Lacan attempts to differentiate the Freudian unconscious from other conceptions of the unconscious in his seminar. He argues that the unconscious has a linguistic structure and is characterized by a "gap" or "non-realized" element. The unconscious emerges in everyday life and takes the subject by surprise. Lacan uses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to represent the relationship between the analyst and the unconscious, with the unconscious having a tendency to disappear when represented in language.

1. 1
CLINICAL NOTES
Jacques Lacan (1973). ‘The Freudian Unconscious and Ours,’ The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan and edited by Jacques-Alain
Miller (London: Penguin Books, 1979), pp. 17-28.
The unconscious is, according to Jacques Lacan, one of ‘the four fundamental
concepts of psychoanalysis’ along with the drive, repetition, and the transference.
Lacan makes this important claim in Seminar XI in an attempt to clarify the
fundamentals of psychoanalysis.
This seminar, which was originally published in French in 1973, was published in
English for the first time in a translation by Alan Sheridan in 1977.
It is a good point of entry into Lacanian psychoanalysis though not all the sessions
included in this seminar are equally comprehensible.
This seminar is also important because it was the first of the Lacanian seminars that
was attended by Jacques-Alain Miller. Miller not only participated as Lacan’s
interlocutor in this seminar but has also edited this volume.
Though Lacan discusses four concepts, the one that he began with was the
unconscious. These clinical notes will summarize the main points raised by Lacan in
his attempt to differentiate the ‘Freudian unconscious’ and ‘ours.’
What does this mean?
Is Lacan saying in the context of the ‘return to Freud’ that we need to compare the
Freudian unconscious and what Lacan means by the unconscious so that we know
what we are doing in the seminar?
Or, is he saying that the Lacanian approach to the unconscious is in fact the correct
interpretation of the Freudian unconscious? Therefore, it is possible to speak
interchangeably of the two forms of the unconscious?

2. 2
While Lacan does his share of comparisons, he is making the latter claim.
The conceptual comparisons are more a way of staking a claim that a linguistic
approach to the unconscious is what is really at stake in redefining the Freudian
unconscious (by invoking the axiom that the ‘unconscious is structured like a
language.’)
Once the importance of this innovation is understood, Lacan felt that it would be
possible for him to dig out the ‘poetics of the Freudian corpus.’
That is, he will call attention to not only the literary qualities that animate the
Freudian text, but also the fact that the very conceptual structure of psychoanalysis
is to be re-thought and formally represented in terms of the ‘differential linguistics’
of Ferdinand de Saussure and the ‘structural anthropology’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Saussure differentiates between langue and parole (i.e. language and speech). In his
Discourse of Rome (1953), Lacan had already set out a number of reasons for why he
thought the structuring aspects of language will help analysts to make sense of the
revelations of the unconscious.
In this session of the seminar, Lacan reiterates his reasons for justifying this axiom in
an interactive form - unlike in Rome where he spoke like an oracle.
Lacan also introduces the concept of the ‘split-subject’ in cognitive acts as simple as
counting.
So, for instance, Lacan poses the question of whether the subject who counts should
count himself?
If so, how should he reckon the difference between the ‘subject that counts’ and the
‘subject that is counted?’
So when the hypothetical subject that he invokes is asked how many brothers he has,
his reply is: ‘I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me.’
Whether this is the correct enumeration or not depends on whether the reader
understands the concept of the split subject.
Is Lacan merely playing with words here?
Why is this example so important? I think it is important because he is trying to
situate where the unconscious is in this example.
As any Lacanian will tell you, the unconscious is in the gap between the subject that
counts and the subject that is counted. That is why Lacan makes heavy weather out
of this example.

