Chapter 14 Recognition of the Unconscious

As the subtitle of this work is Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious, the reader might think that its content gives very unequal treatment to the first and the second. In fact, there is recognition because there has been misrecognition. As for the latter, it seems it is inevitable. In analysing its forms throughout the preceding chapters, and in as complete a manner as possible, I have said implicitly what has to be recognized if the subject is to be able to live the conflicts between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind in a way that is tolerable. Am I claiming that consciousness is recognition? There is no reason to think so. Where there is recognition there is prise de conscience, insight, that is to say, an inwardlooking vision (I have proposed the term introvision). Nonetheless, we are bound to ask ourselves if consciousness is indispensable for recognition. But let us return for a moment to misrecognition. What can be noted about it is the existence of a double grid. Misrecognition is blindingly evident when we enter the heaviest sectors of pathology. One can even argue that, the more the individual is marked by pathology, the greater the misrecognition will be. Psychoanalysis was born and developed, at least during the time of Freud, out of the analysis of the neuroses, forms of pathology neighbouring on normality; I have shown that from the time of the second topography, this was no longer quite true. I have even contended that the modifications which marked the last part of Freud’s work foreshadowed, in a way, the future, that is to say our present. I am quite sure, in fact, that Freud knew intuitively that, in the future, psychoanalysis would have to deal increasingly with non-neurotic structures.1 From the beginning, Freud was obliged to recognize that normality was also inhabited by the unconscious, at least by certain of its particularly rich formations. Thus experiences such as dreams, phantasies, slips of the