01 Gauchet (jr/d) 11/20/02 1:32 PM Page 4

REDEFINING THE
UNCONSCIOUS

Marcel Gauchet

ABSTRACT The notion of the unconscious is central to Freudian theory, and

is at the same time dependent on a network of other concepts and assump-
tions. The theory as a whole is best understood as a historical anthropology,
in the double sense that it reflects a historical transformation of the human con-
dition and that its frame of reference is embedded in the cultural universe of a
historical epoch. A critical reconstruction of the psychoanalytical project, now
urgently needed, therefore faces a double task: it must confront new experi-
ences and developments which have changed the structures of human subjec-
tivity and being-in-the-world, and it must involve a thoroughgoing examination
of the conceptual blockages and imbalances built into Freud’s successive
systems. Both the 20th-century history of psychoanalysis and the new critical
perspectives must be situated in the context of a long-term process of individ-
ualization; but they also reflect changing perceptions and interpretations of oth-
erness, internal as well as external, and are, in that regard, related to the
transformations of art and religion.
KEYWORDS individualization • psychoanalysis • religion • subjectivity •
unconscious

In earlier writings, I discussed the specific trends of contemporary indi-

vidualism. If there was any doubt about their significance, developments
since the 1970s should have removed it: individualization is a total social-
historical phenomenon. It has to do with the global mode of composition of
our societies; in that capacity, it affects all institutional and private relation-
ships between human beings, and it results in radical changes to the social
status as well as the intimate sphere of the individual personality. We should,
in this context, stress the inadequacy of functionalist explanations (even if it
is true that the functions of the individual within the collective mechanism
merit attention), as well as of the theories – such as those of Louis Dumont
Thesis Eleven, Number 71, November 2002: 4–23
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
[0725-5136(200211)71;4–23;028121]
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 5

– which reduce everything to the ideology of individualism (even if it is also

true that the doctrinal legitimations of the claims of the individual are import-
ant). Our task is to understand how the various aspects, including ideological
and functional ones, converge in a remodelling of the individual; only such
an approach allows us to grasp the full scope of the phenomenon, and more
particularly its reflection in the redefinition of individuality as such. Freudian
thought was, at one stage, the most spectacular theoretical expression of this
redefinition. It had shown how the socially constructed and legitimized indi-
vidual had to be rethought from within. The radicalization of the individual-
izing process during the last 30 years has led to further transformations and
new revelations; there is no reason to be surprised by this.
I would now like to add some observations on psychoanalytical theory,
seen from a particular angle: as the most revealing expression of the unset-
tling effect which the individualizing process has had on our conceptions of
psychical subjectivity. As I have stressed, it is the anthropological foundation
of all thinking about subjectivity that has been transformed; and I have, more
specifically, tried to show the importance of changing patterns of socializa-
tion. To grasp this point, the concept of socialization must be radicalized
beyond the usual culturalistic understanding: it does not simply refer to the
adaptation to a given cultural environment, but – more significantly – to the
psychical embedding (inscription) of being-in-society. The most crucial
developmental trend of our times might be the shift towards a complete exter-
nalization of the meaning of being-in-society for the individuals.
It can, as we have seen, be argued that a changing mode of socializa-
tion gives rise to a new type of personality. These mutations seem, in turn,
to throw some light on the contents and the logic of new pathological forms
of mental life.
It is obvious that this set of transformations – a restructuring of frame-
works as well as a reorganization of data – is bound to change our
approaches to the psychological domain in quite fundamental ways. In the
first place they affect the project which set out to study the unknown side of
democratic humanity and adapted the concept of the unconscious to this
purpose. Here we are dealing with a discipline whose anthropological basis
has – in the course of a century – been disrupted by further effects of the
same factors that led to its constitution around 1900. The transformations
since then have perhaps been as significant as those of the 19th century.
But that is not the whole story. Apart from the anthropological foun-
dation, the specifically intellectual preconditions of thinking about psychical
subjectivity have also undergone radical modifications. Here I will mainly be
dealing with these theoretical changes. I would, in other words, like to present
my main reasons for believing that a reformulation or restructuring of psy-
choanalytical theory is urgently needed and bound to happen. When? How?
I do not know. But it seems to me that we can already identify some key
themes for this restructuring, and I will now attempt to substantiate that claim.
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6 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

To clarify the issues, I will divide the argument into two parts, dealing
respectively with problems coming from within and without; this division
should of course not be mistaken for more than a convention. I will first
consider the changes needed because of internal limits which obstruct the
theorizing of Freud’s discoveries, and then analyze the factors that have to
do with clinical, technical or cultural contexts of psychoanalytical procedures;
they appear as external pressures.

1. THEORETICAL DIFFICULTIES
As for the internal limits, I will single out the three most significant ones.

The question of psychosis

The first limit has to do with the understanding of psychosis. This
problem is well known, and it is no less decisive for having been identified
at an early stage. Freudian theory was developed through the analysis of
neurotic illnesses; it is not really capable of dealing with the psychotic ones.
It can throw light on some of their aspects, but it misses the central ones; it
cannot claim to have shown what are the specific features of psychotic pro-
cesses, nor what sets them in motion.
As I noted, this is not a new discovery. In a sense, the problem has
been there from the beginning – it became evident in connection with the
break between Freud and Jung. It became acute again, more recently, as a
result of the rapidly growing influence of psychoanalysis on psychiatric
practice. The Lacanian school owed much of its popularity to the fact that it
had recognized the problem and proposed a solution. The question of psy-
chosis is one of the two key themes of Lacan’s revision of Freudian theory;
the other is the question of language, posed by structuralism. It is precisely
the convergence of these two issues that changes the anthropogenetic model
inherited from Freud. The anthropogenetic process is now seen as centred
on the entry into language, ‘the access to the symbolic’; the Oedipus complex
becomes the key to this transition, and the psychotic patient exemplifies the
failure to successfully complete it. On this view, there is no access to the
symbolic without undergoing the castrating distancing carried out by the
paternal bearer of prohibition and the Law. In that context, the ‘suppression
(forclusion) of the name of the father’ becomes the defining criterion of the
psychotic phenomenon and serves to explain the weakening of the linguis-
tic component of subjectivity, as expressed in hallucinations and delirium.
The merit of this argument is that it poses the problem at the appropriate
level and in adequate terms: what does it mean to become a subject? Clearly,
it is within the process of the constitution of subjectivity that we must find
the reasons for the breakdowns, waverings and failures of subjective power,
which manifest themselves most clearly in psychotic phenomena. We might
say that the subject is that which is revealed in the human being when the
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 7

