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192 LANGUAGE

Kristeva and other members of the ‘Tel Quel’ group, in particular Barthes, work
with the concepts of ‘traces’ and ‘intertextuality’, whereby meanings recur in
different texts and connote other meanings which have been established in other
texts. This textual theory has a theoretical underpinning in Lacan’s theory of
language, the unconscious and the subject. Kristeva also attempts to establish the
compatibility of Lacan’s theory of subjectivity with a Marxist approach to social
relations. Her theory is offered as an alternative to an essentialist, humanist
conception of the subject, usually alienated by capitalist social relations on the
one hand, and the subject as empty space or bearer (Träger) of ideologies and
social relations on the other. Here no attempt is made to theorize the structure of
subjectivity. We will look at this attempt to unite psychoanalysis and Marxism
later. We continue now by looking in greater detail at psychoanalytic theory of
language.

Freud’s approach to language
At various points in his writing Freud uses different theoretical models of the
psyche. These include the biological, dynamic-energy model; the structure of
the id, ego and superego; and the division of the psyche, via censoring
mechanisms, into the unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The unconscious
is the site of repressed ideas, and the preconscious consists of memories not
currently present to consciousness but to which it has ready access. It is within
the framework of this latter model of the psyche that language assumes a
fundamental importance. The unconscious is, in this approach, the seat of not the
drives but rather of their ideational representatives. By this Freud means the
ideas to which the words become attached and thereby find psychical expression.
The unconscious is the site of meaningful representations which can be
consciously appropriated through language. Language, like all human activity, is
ultimately motivated by the desire for pleasure.
Unconscious ideas (experiences, fantasies and so on) are governed by what
Freud calls the primary processes (the mechanisms of condensation, displacement,
representation and secondary revision). These processes are fundamental to the
functioning of the psyche and govern Freud’s method of dream interpretation,
dreams being the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. Every dream has a manifest
and a latent content. The manifest content of the dream is what the dreamer can
remember on awakening. The much more extensive latent content consists of the
whole range of repressed thoughts which analysis can unravel and to which the
manifest content is connected via the primary processes: ‘The dream thoughts
and the dream content are presented to us like different versions of the same
19
subject matter in two different languages.’ The most important of these
mechanisms are condensation and displacement, and in Lacan’s reading of Freud
they become the very mechanisms of language itself. Through condensation one
idea comes to represent a number of chains of meaning in the unconscious.
Displacement is the mechanism whereby an originally unimportant idea is