclaire observes, common opinion of trauma as caused by an event trips over the unanswerable quandary, why that day?15 If we guide ourselves by

Why is another drive, or another region of the body, or a different series of symptomatic metaphors not emphasised instead? These questions oblige a logical reversal in our understanding of the causal bond between unicity, trauma, and fantasy. It seems as though something intrinsically inscribed in the speaking being, at the level of his unique relation to language, his fantasy, determines his traumas. It is not the subjective experience—or at least not memorable experience— of a historical series of events which constitutes the inaugural trauma, forging the subjective singularity and determining one's unconscious. Rather, it is the unicity of the subject, his unconscious fantasy, the incidence of language on one's body, what we might call the real unconscious, which determines the coordinates of reality that resonate. From such suppositions it follows that the coordinates of reality periodically correspond with one's unconscious fantasy, that there occurs a sort of subjective resonance that marks the subject with this accentuation, adding more meaning to his historical narrative. Thus the unconscious would be a sort of formulaic knowledge that occasionally confirms itself through one's singular vision of reality, a kind of positive feedback loop.

Such a viewpoint argues that the unconscious was already constituted, readymade, at the moment of subjective genesis. This of course begs the questions of when and what is subjective genesis. We see the tendency to find earlier and earlier moments of traumatic genesis in the works of Rank (1924) and Winnicott (1945, 1954). When the hypothesis of historical trauma is obstinately taken to the extreme, it produces pseudoscientific ideologies such as those found in constellations therapy or past life regression. One might say the coherence and rationality of a psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious, as well as its clinical safety and benevolence, relies on our not inquiring too often and too insistently into the enigmatic birth of the subject; one cannot know prehistory (Garcia-Castellano, 1997).

1964, Organ or Engraving

Lacan did not restrict his study of structural attributes of language—synchrony and diachrony— to elaborations on the concept of a combinatory, he also attempted to use these notions which order the discourse of structuralism, to bring together the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious and the drives. In 1964, the year of his divergence from Freud, Lacan remarked that the unconscious possesses a rhythmic character in that it appears in the slip of the tongue only to disappear instantly; he ascribes this repetitive manifestation to a Sisyphean impossibility of attaining some object or truth that is always missed.

If the unconscious is what closes up again as soon as it has opened, in accordance with a temporal pulsation, if furthermore repetition is not simply a stereotype of behaviour, but repetition in relation to something always missed, you see here and now that the transference— as it is represented to us, as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious—could only be of itself a precarious way. If the transference is supposed, through this repetition, to restore the continuity of a history, it will do so only by reviving a relation that is, of its nature, syncopated. We see then, that the transference, as operating mode, cannot be satisfied with being confused with the efficacy of repetition, with the restoration of what is concealed in the unconscious, even with the catharsis of the unconscious elements (Lacan, 1990).

Lacan formulated this pulsating version of the unconscious, no longer as historic truth waiting to be remembered, but as a continually missing distance between what must be said and what is said, in an attempt to bring together the fundamental Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the drives. One can see the pulsating unconscious, opening and closing, brings to mind the liminal orifices of the human body. As such, the unconscious of 1964 is a frontier space between linguistics and biology; this is where Lacan links together the transference, the drives, and the unconscious as different faces of repetition.

There is of course the question of whether Lacan's pulsating unconscious errs as Rivers' neuroanatomical unconscious did; after all, such metaphors are suspect. Though I would argue that Lacan was most likely not attempting to locate the psychoanalytic hypothesis of the unconscious in the human organism, but trying to reconcile the paradoxical dichotomy between the permanence of certain aspects of symptoms after interpretation, and levity of their witty double entendre. On the one

hand there are certain unconscious formations at the level of the bodily experience, of what he would name jouissance as a translation of Freud's ‘death drive’ and the libido bound up in it. On the other, one finds the levity, the simplicity of deciphering unconscious meanings as an effect of language structure (Miller, 2000). Freud as well was concerned with reconciling these two divergent aspects of symptomatology in psychoanalysis, as evident in the progression of his Introductory Lectures from “The Sense of Symptoms” to “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms” (Miller, 2003). Perhaps the wisdom of Freud and Lacan in not jumping to neuro-metaphors involves differentiating between the biological organism and our experience of body.