latter is called into question by psychosis. But however praiseworthy the

Lacanian attempt may have been, it failed on both counts: it explains neither
the failures of subject formation nor the weaknesses of the constituted
subject. The famous ‘suppression of the name of the father’ is, in fact, far too
crude a criterion. It can neither account for the apparent success of subject
formation, before the underlying fragility becomes evident, nor for the main-
tenance of subjective being despite its structural weakening. The problem
should be re-examined from a new angle. As I argued in an earlier essay,
the challenge cannot be met without a thoroughgoing revision of the whole
theoretical framework.1
Here we encounter a problem with which I dealt in an earlier book,
written together with Gladys Swain.2 As we argued there, the history of
madness in modernity is characterized by a long-term trend: the integration
of madness through the recognition of similarity, its incorporation into the
very definition of the human being. This appropriation of a previously alien
domain has already had very significant effects. It must nevertheless be
described as an unfinished revolution. We have yet to explore, far beyond
the horizons now visible, the ‘normal’ madness that is constitutive of the
human phenomenon but can take the extreme or pathological forms that
become evident in psychotic illness.
A response to the question of psychosis would presuppose a prior
understanding of a more fundamental problem: in what sense can psychotic
phenomena be seen as one-sided or unbalanced expressions of the organiz-
ing principles inherent in common experience? The structuring of normal
experience involves the virtual madness present in all of us. It seems to me
that phenomenological psychiatry – however valuable some of its insights
might be – failed to grasp this organizing or structuring aspect. Further
progress might lead to a radically new conception of subjectivity.
Let me add three tentative suggestions about possible moves in this
direction.
To begin with, the subject is neither a given fact nor a definitive achieve-
ment; it is a permanent process of self-production, characterized by consti-
tutive polarities.
Not only would it be misleading to think of the subject as a fact
somehow given to itself, capable of coinciding with and self-confirming
through its given being; my second point is that this self, caught up in a per-
manent instituting process, exists only through the openness to the question
of its being. To put it more concretely, we are permanently fluctuating
between being-everything and being-nothing – but there is nothing ‘intellec-
tual’ about this; the meaning in question emerges at the level of moods,
between excitement and depression, euphoria and anguish. We are consti-
tuted around acute contradictions. Psychoanalytical theory has taught us to
see conflict as a structuring principle of personality, but we may have to go
further and try to understand how deeply contradiction is involved in the
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8 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

organization of the human being. Humans are not only characterized by con-
flictual patterns that define their singularity, but structured by antagonisms
and antinomies whose extreme psychotic forms should not make us forget
the less obtrusive dynamics of normal cases.
The task is, then, to reconstruct and understand the meaning of this
network of polarities. Let us note only the most straightforward aspect: we
are permanently torn between being absent from the world, which grounds
the possibility of an objective world for us, while at the same time opening
up the prospect of our own death, and being at the centre of the world,
without which we would not be capable of lending a subjective meaning to
it, without which the world would not exist for us. We shift from an integral
subjectivization of the world around us to an equally complete desubjec-
tivization which makes the world appear mute, strange and meaningless.
Even in the most ordinary moments of everyday life, we live with the tension
between two equally impossible and potentially ‘mad’ poles. The only viable
way is to keep hold of both and manage the in-between as well as we can.
By contrast, the constitutive mechanism of psychosis consists in articulation
of these extremes. That is why I referred to one-sided development. But the
term ‘mechanism’ should not lead us to think of the process as a simple
mechanical dissociation of the poles, which would leave them free to
function in mutual isolation. We are, rather, dealing with a paradox. In the
symptoms of psychosis, we never find one pole only, but both of them
combined in such a way that one of them predominates, and that movement
between them is blocked. To put it another way, there is a cleavage within
a forced conjunction of extremes, as if the terms of an antinomy were pushed
to the limit, but with one of them firmly on top.
It is only in the light of these pathological breakdowns that we can
understand the normal madness which haunts our everyday experience and
makes it possible. Conversely, only a clarification of the organizing role of
the antinomies built into the physical subject will lead to a better under-
standing of psychotic phenomena. But this disclosure of the subject in the
mirror of its madness has yet to be worked out in detail.

The affective and the cognitive

There is another internal limit that is particularly evident in the present
condition of psychoanalytical theory: the articulation of the affective and the
cognitive. How should we define the problem in more precise terms? It has
to do with the unity of two aspects of subjective experience which we – for
good reasons – want to understand as parts of a whole, but can only think
of as separated. The problem would be easy to solve if it was a matter of
replacing one deliberately chosen theoretical framework with another. But
the will to change does not automatically translate into an alternative. We can
proclaim the need to synthesize emotion and knowledge, but that brings us
no nearer to the goal. The graveyard of ideas is full of attempts in this vein,
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 9

