Flores’s Summary of:
Meltzer, Francoise. "Unconscious." Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990. 147-62.

Many argue that the term "unconscious" can only be used as an adjective--it is not a thing or place but an activity of which we are largely unaware. Descartes tended to define mental activity as a matter of conscious experience, but psychoanalysis holds that much that is mental remains hidden from us. Many nineteenth-century German and British Romantics refer to something unconscious, without using the term. It became a popular concept with the publication of Eduard von Hartmann's îPhilosophy of the Unconscious in 1868. But Freud took a popular term and declared it to be inherently sexual.

It is difficult to define the nature of unconscious activity because it must be diagnosed, inferred from by occurrences in life which do not seem consciously motivated, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, puns, amnesia, compulsions to repeat, denials, and literature. It is somewhat of a transcendental ideal (cf. Kant): a way of talking about that which we are not given to know.

It is ironic that unconscious activity must be inferred from that which is observable, and described and understood from within the realm and rules of "consciousness." In short, the unknowable is forever condemned to being described in terms of the known (Freud's term for the unconscious, das Unbewusste, is literally, the "unknown"). This condemns Freud to describing the unconscious rhetorically, through analogies, metaphors, similes, etymological play, and anecdotes. Hence, reading Freud tells us as much about the "economy" of rhetoric and narration as it does the pysche. What we sense as either nonsense in narration or that which seems too sensical, for example, may be evidence of the unconscious manifesting itself through various gaps and excesses of meaning in the text/our interpretation.

In "A Note on the Unconscious in Psycho-Analysis" (1912), Freud divides the unconscious into three types: descriptive, dynamic, systematic. He subdivides the descriptive unconscious this way: that which is present in our minds is conscious; that which is not present but retrievable in memory is preconscious; that which is latent and not retrievable by conscious will is unconscious (e.g., repressed childhood fear). Freud uses spatial, topographical descriptions to express these relations, as if the unconscious were a place of memories, wishes, and fears absent from consciousness, erased after having been written on a child's "mystic writing pad."

The dynamic unconscious is more of an energy flow than a place, where tension/displeasure builds up and needs to find release to restore us to stasis/pleasure (note "hydraulic" and neurological metaphors influenced by nineteenth-century ideas, e.g., unconscious much like series of involuntary knee-jerk reactions). Unconscious energy goes unperceived by the subject, e.g. post-hypnotic behavior as evidence of this. Dynamic model describes the force of repression: the unconscious contains wishes/information, acting like a censor where such elements manifest themselves only obliquely (e.g., parapraxes). Such energy "flows," is "cathected" (attached to an object), and pulsates, building up to break through the repression barrier to enable desire to be displaced and transferred. Again, this model presupposes that tension is displeasure and will find an avenue for release to enable the subject to return to stasis (much like Freud's later "death instinct").

The systematic unconscious is left rather vague, but in the 1930s Freud uses this to describe his tripartite model of the mind as îd, ego, and super-ego, where the ego partakes of both the unconscious id and conscious super-ego. This revision led to a split between those who embraced ego-psychology (Americans) in the 1950s and those led by Jacques Lacan, who see this revision as a repression of the unconscious as a concept in dialectical opposition to consciousness.

Freud turned to Sophocles' story of Oedipus--the king who does not realize he has murdered his father, married his mother, and become the source of the city's plague--to illustrate the unconscious wish of every male child: sexual union with the mother and elimination of the father to take his place. Freud couldn't fit little girls into this theory. He insisted that penis envy was a part of girls' development and because the girl has no penis she is already castrated and thereby impervious to threat the father makes upon the boy child. Hence, for Freud, the female emerges very slowly from the Oedipal phase and therefore has a less developed sense of justice, is less civilized (less aware of taboos) than the boy. For Freud, Oedipus Rex is like the "manifest content" of a dream that both hides and reveals the "latent" Oedipus complex. Here literature serves as the unconscious for psychoanalysis, representing mythically that which is repressed in conscious life. Oedipus discovers that the "other" he seeks (cause of plague) is himself.

The psychoanalytic approach has often been used reductively to show what the text "really" means or what the author's psychological state must have been, or the critic psychoanalyzes fictional characters. See summary of Freud's essay "The Uncanny" (1917) which analyzes E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman" in terms of the protagonist's disguised castration anxiety (154-55). Literary critics frequently feel that viewing texts as essentially symptoms, disguised shapes of unconscious wishes or fears, is often inadequate, and having the uncanniness of a text explained away proves disappointing. But it is difficult to define boundaries, to wall off literature from psychoanalysis and vice versa.

Consider, for example, the talking cure--the patient's associative story of her life. The analysis or piecing together of this story is a form of narrative, the analysand is the narrator, and the analyst the reader of this narrative, the one who interprets the plot of the patient's life and its subplot: the unconscious as it is reconstructed from the disguises and displacements it assumes in the patient's tale. The analyst is not only reader but critic, working to persuade the patient and perhaps others of her/his reading of the patient's narrative—this seems to place psychoanalysis within literary studies after all.
Jacques Lacan felt that Freud's tripartite model--id,ego,super-ego--is already a repression of Freud's earlier discovery that the unconscious is by definition something repressed, always repeating its own discovery of itself only to repress it again. Lacan scorns the notion that the ego is an unfragmented entity that can somehow be made whole. For Lacan, the Subject is always split by that which is other, unknown to him or her, yet something the Subject experiences as something lacking, missing, which in turn creates desire. The Subject strives to fill this lack, to overcome the tension of desire by achieving stasis (pleasure or absence of desire), by filling gaps.

Lacan's dialectical model is influenced heavily by Hegel's description of the master-slave relationship in Phenomenology, where he portrays their struggle for recognition and the ultimate undermining of the master's (consciousness) sense of superiority, purpose, and freedom in relation to the slave (unconscious). Consciousness appears to be the master of the psyche and of its repressed unconscious. But the unconscious works, producing materials which allow for the very existence and shape of the consciousness and catching the consciousness unawares. The unconscious is the master, the consciousness its slave.

This Hegelian paradigm also applies, for Lacan, to the relations between Subject and Other. The Subject will project his own desire onto the Other, and the Other will see himself in the Subject: "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other." The unconscious is that which the Subject does not recognize to be himself and which he experiences as other from himself. The way the Subject projects upon and views an Other will yield clues concerning his or her relationship to unconscious wishes and desires. For Lacan, the unconscious is thus often in the place of the Other, the place where the Subject does not recognize herself. Unconsciousness emerges as otherness within consciousness.

Lacan also has stated that "The unconscious is structured like a language." Drawing upon Ferdinand de Saussure's Course on General Linguistics, Lacan compares the unconscious to the movement of the signifier which generates meaning according to its place in the "signifying chain"--in relation to other signifiers rather than signifieds. He also draws upon Roman Jakobson's (1956) argument that metaphor (substitution) and metonymy (contiguity) are the fundamental axes of language to assert that these terms enable us to describe the rhetoric of the unconscious. For Lacan, S/s (signifier over signified) defines the topography of the unconscious, where unconscious desire is never fulfilled: it is only displaced or substituted for, forming chains of signifiers. Metonymy describes the deferral of desire, never crossing the bar of repression to the signified but always pursuing its lack. Metaphor describes the vertical substitution that occurs when one signifier substitutes as the signified for another signified. See Meltzer’s summary of Lacan's discussion of "The Purloined Letter" (160-61).

Meltzer concludes by suggesting the unconscious is the way we imagine the unknowable and its hidden workings. When we discuss the unconscious, we reveal more about the human will to explore/explain that which is unknowable, hoping that the way we speculate about the unknown will tell us in itself about the structures and patterns of the psyche.