The child’s unconscious is formed by the speech of those who surround him as
well as by his own.
( 2 ) As soon as the Other is understood as a nonindividuated locus, the formula
means that what appears—from an imaginary standpoint—to be the “individual”
unconscious of one given subject cannot actually be dissociated from language as such.
It is in this sense that the unconscious is at times said to lie “outside” the subject.
As a consequence, “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other” can equally be
rendered as “The unconscious (which is structured like a language) is the Other.”
It would, however, be wrong to equate Lacan’s transindividual unconscious with
any sort of quasi-Jungian archetypal unconscious—“collective” by definition. The
former corresponds to a symbolic signifyingstructure; the latter coincides with the
pregiven significationof a set of primordial images. For Lacan, the unconscious as sig-
nifying structure produces conscious signification. Jungian psychoanalysis re-
verses this Freudian principle: it is the unconscious as primordial signification that
produces the linguistic structure.In the final part of this section, I intend to argue that the emergence^32 of the no-
tion of a transindividual unconscious—as universal structure of language—ren-
ders explicit the covert paradox on which Lacan’s conception of the aim of analysis
as the individual subject’s realization of his own true, unconscious desire through
full speech was implicitly based. In fact, if on the one hand Lacan repeatedly warns
us against misinterpreting the unconscious as a subjective hidden substance, on the
other, at this stage of his production, he does not seem to realize that the fullreal-
ization of the subject’s substanceless unconscious would inevitably correspond to
its utter desubjectivization into a substantial structure. Adopting Lacan’s own con-
temporaneous definition of psychosis, we could argue that this would inevitably
correspond to a “being passively spoken by language,” language to be understood
as the transindividual locus of the unconscious. In other words, Lacan’s notion of
an individual unconscious that would be equated with full speech seems to give
rise to a vicious circle: the aim of analysis is to overcome empty speech and the
imaginary wall of language, but, in parallel, the more one’s individualspeech is sym-
bolized, the more it is integrated into the transindividualsymbolic dimension of lan-
guage. Language is never imaginary per se: the wall is erected solely by the individual
subject’s own imaginary identifications. Once these are fully revoked, the subject
is absorbed by language, the transindividual unconscious. I do not believe it is pos-
sible to reconcile this dis-identifying de-subjectivization with the optimism
evoked by the pseudo-Hegelian “humanist” leitmotiv of dis-alienation as pre-
sented by Lacan in “Function and Field.”^33the subject of the symbolic (other)