self-contradictory when it comes to details. There are indeed weighty reasons

why this unity is so difficult to achieve. Descartes may have been wrong, but
it is very difficult not to think in a Cartesian way. We are post-Cartesians,
whether we like it or not, and it will take a lot of work to become anything
else. Psychoanalytical theory represented a significant step towards a reunifi-
cation of emotion and knowledge, but as we can conclude from the re-
emerging problems with understanding how thought functions, this step was
not sufficient.
I might use this opportunity to explain some formulations which I used
at the end of my book on the cerebral unconscious;3 they seem to have irri-
tated the guardians of Freudian orthodoxy. They were particularly shocked
by my emphasis on the contrast between the affective unconscious – the
Freudian one – and the cognitive unconscious which is now becoming more
topical. I admit that these formulations were excessively brief and schematic,
and more nuanced ones are needed, but I still think they were essentially on
the right track. The Freudian unconscious is fundamentally affective, even if
it goes beyond the traditional distinction between emotion and thought,
inasmuch as it is also made up of representations. Freud’s main innovation
was to introduce the drives as links between affect and representation.
This will become obvious as soon as we reflect on the question as to what
Freud has taught us about the workings of thought. To pose it is to answer
it: almost nothing. Freud criticizes the traditional equation of mind and con-
sciousness. But he seems to accept that we can continue to equate thought
and consciousness. At most, one might say that the unconscious can to some
extent infiltrate thought, but that thought as such is located beyond the
unconscious.
The next step – which we now need to take – would consist in linking
the workings of thought to the unconscious, or more precisely to the dynamic
articulation of the conscious and the unconscious, and at the same time to
put the affects at the centre of this constellation. And this is precisely what
distinguishes the operations of the human brain from those of a computer,
whatever we may think about the construction of the latter. The originality
of the human computer and its combination of thought and emotion consists
in its non-analytical way of functioning. It treats information in broad terms
and not only in detail – that is why, for it, information has to do with signi-
fication. It advances through strange, non-linear bifurcations, which have to
do with prohibitions as well as incitements; these nodal points, irreducible
to analytical decomposition, are constituted by the affects. The level of sig-
nification is precisely that of the continuum of affect and thought, the first
layer to which is then added the derivative world of thought purged of
emotion; the intellect functions on these two levels, and that is what often
confounds our attempts to understand it.
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10 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

The genetic perspective

The third point to note is that psychoanalytical theory is – in an essen-
tial respect – characterized by a genetic approach. Here, once again, the
recent results of scientific observation, especially those of the scientific study
of childhood and of precocious intelligence, call for a thoroughgoing revision
of the model of psychic development which is still taken for granted by psy-
choanalytical theorists. And although this revision will have to begin with
facts, its implications go beyond the empirical level. Over and above the data
which it must integrate, it has to do with the process of the constitution of
psychic individuality and with what one might call ‘becoming human’. At an
even deeper level, it concerns the way to think about personal development
and the signification of history for the personal dimension – and this will, no
doubt, involve a redefinition of the status of history in general. The major
landmarks of historical consciousness – those that have to do with its emerg-
ence around 1800 and its reorientation around 1900 – are accompanied by
reinterpretations of individual development; our present situation is clearly
no exception to this rule.
To put it more bluntly: psychoanalytical theory is based on a naively
linear and fundamentally inadequate genetic model. The basic premise posits
a passage from a primary undifferentiated state, characterized by ignorance
of selfhood and of the self’s limits (expressed, for example, in an imaginary
fusion with the maternal body), to a progressive differentiation of individu-
ality. Or to use the terms proposed by Castoriadis (whose work is, in my
opinion, the best systematization of orthodox psychoanalytical theory): it
assumes a transition from an original closure of the psychic monad to an
opening to reality, under the impact of socializing and acculturating processes
which force the monad to open up. From this point of view, Freud’s most
original contribution was to show the indestructible persistence of this pri-
mordial closure within the human psyche; the latter is, in that sense, consti-
tutively fragmented.
But it must be said clearly that these polarizing models – undifferenti-
atedness against opening – are misguided. There is an original openness of
the human psyche with regard to reality, and – correspondingly – an original
differentiation of individuality; they coexist with hallucinatory closure and
with the blurring of personal boundaries. There is no denying the presence
of these latter aspects, but we should rethink their meaning. They are not
primordially given; rather, we should think of them as active components
that from the outset compete with the sense of difference and the passion
for reality. There is no primal undifferentiated condition. Images of that kind
are retrospective illusions, constructed on the basis of stories which adults
tell about their infancy (which they are, in part, striving to perpetuate). We
are dealing with a dialectic of two dimensions, and with their interaction in
a constructive process whose stages are successive compromises between
openness and closure.
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 11

The revision that is needed must go beyond psychoanalytical theory. It

will affect the whole legacy of 19th-century evolutionism, its periodic reacti-
vations and the more or less misguided evolutionistic conceptions of the
development of the human mind, be it at the level of depth psychology or
that of abstract intelligence. Piaget’s genetic psychology cannot escape this
critical scrutiny. The whole idea of learning must be re-examined. What does
it mean to acquire a skill or a habit? What does it mean to learn? The natu-
ralistic idea of ontogenesis recapitulating phylogenesis is as inadequate as
the culturalistic one which stresses the construction of personality through
learning; we must try to go beyond these two well-known rival but inter-
related models. This is not to suggest that we should return to naive belief
in innate patterns; rather, the task is to theorize a constructive process which
draws on potentialities and involves a broad spectrum of mechanisms, from
choice to repression. We need a much more complex model of the psycho-
genetic process to account for all this.
The most revealing example is the learning of language. The access to
meaning can neither be understood as a development of an innate capacity,
nor as the incorporation of rules originally alien or exterior to the psyche.
We are from the outset caught up in language, in the element of significations.
We do not understand them, we cannot master them, but we know that their
content concerns us, that they speak of us. We are within, in such a way that
learning to speak and to handle significations is to some extent a matter of
moving out; this process involves the acquisition of a mastery which always
remains limited. We remain to a very significant extent wrapped up in the
language which we master from without. This is a profoundly mysterious
process, structurally susceptible to failure.
We can never overcome this original primacy of language and signifi-
cation. The most elementary meaning conveyed to us when we first
encounter language through speech (parole) is that the world existed before
us and can do without us. The fundamental drama of our condition is already
involved in the first word which we hear. It tells us that the destiny of the
world which we have entered is to exist without us. We thus always remain,
as it were, at the door, in a state of incurable uncertainty about our being
and our place.
To enter into language is to experience an unbridgeable gap between
us and that which includes us. To appropriate meaning is to learn that we
will never have full access to it; it will remain at a distance from us, and we
will therefore never be fully mature. The phantasmagorical experience of
seduction is the most condensed and climactic expression of this situation.
There would be no question of seduction if the child did not ‘guess’ the
sexual meaning that is being revealed to her/him. He/she ‘knows’ that he/she
does not understand, while at the same time knowing what is not under-
stood. And he/she ‘knows’ (in a way of knowing that has nothing to do with
consciousness) that it will be necessary to ‘move to the other side’ to achieve
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12 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

