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Every week, we invite you to explore a striking quote from a great psychoanalyst to reveal all its depth and richness. These lapidary, often provocative, formulas open up new perspectives on the intricacies of the human psyche. By deciphering these quotes with rigor and pedagogy, we invite you on a fascinating journey to the heart of psychoanalytic thought to better understand our desires, anxieties, and relationships with others. Ready to dive into the deep waters of the unconscious?
“When we think we know, that’s when we’re sure to be mistaken.”
This aphorism applies to all subjects, including the entire field of psychology. Although anonymous, it could very well have been spoken by a psychoanalyst, as it resonates particularly well with psychoanalytic theory and practice. It warns us against the certainties and illusions that our complacency creates. It is a call to lower human pride and omnipotence through our obsession with dominating nature and our peers through the invention of techniques that ultimately turn against us. It encourages a drastic reduction in our belief in the mastery of our will, a cliché instilled from childhood with the famous pie-in-the-sky idea: “To will is to be able.”
S. Freud says that “we must not overestimate the value of consciousness in our psychic life. Consciousness only gives us isolated fragments of psychological processes that are themselves much more extensive.” The psychoanalyst reminds us in his writings that it is often when we believe we hold the truth that we are furthest from it since the unconscious is a radical alterity within us that constantly thwarts the imaginary certainties of the ego and our pretension to objectivity.
Our many motivations and unconscious knowledge are highly active. We may be convinced that we possess a truth, but it is only a snippet that we grasp through our consciousness, because it is only in our unconscious that, if we wish, we can try to find a subjective part, during psychoanalysis, for example.
Moreover, it is impossible to dismiss the continuous play of our fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, in our relationship with reality and its construction. We may believe we are objective in our perception, yet we use our fantasies to make sense of our experience and to navigate the world. Even if these constructions can be subjective, they may seem objective to us, yet they are based on our unconscious desires.
Thus, we can say that our fantasies unconsciously influence the way we interpret information and events, affecting our vision, our listening, our decisions, and our judgments. Sometimes, they even lead us to deny reality, especially if it contradicts our prejudices and beliefs.
Our defense mechanisms, though so necessary for our psychic balance, nevertheless function to make us avoid recognizing uncomfortable truths, such as projection, by which we attribute our own feelings or desires to others. The interpretation of a dream shows, for example, how our psyche tends to distort our perceptions, to dress them according to our unconscious desires, and to present us with a complex, incoherent, strange, and puzzling scenario, much like our psyche itself. Freud’s statement that “the ego is not a master in its own house” underscores the fundamental incompleteness of self-knowledge.
Our unconscious, since it “is structured like a language” (Lacan), deploys formations such as dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, or symptoms in the form of coded messages or puzzles whose meaning is never univocal or immediate. By proceeding through ambiguities, puns, and shifts in meaning, the analytic interpretation aims to resonate unconscious signifiers beyond their apparent meaning.
As Lacan wrote, “truth can only half-speak itself.” This means that truth can never be fully grasped and that it always includes an unspeakable and elusive part. The unconscious is a knowledge that does not know itself, a “pierced” knowledge over which the subject is not master. The task of analysis is to outline its contours, to approach its core without ever fully possessing it.
According to Lacan, “there is no truth that, in passing through attention, does not lie.” In other words, truth is structured by fiction and lies; it is only given in the interstices, the fractures of discourse. By accepting not to know everything and letting ourselves be surprised, we might hope to touch a piece of reality.
Freud warns that “psychoanalysis does not promise happiness; it promises truth, and the truth is often hard to hear,” acknowledging the need for human modesty in the face of the complexity of the human psyche. The “impossible” profession, not only exercised by the psychoanalyst but by all psychologists, should teach them that, out of personal ethical concern, they must remain humble and recognize that their knowledge depends far less on themselves than on what the patient consents to reveal to them.
