The Uncertainty of Communication as Revealed by Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article puts the certainty of communication into question by showing how self-identity is undermined by self-difference in language and how conscious communication is destabilized by unconscious discourse. Reviewed are some of the basic insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis into how communication is not simply a guaranteed outcome of conscious intentions, but is part of an experience of being unsettled by the semiotic and phenomenological conditions of its possibility. Rather than get tangled in a technical discussion about the workings of the unconscious, the objective of this discussion is to stimulate and to broaden conversation about the significance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to contemporary thought of communication.

Keywords:

• Language
• Communication
• Psychoanalysis
• Self
• Communicology

Notes

1. “Idiot” is understood here in the sense of speechlessness, of having nothing to say, of being numb. The television audience looks, but it cannot be seen. It cannot speak, but it can be spoken for. Lacan continues: “The aberration consists in this idea of speaking so as to be understood by idiots. An idea that is ordinarily so foreign to me that it could only have been suggested to me. … For there's no difference between television and the public before whom I've spoken for a long time now, a public known as my seminar. A single gaze in both cases: A gaze to which, in neither case, do I address myself, but in the name of which I speak” (Lacan 1990, 3).

2. Catt (2011) provides a clear definition of semiotic phenomenology, the practical, philosophical paradigm that guides Communicology research: It is the “synthetic logic of two great European and American philosophies. Semiotics specifies what we have in common—signs and codes—and phenomenology specifies the uniqueness of our personal experiences of those signs and codes. Signs consist of perception-expression doublets and mediate all of human experience as codes, or systems of signs that are unfailingly accompanied with rules for their use” (132). See Catt (2011), Eicher-Catt and Catt (2010), Lanigan (1988, 2010), and Macke (2010).

3. What follows is only a basic review of the psychoanalytic method as a communication process. For further detail on psychoanalysis as related to communication inquiry, see Wilden (1973, 1980, 1981, 1987), especially System and Structure, a landmark contribution to the cybernetic communication theory of the Palo Alto Group (Bateson 1972; Watzlawick et al. 1967); see Lacan and Wilden (1981) for the first translation of Lacan's “Rome Discourse,” a work overshadowed by translations by Sheridan (Lacan 1977) and Fink (Lacan 2002, 2007), but brimming nevertheless with insight into the relevance of psychoanalysis to communication; see Pettegrew (1977) for an early, pragmatic application of the psychoanalytic theory of the transference phenomenon to the study of rhetoric; see Hyde (1980) for a review of the structuralist concerns of Lacan's theory of language and, most importantly for communication scholars, the phenomenological and hermeneutic goals of the psychoanalytic interview.

4. In addition to what Watzlawick et al. (1967) identify as the report and command functions of a statement, what is also “communicated” by a statement is the fact of language, its phenomenological presence. Language says, “this is language, and not something else” (e.g., a car horn, a bird song, etc.). See also Heidegger: “Whenever something is communicated in what is said-in-the-talk, all talk about anything has at the same time the character of expressing itself” (Heidegger 1962, 205); “Discourse which expresses itself is communication” (1962, 211). See also Benjamin on the lost aura of language: “All language communicates itself” (Benjamin 1978, 316).

5. As Rizzuto (2008) explains: “What the person has not said, but is frequently insinuated or clearly audible in the pronunciation of the communication and the type of words selected, points to other representational realms and feelings that cannot be explicitly revealed, but that are nonetheless present nonconsciously in the speaker's mind” (738). As Wilden (1981) puts it: “Even if what the subject says is ‘meaningless,’ what the subject says to the analyst cannot be without meaning, since it conceals what the subject wants to say (what he means) and the relationship he wishes to establish” (xi).

6. Restrictions on word limit prevent me from discussing the significance to communication of the relative positions of patient and psychoanalyst in the analyst's consulting room, whether each is seated facing one another, or whether the patient is lying on a daybed and the analyst is seated perpendicular to the patient and outside of his or her field of vision.

