Language and the Unconscious in Freud: Representations of Words and Representations of Things

Abstract

Psychoanalysts frequently forget (or maybe hide the fact?) but it is the place of linguists and semioticians to remind them that language is at the center of Freud’s concerns. It is on a semiologic criterion that the Freudian distinction between the unconscious and the preconscious-conscious is carried out. The article by Michel Arrivé and Izabel Vilela follows the history of this founding opposition throughout a Freudian reflection. They also consider that the implications, both complex and paradoxical but particularly instructive for the semiotician, of the Lacanian postulate of the “unconscious structured as language.”