Alternatively, instead of hypothesizing the unconscious as an abstract and immaterial organ16, one could envision it as the remains of the language learning process, as the engraving of certain cognitive and affective experiences on the body. The predominance of bodily elements as signifying phenomena in the analytic setting, and their potency as bridges from one repetitive discourse towards forgotten truths, would seem to argue in favour of this consideration, as does the common psychoanalytic experience of the reduction of symptoms and fantasies of an analysand towards a fundamental fantasy. The fundamental fantasy acts as a limit point of knowledge, further research into the unconscious runs up against enclosing walls, and the exit from analysis involves either the identification with this minimal enunciation of fantasy, or the relativist claim that even this fundamental fantasy is no more than fiction, just as any subjective history. Nonetheless the fact that no fundamental psychoanalytic symptom appears without intimate ties to the body argues in favour of the supposition that there is an axiomatic relation between human psychical life and the engraving of language in the subject's body. The examples are endless, the fact that a woman whose mother nearly bled to death during childbirth—and who presents an aversion to menstruation, frequent nosebleeds, frequent nightmares of maternity and pregnancy, and grammatically ambiguous speech as to her gender and sexual identity - frequently squishes her nose during sessions points to the signifying function of this body location, all the more so since minimal remarks bringing attention to her body such as “your nose” lead to free association involving new traumatic material. There is of course the scientific question of whether this is an iatrogenic phenomena, one related to counter-transference - such as differences of classical hypnotic presentations between the Nancy and Salpêtrère schools of Bernheim and Charcot (James, 1891; see also Ellenberger, 1970)—but to a certain extent, the entirety of the psychoanalytic experience is two-body experience, in which the iatrogenic effects of the analyst's unconscious are not absolutely suppressible.

Moreover, the analytic experience produces a certain ordering effect, a structuring of the unconscious of the patient. It transmutes, purifies - if you will permit the expression - from a wild state towards the clarity of the fantasy. Simply put, the patient's verbalisation of unconscious tendencies in speech and thought cause the unconscious to be structured as a function of the symbolic. This is most likely the therapeutic motor of psychoanalysis; to paraphrase Paré, je l'écoutai, Dieu le guérit.

Lacan recognises that the fact of elaborating symptoms and fantasies via speech produces a certain effect of organisation. “We only grasp the unconscious finally when it is explicated, by that part of it which is articulated by passing into words. It is for

this reason that we have the right—all the more so as the development of Freud's discovery will demonstrate—to recognize that the unconscious itself has in the end no other structure than the structure of language” (Lacan, 1991, p. 42). In a certain way, the analytic act involves a passing from the unconscious as inexplicable symptoms to the verbalisation of what must have been an unconscious fantasy; this act accounts for the reduction of what Lacan names jouis-sens, or excitation (ecstasy and agony) derived from speech and language. In this way, the analytic experience leads to significant consequences in the analysand's relation to language.

From the seminar Encore onward, one of Lacan's greatest theoretical dilemmas consists in finding a way to bring the linguistic unconscious together with the organism, the body of human experience. He concludes this yearlong seminar with the axiomatic formulation. “The real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious” (Lacan, 1975, pp. 118). He attributes the otherness of the unconscious to the mysterious body and its inertia in treatment. This mystery of the body harkens back to Christine Papin's puzzlingly innocent explanation for her Bacchian desecration of the other's body, the body holds the “mystery of life”.