true knowledge and understanding. But we can never really move to the
other side: the impact of the original communication through separation is
decisive for that. We can only gain partial access, without ever getting rid of
the feeling that the main thing still eludes us. Sexuality remains essentially a
matter of phantasms and representations: something which one witnesses,
even when one is part of the scene. In short, separation persists. But the
same applies to every acquirement of which we might be capable. It will be
marked by the double constraint which fragments the ‘development’ of the
child. We will always be striving to reach from within that which is given
from without, but the only certainty we can have about the ultimate con-
vergence of the two lines will be indistinguishable from madness. This is the
ultimate reason why learning is so difficult. In searching for knowledge, we
have to confront a situation which tells us that we can never know.
The being of madness, the being of affects, the being of childhood:
these are the three problems encountered by psychoanalytical theory, the
three strategic cases to be explored; the result would in my opinion be a very
major reformulation of Freudian ideas. But I want to stress that it would
continue along the same lines, through a deepening of Freudian insights
rather than a break with them.

2. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE FREUDIAN SYNTHESIS

I will now turn to the transforming factors which are not so much tied
to the limits which appear from within the theory as to its environment, the
evolving milieu which conditions the understanding of its practice, the
location of its objects or the comprehension of its categories. Again, I will
refer to three principal factors which could be linked by what we may term
generally the dissolution of the Freudian synthesis. This seems to me to define
one of the salient characteristics of the present moment.
Let me first focus on the concept of synthesis, to be understood here
in the strongest sense. The power of the Freudian theory derives from its
constitution of a point of convergence for very different contributions, ranging
from advances in neurology to the emerging psychology of the child and
taking in the refinements of clinical psychiatry. With the neuroses it was faced
with an object eminently synthetic in itself, which gathered together the
changes in subjectivity under the impact of individualization. The treatment
of this object, in all senses of the word, allowed the theory to assemble and
understand a bundle of disparate data. It brought to light an intelligible unity
within a shapeless mass. It was able to establish itself as the centre of gravity
of a vast problematic domain. Without doubt, this synthetic capacity was one
of the determining factors in its accreditation in its immediate context and
for several decades of our cultural history.
Psychoanalytic theory provided the means of a simultaneous orientation
in at least three areas: it offered a response to the problem of organization
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 13

of the psychopathological field; it provided a solution to the problem of the

method of psychotherapy; it appeared finally to give a plausible account of
the nature of the experience of otherness, or at any rate it presented itself as
in harmony with the living experience of otherness in a certain cultural con-
figuration.
Today, however, what seemed to have become understandable has
become confused in all its aspects. Each of these three problems has
reasserted itself at the same time as the possibility of holding them together
is vanishing. Hence the impression of disintegration and of confusion in a
domain that only yesterday seemed to be readable. It is as if we were return-
ing in a certain way to the matrix from which the Freudian synthesis emerged.

The organization of the psychopathological field

The observation is widely shared: the psychopathological field is return-
ing to chaos. The advent of psychoanalytic theory was inseparable from a
major reorganization of the psychopathological field, a reorganization which
both carried and was carried by the theory. A reorganization which
responded to a multi-formed enlargement of the field and which prevailed
in an almost consensual and stable fashion for 60 or 70 years – let me say
that it took shape on the eve of the First World War and that it started to seri-
ously unravel in the 1980s. The sphere of ‘madness’ expanded in various
directions: how were the borders and the articulations between centres and
peripheries or its different circles to be conceived? The first organizational
differentiation which imposed itself: the difference of psychosis/neurosis. But
once these two circles have been distinguished, a third one needed to be
situated, that of perversions (the element of the whole through which sexu-
ality appears in its de-genitalized dimension, with all that that entails in
relation to the sexuality of the child). And then there is a fourth circle, fated
to remain fuzzy according to the law of borders, but nevertheless of a con-
siderable implicit significance for the overall comprehension of psycho-
pathology. It covers the association of disorders with criminal behaviours, the
toxicomaniacs, alcoholism in so far as it derives from a psychological
addiction, as well as behaviours difficult to situate, such as anorexia and
bulimia, either related to classical entities like hysteria or isolated in a way
which makes them unclassifiable.
The very principle of this differential structuration seems to be affected
today. It is in the process of disintegrating. Below I shall outline some aspects
which support this proposition.
The concept of neurosis is under interrogation. As we know, it is in the
process of being expelled from the official psychiatric nosography. It is only
a sign but this public confirmation of death is no less expressive. A more
substantial fact is that the clinical series connected by the notion of neurosis
is falling apart. We are observing the astonishing revival of ‘primitive’ patho-
logical forms supposedly definitively surpassed. We observe on the one hand
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14 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

the resurgence of clinical hysteria, convulsive (even epidemically convulsive)

