"Television": Lacan on the unconscious

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Slavoj Zizek on How to Read Lacan

... A century ago, in order to situate his discovery of the unconscious in the history of modern Europe, Freud developed the idea of three successive humiliations of man, the three “narcissistic illnesses,” as he called them. ... Today, a hundred years later, a more extreme picture is emerging: the latest scientific breakthroughs seem to add a whole series of further humiliations to the narcissistic image of man: our mind itself is merely a computing machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy is merely the user’s illusion of this machine. Consequently, with regard to today’s brain sciences, psychoanalysis itself, far from being subversive, rather seems to belong to the traditional humanist field threatened by the latest humiliations.

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Nonetheless, in the case of psychoanalysis, the memorial service is perhaps a little bit too hasty, commemorating a patient who still has a long life ahead. In contrast to the “evident” truths of the critics of Freud, my aim is to demonstrate that it is only today that the time of psychoanalysis has arrived. On reading Freud through Lacan, through what Lacan called his “return to Freud.” Freud’s key insights finally become visible in their true dimension. Lacan did not understand this return as a return to what Freud said, but to the core of the Freudian revolution of which Freud himself was not fully aware.

Lacan started his “return to Freud” with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best known formula: “the unconscious is structured as a language.” ...

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