The period from Encore to Sinthome thus involves an attempt to reconcile, to treat as synonyms the mystery of the body and the unknown of the unconscious. The discourse of the Other now refers to the body's impinging on mental life. His clinical work in this period focuses on the necessity and impossibility of interpreting the enigmatic speaking body, of how to make linguistic interpretations without speech. One sees this in the famous testimony of Suzanne Hommel (2015) for example (Miller, 2012). Yet, just three years later, Lacan no longer equates the real of the body with the unconscious. Rather he speaks of an abyss that divides the unconscious as knowledge from the real body.

Llanguage and the Mystery

The mere fact that he [Descartes] speak, since by speaking llanguage he has an unconscious, this lost soul like everyone else with self-respect; it's what I call a knowledge unreachable by the subject, while the subject, he has only one signifier to represent himself in comparison with this knowledge; If I may say so, it is a representative of commerce with this constituted knowledge, for Descartes as was the custom in his time, his insertion into the discourse of his birthplace, what I call the master's discourse, the discourse of noblaugh. That's why he doesn't get by with his “I think therefore I enjoy”. (Lacan, 1974)

Thus Lacan's departure point is: the unconscious is imaginary and the construction of an operational concept of the image. Lacan's teaching begins once he renounces this conception in favour of the one that dominates his teaching up until the end of the Sinthome, namely: the unconscious is symbolic. All of final accounts we have of Lacan concern a third definition that was truly given only once in these terms, in “L'esp d'un laps”: the unconscious is real. (Miller, 2012, p. 43)

What could the term ‘real unconscious’ possibly mean? First off, the final Lacan slowly reduces his tripartite Borromean chain towards the duality semblance/real. Which is to say, to make sense of the untreatable, he divides between wispy make-pretend on the one hand, and the unmoveable on the other. A new way of speaking of the distinction between appearance and reality. Thus the real unconscious is intransigent, it has to do with what cannot be modified.

The term real unconscious does not imply a complete abandoning of the hypothesis that the unconscious be composed of language material.17 Rather, the unconscious is no longer conceived of as an organised linguistic structure, which would possess predictive rules of grammar and syntax. As such it no longer justifies cyclic repetition through the artificial language model of binary code (Fink, 1995). The real unconscious is related to what Lacan names llanguage18, a linguistic trauma, unique to each person, which leaves no possibility for unconscious intersubjectivity. In his last period of theorizing, from the Sinthome on, the intersubjective unconscious is nothing other than the supposition of another who might know, another name for transference. Sometimes this intersubjective gambit permits a transmutation of the subject of the unconscious, and yet the unconscious itself remains an autistic instance. Otherwise said, Lacan's hypothesis of the real unconscious consists entirely of a unique set of S1, but without any link to an S₂ that would generate meaning and syntax. One could say that the S₂ terms which generate meaning only come into being through the presence of an interlocutor. In the analytic setting this role is played by the analyst along with the transference, in other words, that the patient believes speaking to the analyst has worth. But the unconscious as a collection of S₁ involves no second person. The necessary result of his move from linguistics to linguisterie, though arriving late, arrives unequivocally; the real unconscious, bound up with the spoken/speaking body, leaves no room for organised structure or another who would know.

Lacan still argues that the way in which the new-born received language from his surroundings determines him subjectively. More specifically, what one says of and to the new-born, and the way in which (s)he hears it marks the body in such a way that this language acquisition process then determines dreams, symptoms, and bungled actions. But it is no longer simply a question of the discourse of the other; the emphasis has shifted to the other's manner of speaking. Beyond the structural and legal emphasis of discourse, the notion of the other's manner of speaking accentuates intonation, pitch, volume, articulation, phoneme selection, but also subtler aspects such as breathing and cadence.19 The notion of the unconscious thus returns as a

developmental trace, but now instead of involving the historical truth of a personal fiction with its traumas and secrets, it involves the process of language acquisition prior to the earliest memories. This inscription of the mother's and others', ways of speaking, constitutes the root of the real unconscious. One could even speak of the trauma of language learning. In fact, one might say this is the only true trauma, since it cannot be transmuted into semblance by the re-elaboration of new fictions. But llanguage is also the psychoanalytic path to a cure, one shared by the arts. Perhaps, instead of trauma, it is more appropriate to speak of an indelible mark. We have come full circle back to Peirce (1935, pp. ) “a person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea”, except now the (s)he is nothing but a letter.