and above all dissociative personalities in North America, raising the question
of whether it is going to cross the Atlantic. We observe on the other hand
the return of syndromes considered purely affective, in the style of panic
attacks, which recall in strange fashion the descriptions of what one could
call the ‘pre-neuroses’ of the years 1860–80. We must also add the reap-
pearance of certain specific thought disorders of the type of obsession or
phobia, which are now being interpreted again in terms of disturbances of
thought. If we add the eruption of the new pathological forms which I have
sought to sketch, one has a measure of the centrifugal tendencies which are
in the process of disrupting the received frame of the neuroses. They appear
less and less susceptible of a uniformed understanding.
A further feature is the appearance, between neuroses and psychoses,
of an intermediary group, which is rapidly expanding and is commonly called
borderline states – an expression which hardly sheds light. In fact the more
this group expands, the more what it covers becomes obscure. Whatever it is,
its existence alone is sufficient to provoke important changes. The structural
opposition between neurosis and psychosis is tending to be replaced by an
opaque continuum of internal transitions.
The situation would remain fairly simple if it were only a question of
substituting continuity for discontinuity. However, superimposed on this sub-
stitution is a double movement which makes the internal differentiations of
the psychopathological field definitively problematic. On the one hand, the
psychotic phenomenon is becoming isolated in its specificity, due to the fact
that it is hardly affected by the changes in the economy of the personality
which are upsetting the behavioural patterns of the neurotic phenomenon.
Conversely, clinical observation is describing associative phenomena which
blur this insularity. It is teaching us to recognize that psychotic behaviour can
be the expression of a neurotic structure. Thus the sudden delirious fits of
adolescence, wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic, when they in fact belong
rather to neurosis, or obsessions which are likely to appear wearing the mask
of paranoia.
If there is one category today which is under scrutiny, it is clearly that
of ‘perversion’. To start with, its general validity is under question. Indepen-
dent of the word and its historical legacy, is it legitimate to place together
fetishism, sadomasochism, voyeurism-exhibitionism, homosexuality? Do they
really possess a unity? Let us at least pose the question. But this skepticism
is nothing beside the frontal contestation arising from the specific question
of homosexuality. The social and civic movements in favour of recognizing
homosexuality have led to the banishing of the term perversion and to dis-
qualifying, beyond the word, the understanding of homosexual behaviour in
pathological terms. The question of the meaning of the homosexual option
is not thereby rendered less open. Can one be satisfied here by the answer
of a pre-Freudian psychology, of the type ‘just another lifestyle choice’, as if
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 15

everyone disposed of him/herself, completely consciously and freely, includ-

ing sexual preferences? It is reasonable to doubt this. The importance of the
question doesn’t need stressing. It is no less than that of the specificity of
human sexuality, of its uncoupling from its biological basis in reproduction,
of its denaturation through representation and meaning and consequently the
question of the place it occupies at the heart of subjective identity without
any human measure with its objective role in the economy of life. If there is
‘choice’ in fact, since it is the dimension advanced by the actors, what sort
of choice is involved, on what level is it situated, under what form is it to be
conceived? What makes these questions so unresolvable is the impression
that they take us beyond (or remain this side of) the separation of con-
scious/unconscious.
Finally, we are witnessing the growing importance of the most marginal
zone of the psychopathological field, the fourth circle of which I spoke. Its
destabilizing effects cannot be over-emphasized. It presents two faces: the
toxicomanias, delinquent and criminal conduct. Its growing social weight
goes together with its psychological mystery. The phenomena of addiction
and dependence, on the one hand, violence and aggressive de-socialization
on the other, reveal an enigmatic underside of the world which at first sight
seems to put personal autonomy and the pacification of human relations
above all else. The more one is inclined to conceive these patterns of conduct
in terms of disturbances of personality, the less one is able to say in what
they might consist. Let me note in passing that if ‘perversion’ is having a hard
time, the ‘perverse’ by contrast is flourishing. It has migrated to other sites.
The emblematic value which sexual crime is in the process of acquiring is
telling in this respect. The obscurity surrounding these phenomena and the
awareness of their social prominence are what is making them significant.
They underline the radical inadequacy of our responses. They confront us
with a human zone of which we know little and for which we can do little.
Thus the whole area is affected by uncertainty.
The reference to sexual criminals leads me to a last aspect, which even
though it belongs to a different register also represents a striking sign of the
return to the original situation. What we thought we had mastered for good
by assigning it to the domain of phantasm is now returning with the force
of reality. I am thinking, of course, of the question of seduction and beyond
that of the obsession in our societies with the sexual mistreatment inflicted
on children, firstly by their parents. Given that we do not take the problem
at face value, it attests all the same to an unresolved problem. It was not
resolved either by Freud, as has been shown recently, despite the simplifi-
cations of the received version. In fact he remained pretty vacillating; the fact
that the problem has come back in these proportions and with this intensity
shows that he knew how to ask the right questions and that the answers
remain to be found.
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16 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

The psychotherapeutic articulation

If there is one thing which distinguishes the psychoanalytic method
among the psychotherapeutic approaches which flourished in the period
1880–1914, it is the elegance of its solution to the symmetrical difficulties of
hypnosis and of moral treatment and to their joint articulation. It avoids the
pitfalls of the therapist’s illusions of power over his patient, given by
hypnosis, without succumbing to the illusion of the power of the patient with
respect to his symptoms to which moral treatment is prone. It integrates the
mobilization of the spontaneous and the extra-conscious accompanied by
hypnosis while at the same time doing justice to the conscious elaboration
and the subjective distancing employed by moral treatment. The analytic
word operates as a middle term which makes it possible to employ both
approaches while allowing their reciprocal control. Here too the synthetic
articulation is falling apart. Each element of the synthesis is asserting itself
and claims its own independent legitimacy. We are witnessing the return of
hypnosis on the one hand and on the other the reappearance of moral treat-
ment under the fresh but still recognizable guise of cognitive therapies. Each
approach is to be considered, moreover, less in terms of its strict definition
than of its role as organizing pole of a mass of practices more or less related.
What is significant here is less the explosion of the domain of the familiar
flourishing of a market of psychotherapies than the disjunction of the poles.
What is remarkable is the renewed opposition of approaches, the one stress-
ing the influence of the therapist, the other focused on the work of the patient
on him/herself. Admittedly both sides have retained the lessons of the past,
they are wary of unilateral methods when they call for the cooperation of
the patient and draw attention to the interpersonal conduct of the cure. This
does not alter the fact that there is a flagrant divergence of logics, with its
disintegrating effects.
In the return of hypnosis to prominence – it had in fact never ceased
to exist – it is not the fact which is important but the problem. The major
resurgence is that of the enigma of hypnosis. It was thought that the mystery
had been conquered, it was agreed that psychoanalytic theory had offered a
satisfactory interpretation while at the same time supplying the means to
master its effects. Now we are forced to admit first of all that we do not know
what is involved. We can now see, armed by what we have learnt elsewhere,
that the phenomenon reveals a highly enigmatic dimension of the human
subject: its opening to the other, its disposability and vulnerability in relation
to the other. The other lives in us to the point of the virtuality of this extra-
conscious subjection to its power – a subjection which is not without paradox
since it remains ours, in such a fashion that this depossession in favour of
the other is also an appropriation of the other.
We are forced to admit further that a hidden unmastered hypnosis is at
work within the analytic situation. We are faced by a practice which knows
much less about what it is doing than it would like. This observation at least
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 17

