Conscious

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (51)

1. #01

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: Freud, drawing on Hildebrandt, Delbœuf, Maury, and others, establishes that dream material is always rooted in experience (including childhood and forgotten impressions), and that dreams can access memories inaccessible to waking consciousness—a phenomenon he terms 'hypermnesia'—thereby grounding a key premise for the interpretation of the unconscious.

   such pictures of persons, things, places, and early experiences as either possessed but little consciousness and no psychic value at all, or have long ago lost both

2. #02

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage surveys pre-psychoanalytic theories of dream formation—somatic stimulus theories, typical dreams, psychic exciting sources, and dream forgetting—to demonstrate that none of them can fully account for the dream's psychic dimension, thereby preparing the ground for Freud's disclosure of an "unsuspected psychic source of excitement" (the unconscious wish).

   If the conscious interest, together with the inner and outer sleep stimuli, sufficed to cover the etiology of the dreams, we ought to be in a position to give a satisfactory account of the origin of all the elements of a dream

3. #03

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: This passage surveys 19th-century psychological literature on the forgetting, memory distortion, and phenomenological peculiarities of dreams (hallucination, belief, spatial presentation), laying the empirical groundwork that Freud will later theorize through the concept of the unconscious psychic apparatus — the chunk is primarily a literature review rather than an original theoretical intervention.

   As we do not at present possess any other objective control for the reliability of our memory, and as indeed such a control is impossible in examining the dream which is our own experience, and for which our memory is the only source

4. #04

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage surveys 19th-century academic psychology's characterizations of dream-life as psychically degraded—marked by incoherence, absence of logical critique, and withdrawal from the outer world—while registering that certain remnants of psychic activity (memory, emotion, associative laws) persist, thereby framing the problem that will require a genuinely new theory of dream interpretation.

   As we can know anything only through consciousness, there can be no doubt as to its retention; Spitta, however, believes that only consciousness is retained in the dream, and not self-consciousness.

5. #05

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **TOWARD A POETICS OF TERROR FOR THE CULTURE OF THE REAL: OUR DREAM OF CREATIVE READING**

   Theoretical move: The passage surveys competing 19th-century theories of dreaming—ranging from full psychic continuity through sleep to theories of partial waking and somatic elimination—mapping the theoretical stakes around whether the dream is a meaningful psychic process or a merely physical, functionless residue, thereby setting the ground for Freud's own intervention.

   The isolated work of the individual groups now appears before our clouded consciousness, which lacks the control of other parts of the brain governing the associations.

6. #06

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream***

   Theoretical move: Freud establishes dream interpretation as a legitimate scientific procedure by arguing that dreams, like hysterical symptoms, have a hidden meaning recoverable through a method of free, uncritical self-observation — thereby positioning the dream as a psychic formation continuous with pathological symptoms rather than a mere somatic process.

   they are suppressed before they are perceived. In self-observation, on the other hand, one has only the task of suppressing the critique; if he succeeds in this, an unlimited number of ideas, which otherwise would have been impossible for him to grasp, come to his consciousness.

7. #07

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   ***The Analysis of a Sample Dream*** > **ANALYSIS**

   Theoretical move: Freud argues that dream-disfigurement is produced by a psychic censorship mechanism: a "second instance" suppresses wish-content from the "first instance" by distorting or inverting it before it can reach consciousness, making wish-fulfilment the universal motor of dream formation even where the manifest content is disagreeable.

   admittance to consciousness is the privilege of the second instance... nothing can reach consciousness from the first system which has not first passed the second instance

8. #08

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(H) SECONDARY ELABORATION**

   Theoretical move: Freud distinguishes dream-work from waking thought as qualitatively different rather than merely inferior, articulating its four mechanisms (displacement, condensation, regard for presentability, secondary elaboration), and then uses the "burning child" dream to pivot toward the limits of interpretation and the need for a new psychology of psychic apparatus.

   If the father had awakened first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child's life by this one moment.

9. #09

   The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

   **(B) REGRESSION**

   Theoretical move: Freud constructs a topographical model of the psychic apparatus as a sequence of Ψ-systems (Pcpt, Mnem, consciousness, motility) to explain how dream-work transforms thoughts into perceptual images via regression, establishing the foundational architecture that separates perception from memory and both from consciousness.

