FORMATIONS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Dreams, the forgetting of words and names, slips of the tongue, parapraxes in general, and jokes are all examples of formations of the unconscious, the forms by which the unconscious expresses itself. The Formations of the Unconscious is also the title of Jacques Lacan's fifth seminar, given in 1957-1958. The expression also establishes, as a distinct group, different symptoms that were all discussed by Freud in his earliest works.

These formations of the unconscious are, in fact, symptoms, insofar as they are an expression and fulfillment of an unconscious wish. In psychoanalysis, they constitute the royal road to the unconscious. But knowledge of the unconscious can only be hypothesized, because "it is only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious" (Freud, 1915e, p. 166). By proposing a generic expression for the symptomatic elements that Freud listed, Lacan emphasized that as "overdetermined" and "structurally identical" elements, they are "only conceivable, strictly speaking, within the structure of language" (Lacan, 2004a/1958, p. 260).

Freud isolated two principle mechanisms at work in the process of unconscious formations: condensation and displacement. Lacan suggested redefining these mechanisms as "the two aspects of the signifier's effect upon the signified" (Lacan, 2004b/1957, p. 152), namely metaphor and metonymy, terms that had been analyzed by the linguist Roman Jakobson.

The notion of formations of the unconscious is related to Freud's ideas of substitute formation, the return of the repressed, and symptom-formation.

Alain Vanier

See also: Graph of Desire; Metaphor; Object a ; Over-interpretation; Seminar, Lacan's; Splitting of the subject; Subject of the unconscious; Substitutive formation.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4: 1-338; 5: 339-625.

——. (1901b). The psychopathology of everyday life. SE, 6.

——. (1905c). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, 8: 1-236.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

Lacan, Jacques. (1998). Le séminaire. Book 5: Les formations de l'inconscient, 1957-1958. Paris: Seuil.

——. (2002a). The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power. In hisÉcrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans., pp. 215-270). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1958)

——. (2002b). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In hisÉcrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans., pp. 138-168). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1957)