In a way, we have returned to Lacan's first elaboration of the historical unconscious, especially insofar as it links up with trauma. Once again the unconscious is the exclusive property of the subject, it is no longer an intersubjective space. Yet, if the unconscious is an effect of the history of the language learning, then it becomes a message in a bottle whose code no one else can ever know. It is not a knowledge that can be shared, for it is not possessed by the patient. It would be more proper to say (s)he is possessed by this writing. It follows that one must not confuse this hypothesis of the first prehistoric mark with the unconscious as a forgotten memory, a coherent thought outside of conscious experience. And that clinical work with subconscious material will gradually move from what may be sensibly understood in terms of history, to what more appropriately could be called the primordial engraving of language onto the human body.

The impact of the environment in the creation of this unconscious-llanguage is Lacan deriving an unconscious from the sound material of language. In this way it can be read as a final attempt by Lacan bring psychoanalysis into the fold of science, with its object of study, the materiality of language. As such it is a repetition of the structuralist manifesto, marked by his return to Rome for a third time to pronounce his speech La troisième. As the 1953 Rome discourse left behind biology and physiology in favour of linguistics; his 1976 passage to the real unconscious leaves behind linguistics to forge a science of the letter.

This accentuation of the llanguage aspect of the real unconscious instead of the unconscious as formal language or syntactic structure, puts the equivocal in the foreground.

Llangage. The Greeks, from the time of Aesop on, were well aware that it was of absolutely capital importance. There is a well-known fable on this topic, but

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nobody notices it. It is no coincidence at all that, whatever llanguage it is that one receives the first imprint of, words are equivocal. It is certainly no coincidence that in French the words ‘ne’, ‘not’, is pronounced the same as the word ‘nœud’, ‘knot’. It is no coincidence at all that the word ‘pas’, ‘not’, which in French, contrary to, any other languages, doubles the negation, also designates un pas, a step. If I am, so interested in ‘pas’, ‘not’/‘step’, it is not by chance. This doesn't mean that llanguage in any way constitutes a heritage. It is absolutely certain that it is in the way in which llanguage has been spoken and also heard as such, in its particularity, that something will subsequently emerge in dreams, in all sorts of mistakes, in all manners of speaking. It is in this moterialism, if you will allow me to use this word for the first time, which the unconscious stakes hold. What I mean is that here there resides what it is that prevents anyone from finding another way of nourishing what just before I called the symptom (Lacan, 1975b).

For Lacan, Llanguage— if we may borrow Grigg's translation of lalangue - does not constitute a patrimony. It is not a heritage of members sharing a parish dialect. Lalangue is quite simply the speaking being's unique remains of the maternal language learning process, not a knowledge shared between generations, nor a brotherhood. It would be a stochastic process, unique to each person. Lacan continues his efforts to bind the unconscious to language all the while avoiding any merging with Jung's theory of the collective unconscious.

Secondly, the real unconscious involves an attempt to link up the psychological notion of a linguistic unconscious with bodily excitation that resists words; that which words do not tame. In Freud's theory of the psychical apparatus, the organic body influences the unconscious by the drives.20 The body is also there as the material substrate of the psyche.

Then… The real Unconscious at Geneva?

How could people fail to appreciate before Freud that these people called men, or women on occasion, inhabit talking? It is very odd for people who believe they think not to realise that they think with words. There are things there that have to come to an end, don't you agree? The thesis of the Würzburg School, on the so-called apperception of I know not what synthetic thought that isn't articulated, is really the most delusional that a school of supposed psychologists has ever produced. It is always with the help of words that a man thinks. And it is in the encounter between these words and his body that something takes shape. Moreover, I would even use the term ‘innate’ in this respect— if there were no words, what could man bear witness to? This is where he places meaning (Lacan, 1989).