   The Pcpt-system, which possesses no capability of preserving changes and hence no memory, furnishes for our consciousness the entire manifoldness of the sensible qualities.

10. #10

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(C) THE WISH-FULFILMENT**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the wish-fulfilment theory of dreams requires refinement: in adults, the true dream-inciting wish must be an infantile one rooted in the unconscious, which reinforces and "recruits" preconscious day-remnants; the dream is thus the product of a dynamic alliance between unconscious infantile wishes and conscious/preconscious residues, not of either alone.

    I think it is to the opposition between conscious daily life and a psychic activity remaining unconscious which can only make itself noticeable during the night.

11. #11

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(E) THE PRIMARY AND SECONDARY PROCESSES—REGRESSION**

    Theoretical move: Freud synthesizes competing theories of dream formation by subordinating them to his unified framework of wish-fulfilment and dream-work, then advances the argument by distinguishing the preconscious stream of thought from the unconscious wish that energizes it—establishing that the most complex mental operations occur without consciousness, and that regression and the primary process are the hallmarks of the dream-work proper.

    The state of becoming conscious depends on the exercise of a certain psychic function, viz. attention, which seems to be extended only in a definite quantity.

12. #12

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the unconscious is the foundational stratum of all psychic life—larger than and prior to consciousness—and that it operates as two functionally distinct systems (Ucs. and Pcs.), thereby replacing a topographic/spatial model with a dynamic-energetic one while positioning consciousness as merely a sensory organ for psychic qualities rather than the seat of the psychic.

    What part now remains in our description of the once all-powerful and all-overshadowing consciousness? None other than that of a sensory organ for the perception of psychic qualities.

13. #13

    The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

    **(F) THE UNCONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUSNESS—REALITY**

    Theoretical move: Freud concludes the theoretical chapter of *The Interpretation of Dreams* by articulating how consciousness functions as a qualitative regulator of the mobile psychic economy, how the censor operates at the Prec/Cons boundary as well as the Unc/Prec boundary, and by affirming—through clinical vignettes—the reality of unconscious wishes and repression; the appendix section is editorial apparatus listing translation emendations.

    By assuming new qualities, it furnishes a new contribution toward the guidance and suitable distribution of the mobile occupation quantities.

14. #14

    Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

    [Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > The psychoanalytic unconscious of the psychological unconscious

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that pre-Freudian (and ego-psychological) hierarchical dualisms between conscious and unconscious encode a political bias that is itself legible as the 'unconscious of scientific discourse'; true psychoanalytic insight locates conflict not in biological or archetypal sources but in the linguistic structure of the symptom as articulated in speech.

    unconscious is opposed to conscious like instinctual to intellectual, automatic to controlled, intuitive to discursive

15. #15

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_ncx_212"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part31.xhtml_page_0243"></span>***U***

    Theoretical move: The passage systematically maps Lacan's concept of the unconscious, arguing that against biologistic reductions by Freud's followers, the unconscious is irreducibly linguistic, symbolic, and transindividual — structured like a language, constituted as the discourse of the Other, and identical with the determination of the subject by the symbolic order.

    the mind is divided into three systems or 'psychical localities'; the conscious (Cs), the preconscious (Pcs) and the unconscious (Ucs)

16. #16

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_205"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0234"></span> **topology**

    Theoretical move: Topology is argued to be not merely a metaphor for structure but structure itself in Lacan's framework, privileging the function of the cut as a non-intuitive, purely intellectual means of expressing the symbolic order and distinguishing continuous from discontinuous transformations in psychoanalytic treatment.

    divided the psyche into three systems: the conscious (Cs), the preconscious (Pcs) and the unconscious (Ucs).

17. #17

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.71

    TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the phenomenology of waking from a dream — where knocking constitutes the dream before it enters consciousness — to locate the primary process as a rupture between perception and consciousness, positing another locality (Fechner's 'andere Lokalität') as the structural site of the unconscious, and questioning the status of the subject 'before' awakening.

    it is because my consciousness reconstitutes itself around this I know that I am waking up, that I am knocked up.