7. Rogers (2006) offers a fascinating case study of a patient whose hidden memory of trauma was revealed by consciously attending to the significance of three letters that repeatedly appeared in the speech of the patient. It wasn't until the patient became aware of the persistence of these letters in her vocabulary, and what they meant to her lived experience, that she could begin to talk about the trauma.

8. See Connor (2000) on the alienating effects of the human voice: “If my voice is mine because it comes from me, it can only be known as mine because it also goes from me. My voice is, literally, my way of taking leave of my senses. What I say goes” (7); see Gunn (2008) for a review of scholarship in the humanities devoted to word and voice, a “speech revival” (344) that brings life to the study of these classic communication phenomena; see Li (2011) for an innovative review of the psychoanalytic significance of “whispering.”

9. Gunn (2004, 2007) has examined the significance of “what is being spoken and how it has been said over a lifetime” in his rhetorical analyses of “fantasy,” a psychoanalytic concept linking desire and communication to the process through which lived experience is made meaningful by the subject in its entry into culture. Gunn defines “fundamental fantasy” as “the narrative that a subject has internalized to explain to herself the cause of her desiring. … [It] protect[s] the subject from the Real of her division, enabling a sense of agency” (2004, 10–11). In response to Gunn (2004), see Lundberg's (2004) position on the importance of “the status of the Other as the Symbolic” (499), a position similar to my understanding of Lacan's theory of subjectivity as it relates to communication. Below, I address the division of the subject in language and its potential for expressive agency. However, the point of my discussion is to bring to conversations about communication (of which the scholarship identified above is part) a critical focus on the possibility and uncertainty of this phenomenon as shown by psychoanalysis.

10. Words may not be able to describe this “feeling.” However, this is not important. The objective of psychoanalysis is not to overcode the embodied feeling of self-awareness because at that point, as we shall see, the analysis would be over.

11. See Hyde (1980) for detailed discussion of the hermeneutic process of determining “how the patient used language at crucial moments to move from prephenomenal experience to phenomenal experience wherein the symptom [of suffering] became apparent” (107).

12. As Catt (2003) argues, “Communication is neither message nor code. Context serves the communicative function of illuminating meaning. That which creates context is neither sign nor semiotics but, rather, the phenomenology of the sign. … Discourse is often visible but communication is not” (14–15).

13. “I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object” (Lacan 2002, 84); “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself” (Heidegger 1962, 165); “To speak is to alienate oneself in order to mingle with others” (Gusdorf 1979, 81).

14. Lacan's theorem, “a signifier represents a subject for another signifier” (Lacan 1998, 207), is relevant here. It means that words cannot fully represent a subject (they represent it poorly); hence, more and more words are required in the process of representation. Signifiers string us along in the promise they offer not only of representation, but also of more effective communication and, perhaps for that reason, improved understanding. Words may fail the subject, but the attempt to “communicate” succeeds the failure of words to capture everything.

15. Macke (2010) offers an intriguing Communicology analysis of the significance of attachment and anxiety to the embodied experience of communication. Of particular import is his nuanced discussion of the interplay of the “I” and “me” in the experience of communication with oneself, or what he calls “intrapersonal communication.”

16. Levy (1986) explains: “Payment frees the analysand from the danger of the analyst's repeating the kind of abuse to which the analysand has already been subjected in life. It is a mechanism, in other words, that saves the patient, in the transference, from acting out and paying in pounds of flesh and with the coin of suffering” (21).

17. “Forged” in the sense of a forged document. For a fascinating case of the client (an elderly woman) who undertook a lengthy course of psychotherapy only to discover, to her horror, that the image she had of herself (the love object of a much younger man) was never there to begin with, see Yalom (2000).

18. Hyde (1980) explains: “All of one's lived experiences are not meaningful. … Only those experiences can be remembered and made meaningful that occur after the symbolic entry into language. Only those lived experiences wherein one had the potential to think can be recalled by thought; for thought is constrained by that which it is, language. Thought cannot think in terms of that which it is not” (105, emphasis added).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Garnet C. Butchart

Garnet C. Butchart is at University of South Florida