I’m currently reading Bruce Fink’s superb Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners and it’s startling how much clearer obscure ideas are when you see what they mean in practice. For example the notion of the Real:
It should be clear that “truth,” as I am using it here, is not so much a property of statements as it is a relationship to the real; to hit the truth is to alight upon something that had never before been formulated in words and to bring it into speech, however haltingly or insufficiently at first. For it is in the impact that speech is able to have on the real that lies the power of psychoanalysis. Left to its own devices, the real does not change over time; like a traumatic war experience, it persists, insistingly returning in nightmares or even waking life (leading, at times, to what I would be tempted to call “intruthive thoughts”). It is only by symbolizing it in words—and in many cases it must be articulated a number of times in different ways—that one can begin to shift positions with respect to it.
Pg 77
And the unconscious being structured like a language, emphasising the formal features of how it is expressed:
A SPEAKER CAN BE THOUGHT of as providing a certain punctuation of his own discourse, akin to the punctuation found in written texts, by pausing at certain points, stressing certain words, rushing through or mumbling others, repeating specific phrases, and so on.
Pg 36
The aestheticising mode of social theory obscures the practical purpose underlying theorising as an activity. Unless we’re willing to accept this is a weird language game we’re playing purely for our collective amusement, it needs to serve a purpose, even if that purpose is diffuse and under-defined. This makes the theory/practice nexus central to understanding theorising as an activity, including tracing how ideas and activity interact at the intersection between the two spheres.
Mark Carrigan 