18. #18

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.163

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan differentiates his schema from Freud's ego-as-lens model by insisting that what is at stake in his own topology is not the ego (i(a)) but the objet petit a itself, marking a structural divergence between ego-centred and desire/drive-centred frameworks.

    the ego as the lens through which the perception—consciousness operates on the amorphous mass of the Unbewusstsein

19. #19

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

    OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS

    Theoretical move: The passage uses Freud's optical model (from Letter 52 to Fliess and The Interpretation of Dreams) to argue that the subject of the unconscious is constituted in the interval between perception and consciousness—the locus of the Other—and that mapping the signifying network (rather than spatial anatomy) is the only method of knowing the subject's existence.

    these two elements will later, when Freud establishes his second topography, form the perception consciousness system, the Wahrnehmung—Bewusstsein, but one should not then forget the interval that separates them

20. #20

    Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.163

    ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

    Theoretical move: Lacan marks a decisive theoretical difference between his own schema and Freud's ego-as-lens model: where Freud centres the ego as the mediating optic between perception-consciousness and the unconscious, Lacan insists that his schema foregrounds objet petit a, not the ego i(a), thereby relocating the fundamental structural term away from the ego and toward the object-cause of desire.

    the perception—consciousness operates on the amorphous mass of the Unbewusstsein

21. #21

    Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.192

    **Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

    Theoretical move: The passage stages a clinical-theoretical dispute about the relationship between the incest barrier, the Name of the Father, castration, and desire: Safouan argues against conflating the conscious/unconscious barrier with the incest barrier, insisting that the Name of the Father (not transgression) is what orients the subject toward the unconscious and grounds desire through castration, while Leclaire counters that orthodoxy itself is the danger in such argumentation.

    the barrier which separates the conscious system and the psychic system of the unconscious

22. #22

    Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.60

    **Seminar 5: Wednesday 5 January 1966**

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the objet petit a, as a "waste object" of the Real, is the hidden structural core of both identification (the ego as i(o)) and analytic practice, and that its invisibility is constitutive — tied to the illusory sovereignty of the visual/perceptual world — while topology (the cross-cap, torus) is introduced not as analogy but as the proper structure of reality itself.

    The ego is the apparatus of perception-consciousness: Warnehmungsbewusstsein. Now, if from all time the problem of knowledge turns and twists around the critique of perception...

23. #23

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.151

    XII

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's topographical regression is not a primary theoretical datum but a forced construction imposed by the internal paradox of his schema—the dissociation of perception and consciousness at opposite ends of the psychic apparatus—and that a more coherent schema would render the concept of regression unnecessary at this level.

    Everything in experience indicates that the system of consciousness must be located at the most extreme opposite point from this succession of layers

24. #24

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.155

    XII

    Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's first (Project) schema to show that the ego emerges as a regulatory apparatus for reality-testing within the ψ system itself—not at the perceptual level—and that the concept of regression is an unnecessary and ultimately paradoxical addition introduced only when Freud shifts to a temporal schema, having already distinguished primary and secondary processes without it.

    The bipartition of the system of the ego into perception and consciousness, located so paradoxically in his schema in the Traumdeutung, isn't imposed on Freud by a preformed conception.

25. #25

    Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.259

    XVIII > Introduction of the big Other > Objectified analysis

    Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Fairbairn's object-relations reformulation of analysis as exemplary of a deeper theoretical error: the confusion of the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers under the single undifferentiated term 'object', which transforms analysis into an ego-remodelling exercise grounded in the specular/imaginary relation rather than the symbolic register of speech.

    One part of this central ego emerges in the conscious and the preconscious - see what a meagre functional value the original references to the conscious and the preconscious are henceforth reduced to.

26. #26

    Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.20

    **Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1976** > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 14 December 1976**

    Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the structure of man (and the living body) is toric rather than spheroidal, and uses this topology to reframe the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious as a double Möbius strip cut from a torus — displacing any notion of psychic "progress" and redefining the une-bévue (mis-hearing/blunder) as the structural condition of the signifier's exchange value.

    The conscious and the unconscious communicate and are both supported by a toric world this is the reason, this is the discovery

27. #27

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.167

    **X** > **XI** > **1**

    Theoretical move: Lacan theorises Verwerfung (Foreclosure) as the rejection of a primordial signifier into outer shadows—distinct from both Verdrängung (repression) and Verleugnung—positing it as the foundational mechanism of psychosis/paranoia, while simultaneously developing, via Freud's Letter 52 and the mystic writing-pad, a multi-register account of memory as the circulating chain of signifiers that underpins the repetition compulsion.

