i spent 45 of my sad old australian dollars on a book called ‘365 x freud: ein lesebuch für jeden tag’ — yes it’s in german, but who’s afraid of a little german anymore? and if you’re going to read freud about freud it might as well be in german — at least you can call a spade a spade, and the superego the Überich.
the format is like one of those old ‘a bible verse for everyday’ books with 365 quotes from freud accompanied by a commentary from people who have something to say about it (mostly psychoanalysts, although for some reason also jonathan franzen) and in the case of rorschach, on the 5th of january, a picture.
the freud quote that it accompanies is a momentous one, from 1900 :
Das Unbewußte ist das eigentlich reale Psychische,
the unconscious is actually the real psyche
uns nach seiner inneren Natur so unbekannt wie das Reale der Außenwelt,
as unknown to us as the reality of the outside world
und uns durch die Daten des Bewußtseins ebenso unvollständig gegeben
and given to us through the data of consciousness just as incompletely
wie die Außenwelt durch die Angaben unserer Sinnesorgane.
as the outer world is given to us by our sense organs.
(Freud, 1900a, S. 617 f.)
apologies for the poor translation but you get the gist.
(increasing numbers of people seem to be pronouncing the g in the word ‘gist’ like the g in ‘great’ or ‘git’ ha ha who started that?)
Lacan says the problem with the word ‘unconscious’ is that it’s negative. When something goes unnoticed, he says, the word ‘everywhere’ is just as applicable as ‘nowhere’.
This is from the TV show 😅 but I would also like a 365 x Lacan: ein lesebuch für jeden tag book.
You could say the same thing about ‘nothing’, for which ‘everything’ would be equally appropriate, but without the #everythingness.