In his A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice Bruce Fink draws attention to the phenomenological distinction between latency and repression. From loc 556:

Many analysands at some point have an experience in which something comes to light, after a long period of analytic work, which they have the dim sense that they had always known but never expressed or owned up to. (Freud writes that patients would sometimes comment, “As a matter of fact, I’ve always known that, I’ve just never thought of it”; SE XII, p. 148.) This might correspond to what phenomenologists refer to as latency, but once again it is experientially (dare I say “phenomenologically”?) very different from the sometimes shocking and upsetting revelation of what was truly unconscious, and which often initially gives rise to confusion and discombobulation on the analysand’s part, and then to a long and sometimes unsettling period of productive associational work.

These both involve an encounter with the Lacanian Real in the sense of symbolising something that has previously eluded symbolisation. But Fink is pointing to how the reasons for that neglect vary, as do the implications of overcoming it. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how Taylor’s hermeneutics could be put into dialogue with Lacan, particularly the former’s notion of articulation as central to self-formation:

Much of our motivation – our desires, aspirations, evaluation – is not simply given. We give it a formulation in words or images. Indeed, by the fact that we are linguistic animals our desires and aspirations cannot but be articulated in one way or another […] these articulations are not simply descriptions, if we mean by this characterisations of a fully independent object, that is, an object which is altered neither in what it is, nor in the degree or manner of its evidence to us by the description.

In this way my characterisation of this table as brown, or this line of mountains as jagged, is a simple description. On the contrary, articulations are attempts to formulate what is initially inchoate, or confused, or badly formulated. But this kind of formation or reformulation does not leave its object unchanged. To give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold important in a certain way.

We are all groping nervously towards the expression of inner life. The fact of someone presenting clinically with a complaint illustrates their reflexivity, even if it is mediated by family, friends, workplace etc. To be this person, presenting to this clinician in this way embodies reflexivity in Archer’s sense. My growing complaint against the Lacanian social theorists is their neglect of the clinical context of Lacan’s work, which is crucial to avoiding the temptation to totalise these categories carelessly as a form of social and political analyse.

Which is not to say they need to remain confined to the clinic! But we need to be extremely careful at this interface. I think Taylor’s work is geared much more towards the latent than the repressed, but we can trace out the implications of his philosophical anthropology for understanding aspects of social life where these ideas have been taken up. We can then examine these two modes of articulation through a more psychoanalytical lens without dispensing with the original social framing. This is just one example of the kind of concept work I want to do at this interface over the next few years.