As he arrives at the final period of his teaching, Lacan still maintains the fundamental importance of the word, claiming that the subject takes shape in the encounter between words and body. He goes further, claiming that the word is essentially what defines the human; thought doesn't exist in a wordless vacuum, one can only think with language, though Daniel Tammet's (2007) account of numerical hypnagogic hallucinations do raise questions on whether numbers or images could act as letters.

Here Lacan coincides with the Stoics and some contemporary linguists in considering

languages primary function not to be one of communication, but rather of a sort of cognitive scaffolding, a system which permits thought. Lacan goes further still when he considers language as fundamental in the regularisation of jouissance. One observes a broad spectrum of anecdotal evidence for this claim, from the success of the talking cure, to the use of writing and speech to diminish manic excitement, to the simultaneous disordering of language and affective suffering as described by Artaud (1984).

Indeed the psychoanalytic experience demonstrates repeatedly that language and the Lacanian notion of jouissance, which might be translated in Freudian terms as libido, are intimately bound together. Nowhere is this clearer than in the example of the mystic's agony and ecstasy. The oceanic mystic experience involving limitless jouissance for the silent person, loses its brilliance a soon as one attempts to put it in words. Indeed, the words never measure up to the affective experience. Not only can they not adequately depict the mystic's unique qualia, but the very attempt to narrate this singular sensation diminishes its subjective impact.21 We can now see why Lacan spoke of the unconscious mystery of the speaking body. Though the symbolic and the real appear to be two distinct, irreconcilable registers—the symbolic unconscious and the excitation of the organism— they are intimately intertwined. Thus the concept of jouis-sens, or the enjoyment of babbling, of blah blah. From here one can distinguish two versions of excitation, one regulated and limited by the discrete nature of language, and the silent excitation of the mystic, which Lacan used as a provisional path to studying feminine jouissance, one unbounded by language.

The above block quotation from Lacan's 1975 Geneva lecture on the symptom is to be understood together with excerpts below from his seminar The Sinthome, where he speaks of unconscious effects as omnipresent, proliferated into the entirety of the speaking beings subjective life. As Lacan argued for the impossibility of thought without speech, or at least language, and he argued for the impossibility of a language act without the unconscious as a surface effect, this leads to the hypothesis that no act of thinking escapes interference from the unconscious— so long as the unconscious is defined as the set of constituent fragments of llanguage in addition to including the metonymic treasure of signifiers.

The Sinthome: Real vs. Unconscious

The primary distinction between the theory of a structural unconscious and later ones does not reside in a wholesale devaluing of language, but rather an abandoning of a

grammatical approach towards a disorganised notion of language fragments. If the first period of Lacan's teaching focused on the forgotten, and the symbolic structure that necessitates repetition epitomised in the Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, the unconscious as a phenomenon of the real involves moving towards a chaotic grouping of eruptions, towards what cannot be said. The lapsus is still the compass that orients Lacan's final formulation of the unconscious, but he no longer characterises it as being meaningful, or in other words predictive.

As such, the primary changes to the hypothesis of the unconscious involve the loss of any status of intersubjectivity, “No friendship here that this unconscious might supports” (Lacan, 2001). Using mutual intelligibility as a common criterion for determining language and dialect boundaries, one could say Lacan assigns absolute unintelligibility to the real unconscious that it is an idiolect.

The principal change from his earliest formulations to his final formulations of the unconscious does not involve a change to the fundamental justification. “It is difficult not to see that the lapsus is that upon which, in part, the notion of the unconscious is founded” (Lacan, 2005, p. 97). This definition of the unconscious is derived from Psychopathology of Everyday Life more than any other Freudian text. The principal change occurs in the reading given to these lapses. If in a first moment, they were understood as historic monuments whose deciphering would enable the recapture of forgotten subjectivity, now they are senseless. The theory of the real unconscious leaves behind the notion of a grammatically structured unconscious, as well as an intersubjective unconscious, or an unconscious modelled on the notion of repressed coherent thoughts. The parapraxes orient the final formalisation of the Lacanian unconscious, one which paradoxically distances itself from Freud's thesis of the Trieb, which after all were determined by a certain minimal grammar. Lacan (1976) continues to found the hypothesis of the unconscious on the eruption of nonsense in the middle of an association of ideas by a foreign element or distortion. The lapsus, the return of the repressed is considered as the image itself of the link between the conscious and the unconscious.

