The unconscious and its effects on everyday life: formations of the unconscious, repetition and listening beyond the clinical setting

Abstract

This article examines how the unconscious manifests itself in everyday life, outside the analytic setting, and what psychoanalysis authorises one to conclude from such manifestations. The argument reconstitutes the metapsychological status of the Freudian concept — the hypothesis of the unconscious as a requirement imposed by the gaps in consciousness, and its reformulation in the second topography —, examines the formations through which it becomes legible in daily life (parapraxes, dreams and repetition), follows the Lacanian rereading that situates the unconscious in the order of language and in the discourse of the Other, and discusses the scope and limits of the psychoanalytic reading of bodily symptoms. These developments are then confronted with the contemporary diagnosis of malaise and with the critique of the medicalisation of suffering. It is argued that the unconscious is constitutive of subjectivity and is not restricted to the clinical device, but that reading its formations outside analysis yields neither interpretation nor knowledge about particular subjects. Finally, it is argued that the value of analytic listening in public debate lies less in explaining behaviour than in refusing the erasure of the symptom as subjective expression.