indicates to some extent what and why. The hypnotic dimension of trans-
ference needs to be re-examined.
We have the same return to the original problems with the cognitive
therapies. As I said, it is not difficult to rediscover behind their brand-new
vocabulary the intellectualist approach of the great epoch of ‘moral and
nervous treatment’ around 1900. It seemed that the very spirit of the enter-
prise had been definitively condemned for its naivety. The first lecture in the
first year consisted in instructing beginners what a bad method it was to take
at face value the symptoms of patients in their ideational or representational
presentation, elucidation of their affective substratum alone being capable of
modifying or overcoming them. The base axiom: the superstructure cannot
be altered without proceeding via the infrastructure. Things proved to be
more subtle, however. It turned out that the explosion and the action of the
underworld on the conscious part of certain disturbances classically called
‘neurotic’, for instance obsessional but also certain depressive disturbances,
did not only produce short-term effects – the well known difficulty lay here
in their superficial and fragile character, hence the sense of frustration rapidly
reached by this treatment. In fact they also produced, provided they were
conducted appropriately, deep, long-term changes. In other words, work on
the superstructure showed itself capable of transforming the infrastructure,
the very converse of a mode of reasoning held to be irreversibly consecrated.
To sum up: if the synthesis is unraveling, it is because each of its parts
still has something to tell us. If, then, articulation needs to be reconstructed,
as I’m inclined to think, it will be very different in its details to the one we
know.

The experience of otherness

A new mode of experience of otherness is taking shape which is desta-
bilizing the recognized figure of the unconscious and its culturally established
locations. Above I have made reference to the displacements on the
anthropological level of the experience of the unconscious for the ultra-con-
temporary individuals. This is the problem which we encounter in a wider
form. The experience of the unconscious is not a purely personal experi-
ence, it is embedded in a cultural figuration.
In social and cultural terms, the experience of the unconscious is to be
regarded as a specific figure of the experience of otherness in the form of
the otherness of the self. It needs to be resituated from this perspective in a
long history. Human experience has always been an experience of the oth-
erness of the self. For the longest period of human history, however, this oth-
erness of the self was understood within and as a function of an otherness
explicitly situated in order to organize the human world in all its aspects:
religious otherness. Otherness defined by the debt and the dependence of
humans in relation to the gods, by the cultural priority of the invisible over
the visible. The originality of the contemporary experience of otherness is
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18 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

obvious in comparison. One could say: the unconscious is the appearance

which otherness of the self takes on when the instituted otherness of religion
collapses, when the social priority of the invisible dissolves. The result is an
otherness of the self which is solely a question of the self: and this changes
everything.
Of what does the living core of this experience of otherness consist,
which we can regard as constitutive of human experience? To make sense
of it I am proposing to place it in an anthropological structure with three
terms: the invisible, the body, truth.
Our experience is the irreducible experience of a doubling. A doubling
into a visible and an invisible part of ourselves. Beyond our visible body
something of our intimate identity withdraws from the visible, moreover, as
speaking beings, we work with the invisible. Wherever we turn we discover
our doubleness. There is no culture which is not constructed around this
division. Its religious interpretation, the ancient interpretation dominant in
human history, translates into an experience of otherness with two poles:
possession and prophecy, to simplify outrageously the taking over of the
body and the gift of truth. On the one side, the experience of one’s body
becoming other, seized by the power of the invisible. On the other side, the
experience of a rapture which fills the spirit with the invisible and gives it
access to truths normally concealed, the wisdom of the gods, secrets of the
beyond or future reality – but for everyone this experience has the familiar
and everyday form of the dream, in which the sleeping body opens the soul
to another world. Where there is religion, that is, religious structuring of the
human social space, there is this double experience of the invisible, in the
strangeness of a body which ceases to belong to you, and in the self-efface-
ment which yields to a truth which speaks in your place.
Modern European history since the 15th or 16th century provides the
spectacle of a continuous chain of episodes, in which one can follow the dis-
placement of the terms of this structure linking together the body, the
invisible and the truth, parallel to the retreat of the structuring power of
religion. The sequence goes from the epoch of witchcraft, at its height at the
turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, to the convulsive and prophetic episode
at the beginning and the magnetic episode at the end of the 18th century,
finally the hysterical episode at the end of the 19th century, to which the dis-
covery of the unconscious owes a determining debt. The figure of a personal
unconscious emerges and becomes conceivable by means of a reworking of
the structure commanding the experience of otherness. It is a reworking in
which we can still discern behind profound transformations the experience
of the otherness of truth.
These successive metamorphoses since the 16th century – meta-
morphoses in the way the body withdraws from itself and truth manifests
itself despite the self – express the changing face of the ongoing exit from
religion. I can’t elaborate but it is clear that nature gradually supplements the
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 19

