Owlseyes ’s Reviews > Freud as Philosopher > Status Update

For Lacan, the unconscious is "the discourse of the Other." Human desire is "the desire of the Other."

The insistent obscurity of Lacan's style is intended not only to break old habits of thought but also to establish new ones. In the opacity of his own discourse, Lacan aims to produce in the reader an experience that bears some likeness to the analytic encounter with the unconscious.

Through Lacan's rereading, Freud emerges as a philosophical thinker of the first order, whose contribution is to be ranked with that of Heidegger or Hegel.
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The Lacanian Return to Freud

The basic concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan maintains, "can only
become clear if one establishes their equivalence to the language of con-temporary anthropology, or even to the latest problems in philosophy,
fields in which psychoanalysis could well regain its health."

What, then, did Freud mean by metapsychology? The key concept that underlies the whole system of metapsychological ideas is that of psychical
energy

Describing his hopes for metapsychology, Freud remarked that "when I was young, the only thing I longed for was philosophical knowledge, and now that I am going over from medicine to psychology I am in the process of attaining it." Metapsychology was Freud's answer to metaphysics.