What does Lacan say about the unconscious? Lacan is speaking about the unconscious all the time, and his work mutates through different written texts and throughout his seminars so that there are slightly different meanings given to the unconscious at different points. So, I want to approach this task by focusing on the text of one his seminars, Seminar V: Formations of the Unconscious (Lacan, 1957-1958), and to use this as a kind of anchor point to draw attention to some key issues in Lacan’s reading of Freud on the unconscious, and to notice some motifs in the seminar that anticipate later developments in Lacan’s work. Lacan does not give a definition of the unconscious in this seminar, and this absence reminds us that the unconscious is not susceptible to a neat definition, as if it could be summed up as an object with specific qualities. However, in this seminar he does begin to show us the importance not only of ‘formations’ of the unconscious, but of the process of formation of the unconscious as such.

Unpublished paper in progress: ian-parker-the-unconscious-of-lacanian-discourse.pdf