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How the Unconscious Emerges: Winnicott’s Subjective World and Lorenzer’s Forms of Interaction, Life Plans and Desymbolisation in Dialogue.
The Formation of the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis: The Intersubjective Becoming of the Self
How does the unconscious arise? Anyone who reads Donald Winnicott’s later writings on subjective and objective reality alongside Alfred Lorenzer’s materialist theory of socialisation will find a very precise answer to this question. Both authors describe the same process from two perspectives: Winnicott from the perspective of the infant, who moves from the waking dream of his subjective world to the recognition of an external reality; Lorenzer from the perspective of the socially shaped mother-child dyad, in which the forms of interaction from which language, consciousness, and the unconscious emerge are deposited layer by layer. This article brings both voices together step by step.
What does psychoanalysis mean by the formation of the unconscious?
Lorenzer does not conceive of the unconscious as a forbidden reservoir, nor as a mere shadow of consciousness. For him, it is ‘that which is excluded from language’, an autonomous realm of meaning, a ‘non-linguistic structure of practice and meaning’ rooted in human corporeality. “The unconscious is not the shadow of consciousness,” he writes, “it is not subject to the formative influences of consciousness, but operates ‘pre-linguistically’ according to its own distinct rules.” It develops according to its own logic, long before language and concepts reach the child.
This leads to a central distinction. Lorenzer distinguishes between the systematic unconscious, which has never been articulated, and the repressed, which was once symbolised and then excluded from language again. The unconscious blends both. Anyone wishing to understand how the unconscious arises must trace these two paths separately, and both lead through the mother-child dyad.
Why does the unconscious begin in the mother-child dyad?
Lorenzer posits that the formation of the unconscious does not begin with the learning of speech, but rather with the earliest, partly prenatal interaction between the embryo, the infant and the primary caregiver. In the interplay between the movements of the foetus and the way the mother reacts to them, as Lorenzer writes, an ‘agreement on certain forms of interaction within the mother-child dyad’ is ‘formed’. These are not mere reflexes; they are the first manifestations of social reality within the child’s body.
The crucial point is that the mother herself has always been socially conditioned through language. She embodies a way of life shaped by cultural, historical and economic factors. Whether an infant falls asleep in a duvet with a music box, feels the pulse of their humming mother in a sling, or lies tightly swaddled in a quiet environment is not merely a biological matter, but also an expression of a cultural way of life. It is precisely here that Winnicott’s primary maternal concern meets Lorenzer’s: the mother, ‘to the baby that she gradually recognises as a fact within her physical frame’, is never purely nature. She is the gateway through which society enters the child’s body.
Dream-awake state and omnipotence: Winnicott’s image of the subjective beginning
Winnicott describes the beginning unvarnished: the infant lives ‘in a dream world whilst awake’. He does not perceive the world as an objective counterpart, but as an extension of his inner processes. Hunger and the breast, arousal and response, inside and outside are a single, undivided event. The omnipotence of which Winnicott speaks is not a pathological condition, but a brief, precious possibility: when the breast appears as soon as hunger makes itself felt, the infant gains the impression that he has brought it forth himself.
This subjective world does not need to be corrected in the child later on. It is, in Winnicott’s words, the cradle in which the emerging self first comes into being. From Lorenzer’s perspective, it is also the place where the first forms of interaction—sensory-motor and organismic—are inscribed into the body. Subjective omnipotence and objective socialisation are not a contradiction here: they are the same process viewed from two different perspectives.
Specific forms of interaction: when the body becomes socialised nature
The lowest layer of Lorenzer’s model consists of the ‘specific forms of interaction’, which are inscribed into the child’s body as sensorimotor-organismic formulas. As Lorenzer demonstrates, following Freud, they organise ‘the sensitivity and erogeneity of the child’s body’. The lips become an erogenous zone because a specific breastfeeding event is repeated – with warmth, smell, pulse rate and skin contact. This gives rise to a ‘hermeneutics of the body’, a grammar of the body that is not grafted on from the outside, but has grown out of the repetition of experienced scenes.