I try to be rigorous by pointing out that what Freud supports as the Unconscious always supposes a knowledge, and a spoken knowledge, as such. That this is the minimum that is supposed by the fact that the Unconscious can be interpreted. It is entirely reducible to a knowledge. After which, it is clear that this knowledge requires at the minimum two supports, is that not so, that are called terms, by symbolizing them as letters. Hence my writing of knowledge as being supported by S, not to the power of 2, of S with this index, this index of a small 2, of a small 2 at the bottom. It is not S squared, it is S supposed to be 2, S₂. The definition that I give of this signifier, as such, that I support from S index 1, S₁, is to represent a subject,

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as such, and to truly represent it. On this occasion truly means in conformity with reality.

The True is saying in conformity with reality. Reality which is on this occasion what functions; what truly functions. But what truly functions has nothing to do with what I am designating as the Real. It is an altogether precarious supposition that my Real—I must indeed accept my part in it—that my Real conditions reality; the reality of your hearing, for example.

There is here an abyss which is far from, which one is far from being able to guarantee will be crossed over. In other terms, the agency of knowledge that Freud renews, I mean renovates in the form of the Unconscious, is a thing which does not at all obligatorily suppose the Real that I use…

I mean that - if indeed it is something that one can call a Freudian lucubration—that it is my own way of raising to its degree of symbolism, to the second degree, it is in the measure that Freud articulated the Unconscious that I react to it. But already we see there that it is a way of raising the sinthome itself to the second degree. It is in the measure that Freud truly made a discovery— and supposing that this discovery is true— that one can say that the Real is my symptomatic response. But to reduce it to being symptomatic is obviously no small thing. To reduce it to being symptomatic, is also to reduce all invention to the sinthome (Lacan, 2005, p. 131).

We are still in the realm of the Freudian unconscious, one which always supposes knowledge. Typically, understood in a historic variant of memory and mementos. Otherwise, the unconscious could be approached in its symbolic dimension, at the level of linguistic knowledge. Puns and wordplay that permit interpretation in a given dialect come within the competency of a symbolic unconscious. It also supposes a knowledge, but instead of the historic knowledge, it has more to do with the

machinery of a symbolic combinatory, with its related language rules.22 And here we should be attentive, if the unconscious is a knowledge built up upon a foundation of a ‘manner of speaking’ related to llanguage as defined above, then we have llanguage as a chance set of noises and silences characterised by continuity, and the symbolic unconscious as an artefact of semblance. The symbolic, intersubjective unconscious thus becomes an ethical hypothesis with little more real consistency than the supposition that the analyst possesses the intimate knowledge necessary to decipher one's malaise. Then transference unconscious must fall away at the end of analysis along with the analyst's fall from grace, leaving behind only the solitary unconscious.

If one argues for an unconscious structured by/as language, unless one claims unique dialects for every speaking being—which is part of Lacan's llanguage argument—the apparent shared nature of language among nearly the entirety of humanity and the relatively limited number of languages, ~6909 for the 7.4 billion world population according Lewis (2009), extrapolates towards the supposition of a collective unconscious. Jung (1991, p. 43) is often credited with a mystic, religious concept of the collective unconscious, but in the 1911 edition of the Traumdeutung, Freud concurs with Ferenczi that “every tongue has its own dream-language”. Artemidorous' famous account of Aristander ‘most happy interpretation’ is available in both ancient Greek and modern French, though not in English.23 It comes down to a question of where one demarcates languages and dialects. So long as one works within the intersubjective transference unconscious, at the level of the meaning of symptoms and unconscious formations, then the language code is shared between analyst and analysand, here we are at the level of Ferenczi's dream tongues. However, once one claims that this language is an elaborate artefact built upon llanguage, a hypothetic marking or regulating instrument of bodily excitation, then the probability of intersubjectivity becomes astronomically infinitesimal. It is at this level that Lacan objects to Jung's theory of a collective unconscious.

