Phantoms in the Voice: A Neuropsychoanalytic Hypothesis on the Structure of the Unconscious

Several clinical case fragments show how a reading of the subject's symptoms at the level of the signifier gives access to its underlying unconscious logic. Freud's “splitting of consciousness” model is proposed to have a neurophysiologic counterpart in LeDoux's model for the processing of emotional stimuli. The language fragments in these dynamics are considered as material phoneme vectors, corresponding to Freud's word-presentation and to Lacan's signifier. Accordingly, neurolinguistic research has uncovered a specific, well-organized lexical brain area in which the words are phonologically encoded. In line with Lacan, psycholinguistic research has shown how the linguistic train always has an ambiguous structure, transiently and unconsciously activating its different meanings, followed by inhibition of the contextually inappropriate meanings. Neurophysiologic research also shows how language is always a motor event. Imminent articulatory intentions that remain without effective execution will therefore give rise to articulatory or phonemic phantoms, searching for relief in substitutive signifiers. A neurophysiologic mechanism for Freudian repression is thus proposed, leading to the return of the repressed in symptoms with a similar phonemic structure though with a radically different meaning. The phonemic phantoms thereby organize the structure of the unconscious by functioning as attractors for the subject's mental energy in its (linguistic) action space.