#unconscious

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#freud #horses #lacan #language #post-structuralism

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#may #nature #psychical #unconscious #whatever

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. ↗

— Jackie Cooper

#dying #good #good work #half-hour #hope

I believe in the unconscious state of the mind in death. ↗

— John Harvey Kellogg

#death #i #i believe #i believe in #mind

The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous. ↗

— Edward Thorndike

#animal #compared #distortion #facts #harmless

Marvelous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks. ↗

— Anthony Trollope

#company #crowd #digestion #even #exercised

some of the happiest moments of my life have occurred just before I fall asleep or wake up, when I linger in that twilight world between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a state of somnolent repose but also savoring the vital goodness of remaining this close to the vegetative in myself ↗

— Irving Singer

#harmony #intellect #nature #repose #sleep

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously. ↗

— Wally Lamb

#experiences #far #fiction #fiction writers #however

Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius. ↗

— Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

#every man #genius #grows #into #man

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#consciously #contemporaries #epoch #his #individual