    It's been known for a long time that the phenomenon of consciousness and the phenomenon of memory exclude one another.

28. #28

    Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.15

    Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > THEORISING THE LACK OF OBJECT > <span id="page-7-0"></span>INTRODUCTION

    Theoretical move: Lacan contrasts his own structural account of the subject—grounded in the tension between pleasure principle and reality principle, the mirror stage, and the primacy of the unconscious—with the object-relations and ego-psychology tradition (traced through Abraham, 1924) that reduces analytic experience to ego-adaptation, subject-object reciprocity, and the ideal of a "genital" normalisation, arguing that this reduction is fundamentally foreign to Freud's point of departure.

    what is consciously acknowledged therein is first and foremost a misrecognition, and that it is not along the path of consciousness that the subject recognises himself

29. #29

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.61

    THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of associationism (contiguity and similarity) maps directly onto metonymy and metaphor in the signifying chain, thereby subordinating psychological atomism and its Gestalt critique to a single linguistically-grounded theory; the dream's wish-satisfaction operates at the level of "being" as verbal appearance rather than substance, and desire—irreducible to demand—is located at the enigmatic point opened by the subject's relation to the signifier.

    what we see at the surface is thought to be the field of the conscious and the preconscious.

30. #30

    Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.299

    THE MOTHER'S DESIRE

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses the closet scene of Hamlet to demonstrate that desire is constitutively the Other's desire, mapping Hamlet's oscillating plea/collapse onto the Graph of Desire to show how Fantasy regulates desire's fixation and how, when the subject drops back without meeting his own desire, he is left with nothing but the Other's message — the mother's impenetrable jouissance.

    The hooked line that goes beyond the Other, the one that represents the subject's questioning, is drawn here with an uninterrupted line. Why? Because it is conscious.

31. #31

    Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.58

    **IV**

    Theoretical move: Lacan explicates Freud's *Entwurf* and Letter 52 to establish that *Das Ding* (the *Nebenmensch* as irreducible alien core) is the primordial outside around which the subject's entire economy of desire is oriented, and that the lost object — structurally unfindable — is what drives the subject's search for satisfaction; simultaneously, the signifying structure interposing between perception and consciousness is what constitutes the unconscious as such.

    Consciousness is elsewhere; it is an apparatus that Freud has to invent, that he tells us is intermediary between the ψ system and the φ system.

32. #32

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.65

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > What is the proper name?

    Theoretical move: The proper name serves as the theoretical pivot for rethinking the border between unconscious and preconscious: because the enunciating subject necessarily names itself without knowing it, the unconscious is constituted at a more radical level than preconscious discourse (which is already "in the real"), and what the unconscious seeks—perceptual-identity with a lost original signifier—is structurally unfulfillable, explaining its irreducible insistence.

    consciousness, compared to what constitutes preconsciousness and constructs for us this world closely woven by our thoughts, consciousness is the surface through which this something which is the heart of the subject, receives, as one might say, from the outside his own thoughts

33. #33

    Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.67

    *Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > What is the proper name?

    Theoretical move: Lacan rewrites the Cartesian cogito as a structural problem of the subject's relation to the Other and to signification: the "I think" is not a logical consequence but a preconscious signified that points to an ontological x—the subject—while the infinite regress of "I think that I think" is short-circuited by the mirror-like reduplication of cogito and sum, anticipating the split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.

    This gives us the triad: conscious, unconscious, preconscious, in a slightly modified order

34. #34

    Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

    THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > BOOK II. > 4. THE POSTULATES OF EMPIRICAL THOUGHT.

    Theoretical move: Kant argues that the categories of modality (possibility, reality, necessity) do not determine objects but express their relation to cognition, and that their legitimate use is strictly tied to possible experience and its synthetic unity — the postulates of empirical thought thus function as restrictions confining the categories to empirical use alone, barring transcendental or speculative employment.

    The postulate concerning the cognition of the reality of things requires perception, consequently conscious sensation, not indeed immediately, that is, of the object itself

35. #35

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.30

    2 The Orthopsychic Subj ect: Film Theory and the Reception o£Lacan > The Screen as Miror

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory effected a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into a panoptic structure of total visibility, thereby reducing the subject to a fully determined, knowable position and eliminating the radical Lacanian insight that signifying systems never produce determinate identity—a move that makes resistance theoretically impossible.

    For Foucault, the conscious and the unconscious are categories constructed by psychoanalysis and other discourses.

36. #36

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    IV

    Theoretical move: Freud uses the metapsychological model of the living vesicle and its protective barrier to argue that consciousness arises *instead of* a memory trace (a function of the Pcpt-Cs system's surface position), and that trauma is defined precisely as the breaking-through of this barrier, which suspends the pleasure principle and forces the apparatus to bind/annex the invading quanta of excitation.

    consciousness is the product of a particular system that it terms Cs. Since consciousness chiefly delivers perceptions of excitations emanating from the external world

37. #37

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    The Ego and the Id

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego is a corporeal surface-projection of the id, shaped by the reality principle and perceptual systems, and that the conventional mapping of 'higher' psychic functions onto consciousness is fundamentally overturned by the analytic discovery of unconscious guilt and unconscious self-criticism.

    even subtle and complex intellectual tasks that normally demand sustained and strenuous thought can also be carried out pre-consciously, without entering consciousness at all.

38. #38

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    The Ego and the Id

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces the structural distinction between ego and id by arguing that the ego develops from the perceptual surface of the psychic apparatus, while the id names the unconscious remainder; this move reframes the topographical (Cs/Ucs/Pcs) model by showing that the ego itself is partly unconscious, and that word-notions are the mechanism by which inner processes gain access to consciousness.

    All perceptions that come from without (sense perceptions) and from within – what we call 'sensations' and 'feelings' - are Cs from the very first.

39. #39

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial/translator's notes to Freud's 'The Ego and the Id,' clarifying terminological and conceptual difficulties in translating key Freudian terms (bewusst/unbewusst, Vorstellung, Verdrangte) and including a substantive Freudian argument defending the dynamic concept of the unconscious against critics who would reduce it to degrees of consciousness.

    'conscious' (from Latin conscius, 'knowing') refers essentially to the person doing the knowing, whereas 'bewusst' (originally a past participle meaning 'known') refers essentially to the thing that is known.

40. #40

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud

    The Conscious and the Unconscious

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the descriptive conscious/unconscious distinction must be replaced by a structural and dynamic tripartite topology (Cs/Pcs/Ucs), and then further complicated by the discovery that part of the ego itself is unconscious—rendering 'unconsciousness' a multivalent quality rather than a single definitive category, and obliging a shift from the Cs/Ucs antithesis to the structural opposition between the coherent ego and the repressed split from it.

    To say that something 'is conscious' is to use a term that in the first instance is purely descriptive, a term based on perception of the most direct and certain kind.

41. #41

    Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.149

    Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Determinism in the Holes

    Theoretical move: Ruda deploys Freud's psychical determinism to argue that the apparent freedom of choice is structurally undermined by a gap in its own causality—the very hole where unconscious determination operates—such that freedom itself, when taken at its word, admits to being determined, pointing toward free association as the paradoxical proof of total psychical determination.

    if the distinction between conscious and unconscious motivation is taken into account, we can see that what is thus left free by the one side receives its motivation from the other side, from the unconscious.

42. #42

    Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.19

    **The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan** > **The Screen as Mirror**

    Theoretical move: Copjec argues that film theory committed a "Foucauldization" of Lacanian theory by collapsing the Lacanian gaze into the panoptic apparatus, thereby substituting a logic of total visibility and determinate subject-positions for Lacan's more radical thesis that signifying systems never produce determinate identities—a substitution that renders the theory structurally resistant to resistance.

    For Foucault, the conscious and the unconscious are categories constructed by psychoanalysis and other discourses

43. #43

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    The Conscious and the Unconscious

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the topographical distinction between Conscious/Preconscious/Unconscious must be supplemented—and partially replaced—by a structural distinction between the coherent ego and the repressed, because the discovery that the ego itself harbors an unconscious, non-repressed component reveals the inadequacy of 'unconsciousness' as a simple binary or dynamic category.

