'Television': What Freud Discovered in the Unconscious

Subtitles adapted from the translation by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson in 'Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment' - Jacques Lacan (Norton, London: 1990). Complete video (without subtitles) at ubuweb.com.

Here Lacan addresses the role of the objet a in the relationship between lovers and the object of their love.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Lacan
• Freud
• object
• grammar
• love
• unconscious
• objetpetita
• Jung
• psycholinguistics
• symptom
• signifier

[iggypot]

so the unconscious is a bubdle of sexual knots - memories of pleasure - and the continual gratification of these pleasures ultimatly determine all our conscious behaviors. It is the psyche of a materialist, consumerist, hedonist society. Thus, Freud was quite correct in many ways - like Marx, you cant throw the baby out with the bathwater. Both men have influenced ethics and politics immensely, and therefore will always remain relevant to any modern historical discussion.

[grrfu]

hmm.. taking time to think of what to do in the future.... it's funny because by the time you think of it the future is there and the circumstances have changed

[SC88213]

@iggypot I think the knotting refers to the way in which the symbolic, imaginary, and real interrelate.

[isaysee]

- everything starts out fine- till the tongue gets in the way of the eyetooth so we can't see what we're saying. - So much 'lost in translation' -- Didn't Freud ever say anything in plain english ? - like, - '' I'm getting credit for discovering what every nursemaid knows'' . One of my favorites is when he said to his receptionist- - - '' CAN'T YOU KEEP ALL THESE CRAZY PEOPLE OUT OF MY OFFICE ''

[Superpureeliteful]

@oldor12 True!,but in Freud's life time, life was much simpler,compared to the problems we have today,Freud's idea's could of worked if it was not for change,it is peoples emotions and feelings that are shaped by the media,by Advertisements,by bad education,by what is in the news papers,or how it is displayed,good and bad,every time mankind changes its laws and ideas,it has an affect on the emotions of future Generations,which results in a Inflated love Bubble of emotions,to a explosion of anger

[Allocator2008]

so if the symptom is created by a signiifying chain glued together with joissance, then, to unbind that chain is to "reintroduce the Real", which presumably is the same thing as draining away the joissance that binds the chain that holds the symptom. So how does one "re-introduce the Real"? It makes sense; the "purpose" of a symptom is to "protect" the subject from the Real. So by encountering the Real again, one could perhaps undue the symptom. But I am unclear how one "re-introduces the real".

[2levina]

Profound: the symptom is just a knot of signifiers (I talked myself into it); it has no sense in the Real; it is not 'sense' but Jouiss(e)(a)nce, that is, it so pleases me, it pleases me to have the symptom, it makes me 'somebody'. 

[maxvitreus]

horrible translation

[trocolele]

I thought the Spanish Inquisition would come from behind the curtain!

[LichtungNym]

One can give a sexual meaning to everything, even to sex.