Page 204 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

THEORIES OF LANGUAGE AND SUBJECTIVITY 193

invested with the energy which is due to another drivemotivated idea (in Freud’s
terminology, an idea ‘cathected’ with psychic energy). The two ideas are
linguistically linked by associative chains of meaning. The psychoanalytic
method enables the recovery of the repressed idea, from which psychical energy
has been displaced. This method relies on the patient’s own words, on her or his
account of dreams, memories and fantasies and on free association. It is the
principle of free association which makes language as a system central for Freud.
It is the key to unconscious as well as conscious thought.
It is this aspect of Freudian theory which Lacan privileges when he sets out to
develop a full theorization of ‘the unconscious structured as a language’ and of
the constitution of the subject in language. In the context of post-Freudian
developments in psychoanalysis Lacan’s point of departure is a critique of those
theoretical developments which have taken a biologist direction (Klein, Horney
et al.) or developed in the form of ego psychology (Erikson) and of prevailing
forms of Freudian psychotherapy, where the analyst assumes the role of expert,
interpreting experiences to the patient. Underlying both these criticisms is
Lacan’s insistence on the primacy, within Freudian psychoanalysis, of the
unconscious, understood as a site of meaningful thoughts and of language (in
practice, the patient’s own language) as the sole means of access to unconscious
thought. Since thought and meaning are not the exclusive province of
consciousness, the philosophical principle of man’s unified, intentional
consciousness as the source of meaning (found in rationalist and
phenomenological approaches to language) must necessarily be challenged. It is
the fundamental discovery of the unconscious as a site of meaning that, Lacan
claims, other post-Freudian theorists have distorted or repressed. He identifies
Freud’s work on dreams and parapraxis as the key texts for psychoanalytic
theory and practice, and he sets out to re-read these texts in the light of
Saussurean linguistic theory. We intend here to look briefly at the way Lacan
takes up Saussure within the context of a general, psychoanalytic theory of
language and subjectivity, and at the claims made for this theory as the basis for
a materialist theory of language.

The unconscious structured as a language
Lacan’s theory is a general rather than a historically or culturally specific theory
of the acquisition of language and gendered subjectivity. In its universality it
draws on Lévi-Strauss’s attempt, in structural anthropology, to identify the
universal features of human culture. For Lévi-Strauss the principal feature is the
Oedipal structure of relationships, which is linked to exogamy and the exchange
of women. Lacan, like Lévi-Strauss, posits the Oedipus Complex as a general
structuring principle of human culture.
In Lacan’s theory the unconscious is formed via the organization of the drives
at the resolution of the Oedipus Complex. This organization is structured so that
demands for satisfaction are channelled in the direction of non-incestuous,