dialogue. In other words, the concept of unconscious, like the Saussurian
concept of langue, is the result of a process of fetishism.
The second thesis is that the operation of transference is a social operation,
involving linguistic agonand the establishment of a power relation. Voloshinov
is interested in the psychoanalytic relationship between analysand and analyst
as a speech genre (and we recall Bakhtin’s interest in this concept, to which
he devoted one of his best-known essays).^15 This social relation is once again
subject to a process of fetishism: it then becomes the Freudian topic,
individualised and internalised, of ego, super ego, and id. The well-known
kinship between the super ego and God is explained by the fact that they
are both products of fetishism. The following quotation at least has the
advantage of offering us an original analysis of the relations between the
psychiatrist and his patient:
I refer to the complex relations that are formed between the psychiatric
doctor and his neurotic patient – a social microcosm marked by a particular
kind of struggle, in which the patient seeks to hide certain aspects of her
life from her doctor, to mislead him, to become fixated on her symptoms,
and so on and so forth. This is a highly complex social microcosm, in which
the economic base, physiological factors, and the weight (aesthetic as well
as moral) of bourgeois ideology combine to define a set of concrete relations.
The doctor responds to this situation as a practitioner, seeking to divine
the real forces that condition it and learning to control them, but without
being able to integrate them in all their complexity into a (materialist)
scientific theory – which is not surprising, given that study of the physiology
of neuroses has as yet scarcely started....And onto this ignorance of the
theory metaphor, or a dramatic personification of the practitioner’s orientation, is
grafted, which (like every personification) is subjective and relative –
something that in no way detracts from its utility.^16The scientistic language of psychologism, to which Voloshinov is committed
as the only possible form of materialism, reflects the climate of the time. But
it will be agreed that the Freudian metaphor of the unconscious as another
scene receives an explanation here that is worthy of interest. For the relationship
Continuations • 117(^15) See Bakhtin 1986.
(^16) Bakhtin 1980, p. 65.