Unconscious structured like language

Although, evidently, this notion is already present in the work of Freud and other psychoanalysts, the way in which he defined the unconscious in this sentence became known worldwide.

In the work of C. G Jung, we can also find the importance of language. At the beginning of the last century, Jung created the word association test. It worked like this:

Jung got a big list of words. With each word, the subject had to associate another word. If the person took a long time to say the word or if he said the same word or the opposite word, it was an indication that that word was important to the subject’s life.

J. Lacan, in turn, emphasized the importance of language in psychoanalysis, returning to Saussure’s linguistics (the creator of the language science known as linguistics).

A sign is composed of signifier and signified. The signifier is the sound, the acoustic image. Think of the Russian word Тоска, said to be “the most untranslatable word in the world”. Тоска (the sound is Toská), according to the writer Nabokov:

“No English word conveys all the nuances of TOSKA. Deep and painful as it is, it is still a sense of spiritual anguish, often without a specific cause. On less morbid levels, it’s a silly ache in the soul, a sense of want without having anything, a sickly wasting away, a vague restlessness, mental spasms, a burning desire. In particular cases, it can be the desire for someone or something specific, a nostalgia, a pain of love. On a simpler level, it’s a bore, a bore.”

The Toská sound is just a sound, that is, it is a signifier. Meaning is what Nabokov tried to convey.

Simply put, when you don’t know what the meaning (meaning) of a word is, you have the signifier.

Lacan’s “unconscious structured as language” is not, as many think, a dark, hidden well, something that lies beneath consciousness… the Unconscious is in language.

It appears when we speak, in the importance we give to certain words, concepts, ideas. That word that, if mentioned in a conversation, will make you sad, nervous, angry, longing, with Toská…

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