If the unconscious is the product of a unique inscription of language from chance encounters with ways of speaking found in one's early environment, then it would never recur in the same way for two people. But Lacan goes even further than this

absolute difference from inscription, arguing that living languages are in continual evolution, not only for language communities but for individuals. It would follow that if languages are in continual evolution then the notion of archetypes enveloping the totality of humanity—unless they derive from some structure besides language—could be justly described as a psychoanalytic version of the normative, reminiscent of Genet's epiphany that everyman is equal and worth any other.24 In Lacan's terminology, this passion of interchangeability belongs to the dimension of images, and not to the discontinuous nature of language.

One creates this tongue, one creates this tongue in as much, in as much as at every instant one gives it a meaning. It is not reserved to the sentences in which the tongue is created. At every instant one gives a little prod, otherwise the tongue would not be living. It is living in as much as at every instant it is created. And that is why there is no collective unconscious, that there are only particular unconsciousness', in so far as everyone, at every instant, gives a little prod to the tongue he speaks (Lacan, 2005, p. 133).

And so we find, in the seminars and writings from 1975-1981, the real unconscious, Lacan's sinthomatic production, progressively abandons hope in the intersubjective unconscious, moving towards a more isolated unconscious. One could say that Lacan's teaching does not end on an upbeat note. The unconscious continues to belong to the field of the Other; not as imposed rules of language and society, nor as the repository of a languages vocabulary, but insofar as it compiles the singular marks of hearing speech and learning language. Lacan's theory of the unconscious moves from a kind of knowledge without subject, to a fictional construction established on the senseless traces of llanguage.

This Other is located in the interior, or at least on the body of the speaking being; though we speak loosely of social institutions of culture, rites, and language, Durkheim (2014) makes a convincing case that social facts are internal to individuals, where else could they possibly be inscribed? The schizophrenic subject demonstrates that the Other is, an act of faith, faith that the throng of others is more than just an endless series of peers. It is for this reason that Lacan and Miller employ the term ‘extimacy’25, to speak of what remains foreign even as it is the most intimate part of a speaking being; that the closest a human gets to an ontological justification remains in the field of otherness.26 The unconscious inhabits this paradoxical space. The unconscious is not found in peers, nor does it reside entirely in a shared symbolic space. Instead, its uncanny nature recalls Winnicott's invention of transitional space, yet Lacan brings the unconscious closer to the traces of the other on the one, than the collaborative intersubjective space of Winnicott (Conway, 2011).

The Last Lacan: The Senseless Unconscious of the Preface to the English Edition

In 1976 during his seminar on l'une-bévue, faced with the proposition that the analysand arrives at the end of analysis through identifying with his analyst, Lacan places himself in direct opposition. The identification of the patient to doctor as a means of ending the analytic experience, is exactly what we see in the famous as-if case described in detail by Helene Deutsch (1991). She wrote of those patients who advance very rapidly in their treatment until demanding to be recognised as worthy

analysts just as their doctor, as though manoeuvring oneself to being equal to the other justified the completion of analysis and brought along with the title of psychoanalyst, just as the other.

