Rethinking the Beyond of the Real

It is commonplace to note that Sigmund Freud "discovered" another reality. This reality is the reality of the psychic life. The meaning of its unconscious underpinnings surfaces in the other world of dreams and in the slips of the tongue that indicate a beyond to the day-to-day life given to us by conventions of our form of life. Certainly, Freud always returns us to the Jenseits, the other side, the beyond of the unconscious, which leaves its traces and marks on so-called "real objects," but which, on the other hand, can never be simplistically identified with them.

An obvious example of this mistake is the conflation of the penis with the phallus. Another is the identification of the unconscious fantasy object, the Phallic Mother, with actual mothers. Indeed, the ferocity of the debates between different schools of psychoanalysis can, at least in part, be attributed to the idea that unless one remains "true" to the unconscious as the beyond to "reality," there is no psychoanalysis at all; there is only the crude fix-it therapy that invests in the "world" of purportedly real familial objects as if these objects should serve as the basis for analysis. Simply put, psychoanalysis begins with the differentiation of unconscious from conscious objects.