THE LANGUAGE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Abstract

This paper is about the meaningful employment of psychodynamics terms and the language of the unconscious. It distinguishes literary language meaning and the special, technical, psychodynamics meaning of the term 'unconscious' as follows: a psychodynamics meaning whereby it applies to mental states such as feeling, intentions, ideations, other mental items and a literal meaning where it refers to the physical state of the individual such as when a person is said to be comatose and to situations when a person is unaware of something. The latter state is equated with situations of lack of knowledge. The paper shows that psychodynamics language is incommensurable with literal language. It discusses the epistemological problem in using the two languages as one and mistaking unconsciousness with unawareness and, thus, with lack of knowledge. The paper argues that in failing to make the necessary distinction between psychodynamics language and literal language, some writers produce comments on psychodynamics topics which are shrouded in confusion because they are opaque and have no psychodynamics content. The main discussion of the paper is the idea of the self-ascription of unconscious states. This gives an illuminating demonstration of the confusion in so far as such idea fails to make the distinction that is necessary to give transparency to the meaning of psychodynamics terms and fails to recognise the role of repression in making mental items unconscious. The research method is non-clinical qualitative analysis of data by Case Study. Here, I highlight a case to use it for illustration and discussion.