It is a question of much interest since it would result in certain remarks that have been advanced, that the end of analysis should be to identify oneself to the analyst. For my part, I do not think so, but this is what Balint maintains at any rate, and it is very surprising. To what then does one identify at the end of analysis? With one's unconscious? This is what I do not believe. I don't believe it, because the unconscious remains, I say ‘remains’, I am not saying ‘remains eternally’, because there is no eternity, remains the Other. It is the Other with a capital O that is at stake in the unconscious. I don't see how one could give meaning to the unconscious, except by situating it in this Other, the bearer of signifiers, which pulls the strings of what is imprudently called, imprudently because it is here that there arises the question of what the subject is from the moment that it so entirely depends upon the Other. So then, this mapping named analysis consist in what? Might it be or might it not be, to identify oneself, to identify oneself while taking some insurance, a kind of distance, from identifying oneself to one's symptom? (Lacan, November 16^th 1976)

Lacan unhesitatingly criticises the patient's identification with the analyst as the right exist from the analytic experience. Moreover he criticises any notion of harmonious identification with one's unconscious: love one's unconscious yes, yet to identify with it is out of the question.27 The unconscious remains on the foreign side of the Other,

essentially incomprehensible and undecipherable. Lacan is very clear in his experience of the unconscious. The unconscious forever persists as unfamiliar, whether that be as the other's language code, or the mysterious body, or the unquenchable drives.

When the space of a lapsus no longer carries any meaning (or interpretation), then only is one sure that one is in the unconscious. One knows. But one has only to be aware of the fact to find oneself outside it. There is no friendship there, in that space that supports this unconscious. All I can do is tell the truth. No, that isn't so—I have missed it. There is no truth that, in passing through awareness, does not lie… It should be noted that psychoanalysis has, since it has ex-sisted, changed. Invented by a solitary, an incontestable theoretician of the unconscious (which is not what one imagines it to be—the unconscious, I would say, is real), it is now practised in couples. To be fair, the solitary was the first to set the example…

Why, then, should we not put this profession to the test of that truth of which the so-called unconscious function dreams, with which it dabbles? The mirage of truth, from which only lies can be expected (this is what, in polite language, we call ‘resistance’), has no other term than the satisfaction that marks the end of the analysis. (Lacan, 2001)

Lacan's theory of the unconscious of the 1970's is animated by an unresolved tension. The tension between the purely singular phenomenon of the unique speaking body and the apparent universal of language. In this final period he portrays the person's essential subjectivity as being shared neither with others, nor with its host. It is in this

sense that Lacan depicts the nature of language, and the unconscious, as parasitic instances. With the fall of the Other of the Other, announced by Nietzsche, the unconscious of the last Lacan is not intersubjective. For Lacan, every individual continually gives life to language in a continual recreation of living language. This language marks the body and regulates jouissance, but is not a collective experience. Instead, the radical otherness of the unconscious locates itself in the absolute distance between psychological experience and the biological organism. This would appear to be synonymous with the universal/particular distinction. During the period from Encore to L'insu que sait, Lacan fought to reduce the gap between the unconscious as an enigmatic real experience of the body and the unconscious as a language combinatory. As seen above, during his seminar on the sinthome, he separates the two, on the one hand the unconscious as knowledge in conformity with reality, on the other the real as the inexplicable which is dictated by no knowledge. The very final period of his teaching, however, from his Preface onward locates the unconscious as real in the field of meaningless eruptions of nonsense, and ordered language, discourse, and thought on the side of semblance. As Freud was obliged to modify his theory of dreams as wish fulfilment, due to anxiety dreams and the war neuroses, so Lacan found himself in need of modifying his structuralist formulation of the unconscious due to phenomena of the speaking body and the discovery of the sinthome.

For the very last Lacan, the unconscious is nothing more than nonsense which suddenly erupts, disrupting the semblance of the imaginary and symbolic. As soon as the unconscious manifestation reorganises and is included in the field of meaning and logic, it is now semblance. Simply a new manifestation of the fantasy of the unconscious. For Lacan, the unconscious's calling card becomes its traumatic aspect, its irreconcilability with meaning. The end of analysis marks a satisfaction commensurate with the fall of the subject supposed to know and the hope that the unconscious, essentially, organises itself through a syntax which would give meaning. The end of analysis implies a giving up on the search for the one true narrative; taking into account this dimension of lack while grasping the singular jouissance of the drive which orients us.