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The unconscious as overflowing with other people’s desires

From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 12236:

Many people sense at times that they are working towards something they do not even really want, striving to live up to expectations they do not even endorse, or mouthing goals they know perfectly well they have little if any motivation to achieve. The unconscious is, in that sense, overflowing with other peoples desires: your parents’ desire, perhaps, that you study at such and such a school and pursue such and such a career; your grandparents’ desire that you settle down and get married and give them great-grandchildren; or peer pressure that you engage in certain activities that do not really interest you. In such cases, there is a desire that you take to be “your own,” and another with which you grapple that seems to pull the strings and at times force you to act but that you do not feel to be altogether your own.

The overlap with the habitus is striking here in the sense of how “other people’s talk, other people’s conversations, and other goals, aspirations, and fantasies” (loc 12671) get ‘inside us’. The necessity of reflexivity comes because of our capacity to ask “is this really what I want?”; a question which is routinely possible outside the clinic, even if the realist approach to reflexivity chronically understates the psychic and interpersonal constraints on asking it in a sustained and efficacious way.

The gap I increasingly see in this body of work is that it doesn’t account for the stream of connections running beneath the internal conversation, often interrupting it as we find ourselves drawn to compulsive behaviours contrary to our reflective intentions. But also making it possible, in the sense of furnishing our inner life with the cultural raw materials (phonemes, words, phrases, associations, images etc) in which the acts of articulation which constitute inner speech become possible. As Fink describes on loc 14420:

Certain words and expressions present themselves to us while we are speaking or writing-not always the ones we want-sometimes so persistently that we are virtually forced to speak or write them before being able to move on to others. A certain image or metaphor may come to mind without our having sought it out or in any way attempted to construct it and thrust itself upon us so forcibly that we can but reproduce it and only then try to tease out its meaning. Such expressions and metaphors are selected in some Other place than consciousness. Lacan suggests that we view the process as one in which there are two chains of discourse which run roughly parallel to each other (in a figurative sense), each “unfolding” and developing chronologically along a timeline, as it were, one of which occasionally interrupts or intervenes in the other.

The clinical aspiration to excavate these intrapersonal relations, bringing the unconscious to consciousness, has a quotidian counterpart in simply recognising the origins of the things we do (often lying outside of ‘us’, strictly speaking) and developing the capacity to filter and endorse rather than mechanically reproduce. Or as Maggie Archer would put it to discern, deliberate and dedicate. This is not to equate psychoanalysis and the sociology of reflexivity but rather to try and sketch out elements which are homologous, with a view to better understanding the relationship between them. The problem with such a suggestion from a Lacanian point of view is that it fails to grasp the formal character of the unconscious, as a chain of reactions to events which generates its own emergent syntax as it contingently unfolds* rather than, as I’ve framed it here, a kind of inherited reservoir of semantic content which is flowing continuously under the surface of reflexive consciousness.

There’s a further exploration to be made here about how realists think about social roles and the expectations carried by them. There’s a recognition that we can personify those roles in particularistic ways which can cumulatively lead to changes in the role itself (e.g. Maggie’s example of the growing informality of higher education) but how the structural content of those roles (e.g. my contractual responsibilities as a lecturer) and their interpersonal challenges (e.g. what these responsibilities mean with particular people in particular contexts) is inflected through the psychodynamics I’ve discussed above is a fascinating question.

*I felt I understood this when reading Fink’s simplified account of coin flip: the patterning of the outcomes in the sequence generates a code which is specific to that chain of events. But I’m struggling to relate it to empirical examples, beyond the general insight that the formal structures of language are embedded in such a code in a way which intervenes on the semantics of phenomenological content without being reducible to it.

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