The Lacanian Unconscious (1 of 4) : The trans-subjective

The Lacanian unconscious, as ’the discourse of the Other’, cannot be reduced either to notions of an individual (or ’intra-psychic’) unconscious or to Jungian notions of the collective unconscious. It is, by contrast, a trans-subjective unconscious. We discuss a series of overlapping Lacanian concepts (the big Other, the idea that ’desire is always the desire of the Other’, the ’Che vuoi?’ (’What do you want?) formula of fantasy) as a way of getting a better sense of what a trans-subjective unconscious might mean. Playfully extrapolating from Levi-Strauss’s (alleged) idea that ’one should not confuse the contents of the stomach for its processes’ we say much the same in respect of the unconscious. In other words, rather than objectifying the unconscious, considering it a thing, a type of intra-psychic space, a collection - such as a repository of id impulses and memories - we should grasp it as a series of symbolic/linguistic processes. Such processes, chiefly o