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October 10, 2005
In Dialogues Gilles Deleuze makes several criticisms of the Freudian psychoanalysis' conception of the unconscious. The first of these criticisms is this one:
We say, on the contrary: you haven't got hold of the unconscious, you never get a hold of it, it is not an 'it was' in place of which the 'I' must come. The Freudian formula must be reversed. You have to produce the unconscious. It is not at all a matter of repressed memories or even of phantams. You don't reproduce childhood memories, you produce blocs of child-becoming with blocs of childhood which are always in the present...The unconscious is a substance to be manufactured, to get flowing---a social and political space to be conquered. here is no subject of desire any more than there is an object. There is no subject of enunciation. Fluxes are the only objectivity of desire itself. Desire is the system of a-signifying signs with which fluxes of the unconscious are produced in a social field.
I 've always been in favour of, and defended, the unconscious, especially in relation to American ego psychologists and their emphasis on the stability of the ego. I've always interpreted that as a betrayal of Freudian thought. The unconscious, along with desire, was one of the most important of the psychoanalytic concepts. What was needed was a transformative critique of psychoanalysis, not its betrayal; a critique that displaces the traditional idea of a subject (as an ego) and deconstructs the traditional Freudian idea of desire.
However, I've been uneasy with the conception of repressed memories of say sexual abuse that can be recovered in their raw form. It has always struck me that the memories and desires are constructed by us. We interpret what we remember.
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