supernatural and that the other in the self becomes more and more an other
of the self. The discovery of the unconscious is embedded in this sequence,
it is one of its important aspects. It corresponds to the decisive moment when
the subject cannot situate the other, which is still present anywhere but in
the self. We need, however, to refine the description if we want to seize the
continuation of the movement and not fall into the embrace of the end of
history, that is, to posit an already accomplished exit from religion. There can
be no doubt that a crucial threshold was crossed around 1900. But nothing
would be more deceptive than to consider this reworking of the articulation
of the invisible as terminal. The process of the exit from religion is still con-
tinuing. Everything seems to suggest that we are entering a new metamor-
phosis, a new stage. The constellation set up around 1900, which has shaped
our conception of the unconscious, is changing. If we wanted to sum up the
displacement which is occurring in two propositions, I would say: the
reworking of the 1900 constellation consists in a rearrangement of the
religious outside of religion at the same as we observe the installing of a reli-
giosity without religion.
The religious outside religion: this supposes an ongoing strength of
presence of the latter together with a hostile climate. We have reached an
acute point in the secular battle. In this atmosphere of conflict we have the
striking synchronism of a series of events which have in common that they
are external to the explicitly religious domain but which nevertheless consist
in reactivating knowingly or unknowingly the religious dimension outside its
domain. It is not a case of transference according to the secularization model,
but of a revival of or insistence on the religious by actors, who not only live
outside religion but are hostile to it, at least as regards the established forms
of belief. We are dealing with a loss of the hold of religion since it is wit-
nessing the development of activities which radically challenge it but remain
religions in this challenge. Where religion is reflected it is still present.
Four of these activities seem to me particularly significant.
The years around 1900 were, as we know, a great period for the occult
and for ‘psychic research’. I don’t have the space to dismantle the metamor-
phosis of the believable inherent in this will to science in relation to phenom-
ena which have previously been held to be supernatural, apparitions,
miracles, phantoms, ghosts, etc. If you take away the religious understand-
ing of things, it leaves the powers of the invisible.
Second, the crystallization of ‘secular religions’ belongs in the same
context and to the same fundamental operation. The Leninist reinterpretation
of Marxism provides the most telling expression, with to a lesser extent the
affirmation of ultra-nationalism in the opposed camp. The best way to situate
this phenomenon is to contrast it with the diffuse, even explicit religiosity of
the early socialist doctrines and more generally with the philosophies of
history of the early 19th century which has nothing in common with The New
Christianity.4 What entitles us to speak of secular religions is precisely the
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20 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

aggressively secular aspect of the new doctrines, their hostility to religiosity

as such, whatever the degree of transcendence. A hostility which does not
stop them reintroducing unconsciously the religious dimension into the very
project of its elimination. A crazy project indeed, to supplant religion on its
own ground, to abolish it by realizing it, by projecting it wholly into the
world.
Under the same heading we should mention, thirdly, the aesthetic rede-
finition of the powers of art, which brings us to its ‘contemporary’ age (as
opposed to the ‘modern’ rupture of the 1850s and 60s, of Manet, Baudelaire,
Flaubert or Wagner). Here too there are precedents. The prophets of future
society have their worthy counterparts in the romantic image. But here, too,
it is one thing to base oneself on a religiosity supposedly independent of the
churches and dogmas, and to invest the poet with a new ministry, and it is
another thing to attribute to an art, which has become its own pure end, the
exorbitant power to reveal to us the beyond of things as well as the secret
of ourselves. This double radicalization, both of the principle of art for art’s
sake and of the capacity of unveiling lent to art, is most clearly seen in the
break with figurative painting by Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian. This
hyperbolic and contradictory ambition to disclose the ground of our being
and the truth of being, while at the same time enclosing oneself in the exclu-
sivity of a completely self-sufficient activity, was to be, however, the spiritual
dynamic of all the avant-gardes of the century. The faith in a beyond of reality
was to be nowhere more living in our period than in those who were firmly
convinced that they were solely concerned with this world.
The years around 1900, fourth and last, saw the constitution of a soci-
ology of religions (Troeltsch, Weber, Durkheim). This new discourse of
knowledge supposes a relationship to the object close to the phenomena we
have been discussing. Up to then, either one spoke of religion from within
religion or one spoke from outside. A sociology of religion, as the socio-
logical classics conceived it, only makes sense if it crosses this division. It
demands that one be able to speak from outside religion as if one were within
or that one is able to integrate the objective viewpoint of the external
observer when speaking of the internal viewpoint of the believer. The fact
of being a non-believer should not block the recognition of a part of human
experience and the capacity to recover its positive significance. Conversely,
the fact of being a believer should not block the recognition of an element
of social reality and the capacity to appreciate the relative independence of
its function from all ultimate truth. A double demand which allowed
Durkheim, for example, to preach the recuperation of the religious outside
of all religion in the name of the needs of the collective consciousness.
It is in the midst of these reworkings of the boundary between the
visible and the invisible that the concept of the psychic unconscious gained
its legitimacy in the order of knowledge while becoming at the same time
the name of an identifiable experience. We may note the revealing ambiguity
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 21

of its relationship with the spirit of faith. If Freud presents it as an explana-