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Lacan identifies the combinatory structure within which the subject counts as a
specific instance of what gives the unconscious its status as a ‘structure.’
The main focus for Lacan is not on the dynamic aspects of the unconscious since that
predates the Freudian discovery of the unconscious.
There is, as Lacan points out, a huge literature on the ‘unconscious before Freud’ and
on the unconscious after the Freudian movement split.
Lacan’s main preoccupation here is to differentiate the structural approaches to the
unconscious from these.
The main advantage, he argues, with the structural model of the unconscious is that
it will help to make sense of cause.
The importance of this theoretical move should not be overlooked.
There is a strand in psychoanalytic theory and in philosophy which attempts to
differentiate between the concepts of cause and reasons in the explanation of human
behaviour.
The philosopher who forced the issue in the context of this analytic distinction was
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Another important question is whether the psychological realm is subject to
‘determinism’ that is as strong in relating cause to effect as the physical realm.
And, if it is, is it possible to demonstrate that objectively to be the case?
While these questions are big enough to generate dissertations and are beyond the
scope of these clinical notes, suffice it to note that Lacan is not unaware of these
problems.
That is why Lacan invokes the Kantian attempt to ‘introduce the concept of negative
quantities into philosophy’ as a specific instance of coming to terms with the
structural gap that can serve the function of cause in psychoanalytic explanations of
human behaviour.
Lacan also differentiates between the terms ‘cause’ and ‘law’; he points out that the
former is more ‘indefinite’ whereas the latter is a form of strong generalization (as in
the laws of motion).
It is between cause and effect that Lacan situates the unconscious.
So it is not the unconscious that causes a neurosis because it is not possible to rule
out the possibility of an organic element (like ‘humoral determinates’).

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What is conceptually at stake then is the gap itself.
In Lacan’s formulation, ‘what the unconscious does is to show us the gap through
which neurosis recreates a harmony with the real.’
What happens to the gap if the analysis is successful?
Since the gap is structural it does not disappear, but it becomes, as Lacan points out,
a scar ‘not of the neurosis but of the unconscious.’
Lacan then moves towards his concluding remarks when he mentions that these are
problems that Freud addressed in his own way in his attempts to delineate the
‘aetiology of the neuroses.’
What Freud found in the gap, points out Lacan, is ‘something of the order of the non-
realized.’
The implications of this formulation for sentence structure, propositional analysis,
textual analysis, and the analytic situation is enormous. It will be of interest to
linguists, literary critics, and those in the human sciences.
It would not be a stretch to say that implications of this definition of the unconscious
itself is the non-realized of literary criticism inspired by Jacques Lacan.
Instead, what Lacan finds is the propensity to stitch this gap, to make it go away.
Consider the image from Heinrich Heine that Freud himself would invoke of how
the philosopher attempts to suture this gap in his nightgown.
Lacan’s point about his concept of the unconscious being precisely that of Freud is
based not only their agreement on the need for a linguistic translation of the
‘formations of the unconscious.’
It is also based on this moment of similarity in categorically identifying this
‘constitutive gap’ in spatial structures and the function of the ‘non-realized’ as a
temporal unfolding as what really characterizes the structure of the unconscious.

5. 5
That is also why ‘deferred action’ becomes necessary as a source of causal
explanation in psychoanalysis.
This is proof – if proof is needed – that the Freudian unconscious is altogether
different from those which preceded the Freudian formulation.
Lacan is keen to differentiate the Freudian unconscious from those which are
described as ‘romantic, collective, and heteroclite.’
Or, in Lacan’s summary: ‘Freud’s unconscious is not all the romantic unconscious of
creative imagination.’
Instead, the Freudian unconscious is associated with terms like ‘impediment, failure,
split.’
These terms are invoked in addition to what he has already told us about the
function of the ‘gap’ and the ‘non-realized.’
So having told us what the unconscious is not; Lacan tells us what it is not only in
terms of the structure of the combinatory, but about how it emerges in everyday life.
Not only does the unconscious emerge, it insists on having its say in a way that
appears to rival the consciousness of the speaking subject and which takes him by
‘surprise’ on the couch.
And, finally, Lacan invokes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to situate the
unconscious in the analytic situation:
‘To resort to a metaphor, drawn from mythology, we have, in Eurydice twice lost,
the most potent image we can find of the relation between Orpheus the analyst and
the unconscious.’
This is an image that Lacan will return to again in this seminar when in response to
Jacques-Alain Miller’s question, he will not only consider the ‘pre-ontological
structure of the unconscious,’ but also the fact that the unconscious has a tendency to
disappear when we try to represent its structure in language.
This constitutes its pulsative function.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN