Picture of the Human in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

If Freud engendered the Copernican turn in the Cartesian picture of the person, Lacan offered the Keplerian turn. The paper works through the works of Freud-Lacan and Deleuze/Guattari to arrive at three meanings of the unconscious: (i) repressive, (ii) non-repressive and (iii) productive of surplus. It displaces the Cartesian ›I think, therefore I am‹ with the ›It thinks‹ – i.e. the unconscious thinks; therefore ›I think, where I am not‹ and ›I am, where I think not.‹ It shows how the person in psychoanalysis moves from self-reflection to self-transformation, i.e. from a close look at the ›mirror of being‹ to a ›canvas of a new becoming‹; where the mirror becomes a canvas for redrawing the ›graph of affect‹ and rewriting the palaeolithic script on the person’s Mystic Writing Pad. Building on insights gleaned from a medieval spiritual ›cultivation of self‹: Sahajiya, the paper sees psychoanalysis as also a larger praxis of living-loving, and not a mere means to medicalized individual cure.