tory instrument of the reduction of religious need, it has been since the begin-
ning the object of an investment by believers which continues to be
confirmed and amplified but is all the more in need of further interpretation.
The unconscious has in fact served to restore meaning to religious convic-
tion in the culture of our century in more than one respect. We need to be
aware of this.
This configuration remained relatively stable for six, seven or eight
decades – depending on where we draw the line. And then it began to
change. All its components are undergoing transformations. A new equilib-
rium has not yet taken shape, but it is at least in the making.
The most spectacular change of recent times, with regard to the
phenomena discussed above, is obviously the collapse of secular religions.
History and society are no longer credible outlets for religiosity, be it con-
scious or unconscious. The future is no longer a possible object of faith in
the strict sense. It has become an unknown which undermines belief. Neither
divination nor transcendent knowledge can reach it. There is no ultimate
realization to be expected from it. It discourages utopias by making them
appear as vacuous: the road to earthly redemption is no longer open. This
could mean two things: the religiosity that had found expressions outside
religion might be returning to its original source; to some extent, this seems
to be happening. Or the relevance of religion to human affairs is diminish-
ing in a drastic way; that is, in my opinion, the main implication of this
development. It represents a new phase of the exit from religion.
Many observers have – with good reason – noted the parallels between
this collapse of revolutionary hope and the discrediting of avant-garde art.
The connection goes deeper than the political sympathies that may have
linked the two domains. It is the secular religiosity of art that is losing its
content, and the faith in its transcendent cognitive power that is being
destroyed. The pleasure which it gives us can no longer take us beyond the
realm of appearances. And although art can still tell us much about ourselves,
it does not disclose any otherwise inaccessible fundamentals of our life. It
does not open the door to any other reality.
We are seeing the last of the variously disguised religious remnant that
has – for better or worse – dominated the last century; but at the same time,
its disappearance is revealing a hard and irreducible core of religiosity. This
can, for example, be seen in the stubborn survival of superstitions, amply
documented and much deplored by rigorous rationalists. More than half of
the French nation believes in telepathy. But what does it mean to believe?
That is the point: here we can measure the changes which have occurred
since ‘psychical research’ was at its best, at the end of the 19th and the begin-
ning of the 20th century. It still has its followers – thanks to the miraculous
strength of human conservatism, nothing ever disappears completely. But for
most of those who claim to believe in premonition or telepathy, what matters
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22 Thesis Eleven (Number 71 2002)

is not the substantial reality of the invisible world which they take for
granted. They feel inwardly obliged to believe in it, but they feel no obli-
gation to go in search of objective evidence for their belief, in the style of the
photographs of invisible fluids that were produced by the psychical
researchers of the late 19th century. Even more: they know, in an obscure
but significant way, that such objective manifestations are unlikely to be
found, and they find it easy to live without them. The whole matter has to
do with our way of thinking, rather than with the reality of things. Our mental
constitution is such that we cannot avoid thinking along these lines, that these
ideas irresistibly occur to us. We are not dealing with residual superstitions,
rooted in a remote past and destined to be overcome by the progress of
enlightenment. Rather, the phenomenon has to do with certain features of
our mind which predispose us to see something else in things and in our-
selves. The very process which culminates in the elimination of the invisible
from objective reality thus leads us to discover the subjective roots of the
belief in the invisible. Something that we might call the anthropological core
of the religious sphere is being brought to light.
I have used the revealing and undisputed example of magical or
‘paranormal’ beliefs to illustrate this core. But there is more to it, and the
field has yet to be mapped out. As suggested above, it involves all phenom-
ena which link our experience of the world and of ourselves to invisible oth-
erness and relate it to the unknown. In view of the forms which this
experience now tends to take – for example, in art, at least on some occa-
sions – we have some reason to speak of religiosity without religion. We are,
independently of any kind of belief, destined to live through intellectual and
personal experiences of the kind earlier associated with religion, even if we
cannot identify them as such. Let us imagine the impossible: if religions were
to disappear so completely that they would even be erased from human
memory, the anthropological core that has for many millennia functioned as
a substratum for religions would still exist, and it would retain its capacity to
shape our thoughts and experiences.
This shift in the forms of expression of religiosity is also reflected in
new approaches to religion as an object of inquiry, in contrast to the tradition
established by early 20th-century sociology of religion. The latter was, explic-
itly or implicitly, based on the assumption that religion fulfils an essential
social function (and for that reason, we can still believe in its return even
when it is obviously disappearing). But the transformations of our world lead
us to think that a complete de-functionalization of religion is possible, and
that – correspondingly – societies can function wholly without religion. But
this is not to suggest that the religious dimension has simply lost all meaning.
It is still there. The point is that it must now be defined primarily in terms of
an anthropological grounding rather than a sociological function. On the one
hand we must analyze the foundation on which institutionalized religions
rested, and thus explain what constitutes the human being as a religious being
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Gauchet: Redefining the Unconscious 23

or at least one susceptible to religion. For we must, on the other hand, admit
that this anthropological core of religion is destined to survive its institutional
forms and likely to find non-religious expressions. It seems that we now stand
at the beginning of this new history of that which was known as religiosity.
We have, in other words, definitively entered the critical phase of
religious consciousness: the phase where belief returns to its subjective roots
and where the question of its anthropological foundations becomes fully
explicit. Two centuries ago, Kant made the first move in this direction. But
the domain of religion in human life goes far beyond the ideas of reason
within which he tried to confine it. The critical question is less about that
which makes us demand a complete explanation of the phenomenal world,
than about that which makes us beings of the other, divided within ourselves
and irresistibly tempted to link the world of the senses to a supra-sensual
one. It is this question that we will have to confront.
We are thus about to take a new step on the long road that leads out
of religion; it changes our experience of the invisible in a fundamental way,
and cannot but affect our perceptions and interpretations of the unconscious.
The implications involve the whole system of associations and intersections
between the body, the invisible and truth. The present state of confusion
indicates the need for restructuring. That task will take us far beyond earlier
approaches to the otherness within us; we used to call it ‘the unconscious’,
but we may soon have to invent another label.

Marcel Gauchet teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
and is editor of the journal Le Débat. His publications include The Disenchantment
of the World: a Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press (1997) and,
most recently, La démocratie contre elle-mème, Gallimard (2002).

Translators’ notes
An earlier version of this article was published in Le Débat, no. 100, 1998,
pp. 189–206. The text was translated by Johann P. Arnason and David Roberts.
1. See M. Gauchet, ‘A New Age of Personality: An Essay on the Psychology of
Our Times’, Thesis Eleven 60: 23–41.
2. See M. Gauchet and G. Swain (1980), La pratique de l’esprit humain. Paris:
Gallimard, 1980.
3. See M. Gauchet (1992), L’inconscient cérébral. Paris: Seuil.
4. This refers to Saint-Simon’s Nouveau Christianisme, first published in 1825.