    To say that something 'is conscious' is to use a term that in the first instance is purely descriptive, a term based on perception of the most direct and certain kind.

44. #44

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    IV

    Theoretical move: Freud constructs a speculative metapsychology of the Pcpt-Cs system as a boundary membrane—consciousness arises *instead of* a memory trace, the protective barrier (Reizschutz) against external stimuli has no counterpart for internal excitations, and trauma is defined as precisely the breakthrough of this barrier, suspending the pleasure principle and forcing the apparatus into binding (annexation) of free-flowing excitation energy.

    consciousness is not the only distinctive characteristic that we are disposed to ascribe to the processes in this system… consciousness arises instead of a memory trace

45. #45

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

    Theoretical move: Freud argues that the compulsion to repeat, rather than being simply suppressed, must be harnessed via the transference as a controlled "playground" that converts acting-out into remembering; the working-through of resistances — not mere identification of them — is the decisive therapeutic operation that distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion.

    without ever becoming conscious of the force impelling her to 'run away' in this manner

46. #46

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    The Ego and the Id

    Theoretical move: Freud establishes the ego as a corporeal, surface-projection entity derived from the id through contact with the external world, substituting the reality principle for the pleasure principle — and then undermines the intuitive equation of 'higher psychic functions = conscious' by showing that self-criticism, conscience, and guilt can all operate unconsciously, radically complicating the topography.

    the conscious ego – that it is above all a corporeal ego.

47. #47

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    Notes

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's *The Ego and the Id*, clarifying terminological difficulties in translating key psychoanalytic concepts (conscious/unconscious, Vorstellung, Verdrängte) and reproducing Freud's own footnoted argument defending the dynamic distinctness of the unconscious against critics who would reduce it to mere degrees of conscious attention.

    'conscious' (from Latin conscius, 'knowing') refers essentially to the person doing the knowing, whereas 'bewusst' (originally a past participle meaning 'known') refers essentially to the thing that is known.

48. #48

    Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud

    The Ego and the Id

    Theoretical move: Freud introduces the structural distinction between ego and id by grounding consciousness in the perceptual surface system (Pcpt-Cs) and word-notions as the mechanism of preconscious linkage, while arguing that the ego, though rooted in perception, flows continuously into the unconscious id — thereby initiating the second topography that supersedes the simple Cs/Ucs binary.

    We already know exactly where to start in order to answer this question. We have said that consciousness constitutes the outer surface of the psychic apparatus

49. #49

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.8

    **Conscious**

    Theoretical move: The passage theorizes consciousness not as a privileged site of psychical truth but as a topographic layer embedded within a multi-system censorship apparatus (Freud), and then as a structural barrier to the Real and an ideological modality of mastery (McGowan) — arguing that submission to the unconscious logic of film/dream is the condition of possibility for an encounter with the gaze.

    By accepting the existence of these two (or three) psychical systems, psychoanalysis has departed a step further from the descriptive 'psychology of consciousness'

50. #50

    Theory Keywords · Various · p.85

    **Transference** > **Unconscious**

    Theoretical move: The passage constructs a multi-layered theoretical account of the Unconscious by moving from Freud's topographical and economic descriptions (timelessness, exemption from contradiction, primary process) through Lacan's reformulation of the unconscious as structured by and dependent on the Other/language, to contemporary arguments (McGowan, Zupančič) that the unconscious is the site of ontological negativity, genuine freedom, and desire that exceeds conscious will.

    The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious. Everything conscious has an unconscious preliminary stage

51. #51

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [Ideology Critique as an Existentialist Choice](#contents.xhtml_ch6) > The Foundationless Subject

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Freud's non-foundational, dynamic model of the psyche (the eyeball diagram) is fundamentally incompatible with structural/foundational readings (the iceberg metaphor), and that Lacan's structuralist turn, far from rigidifying the psyche, reinforces this anti-foundational insight — setting up Žižek as the thinker who properly brings the psychoanalytic subject to bear on ideology critique.

    Freud maps out where consciousness (residing in what we might think of the cornea), the preconscious (residing next to the cornea), and the unconscious (taking up the rest of the eyeball) fall