The Letter, Issue 70, pages 71-80
The Mystery of of The Unconscious
Mary Cullen
The real is the mystery of the speaking body, it is the mystery of the unconscious.
Jacques Lacan [1]
In his recent publication, The Jouissance Principle,[2] Christian Fierens poses the question as to how desire is to be understood. If the simple function of the dream is the fulfilment of a disguised wish linked to the pleasure principle, then following on from this, the ethics of psychoanalysis, moderated by pleasure and prudence at the level of the individual, would come within the general quest of a framework for pleasure or happiness, [3] that of a universal framework. These ideals of pleasure or perfection based on ‘fictive entities’ aiming at ‘happiness’ ‘genital love’, ‘authenticity and autonomy’, are not realisable and as Fierens emphasises, are imposed and external to the process of morality. The essential critique of this approach is, ‘the essence of the ideal presented as something which would exist in reality independently of us and not as part of the subjective Architectonic as Freud has already presented it in his introduction to narcissism.’[4]