These patterns are what Lorenzer refers to as ‘socialised nature’. For him, the drive is not an instinct but the residue of earlier forms of interaction that urge their repetition. It thus corresponds precisely to that layer which Winnicott describes as the ground of subjective experience, and yet it is socially shaped from the very beginning. The seemingly pure nature of the infant’s body is always already the residue of a very concrete maternal practice and thus of a very concrete cultural lifeworld.
How does a physical need become a need?
Lorenzer’s most subtle observation here is the distinction between bodily needs and psychological needs. The infant is born with a vague set of bodily needs: hunger, warmth, closeness, and the need to release tension. It is only through the repeated response of the primary caregiver, given in a specific cultural form, that these bodily needs become concrete psychological needs. ‘The need that has been met in the real situation becomes, in the form of interaction, a claim to receive satisfaction in a specifically socialised manner’ (Lorenzer 1992, p. 88).
This expresses what is often overlooked in the psychoanalytic tradition: we do not desire in the abstract. We desire in the way our desires have shaped us. The socialised life plans that emerge here are the form in which we later love, sleep, eat, fight and comfort ourselves. What Winnicott calls the experience of the ‘primary relationship’ is, for Lorenzer. In this place, these life plans take physical shape and, at the same time, the root of those affective desires and aversions that underpin later life.
How do transitional objects and presentational symbolism connect the layers?
At the middle level, forms of interaction emerge from the purely organic realm without yet being language. Lorenzer describes this layer as presentational-symbolic or sensory-symbolic. Facial expressions, voice, gaze, touch, play and the earliest images are experienced and responded to as affectively charged, holistic forms. Here, symbols emerge that already carry meaning but are closer to the unconscious than linguistic figures, because ‘the symbol here is still part of the same sensory-immediate field of interaction to which the symbolised interaction with the mother also belongs’ (Lorenzer 1981a, p. 159).
This is precisely the locus of Winnicott’s transitional object. The cuddly toy, the corner of a blanket, and the gesture of falling asleep are not linguistic signs, yet they possess meaning. They are, in Winnicott’s words, an ‘intermediate position’, neither entirely within nor entirely without. Lorenzer’s presentational-symbolic form of interaction and Winnicott’s intermediate space describe the same phenomenon using two different theoretical languages. From this layer later emerge play, art, dreams, romantic relationships—everything that carries meaning without being reducible to sentences.
What does the discursive-symbolic layer achieve, and where does it reach its limits?
With the acquisition of language, the child enters the discursive-symbolic, that is, the linguistic-symbolic layer. The patterns previously felt bodily become bound to words, communicable and verifiable. It is only here that the objective world is constituted in the full sense: another with their own desires and limits, a reality that offers resistance. This step corresponds to Winnicott’s transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle; the child realises that the world does not simply conform to their wishes.
Yet language never translates completely. Lorenzer emphasises that every translation of a bodily impulse into language ‘cuts off the incongruous’. The discursive-symbolic layer does not overwrite the earlier ones; it merely overlays them. Beneath the language, the organismic and presentational-symbolic forms continue to operate, providing substance, pressure and obstinacy. It is precisely in the language that does not take in, and in what it would take in but is not permitted to do so under social pressure, that the formation of the unconscious begins.
How does the systematic unconscious arise?
Here, Loranzer’s decisive distinction becomes clear. He distinguishes between two ways in which the unconscious arises. The first path is that of the systematic unconscious: a form of interaction that was never translated into language. It remained at the organismic or presentational-symbolic level and found no connection to the linguistic community. It continues to operate within the body, urges repetition and contains, as Lorenzer writes, ‘surplus figures of practical life’, material for fantasy, art and the desire for social change.
The second path is that of the repressed: a form of interaction was once linguistically accessible, but was subsequently excluded from language under the pressure of family and social norms. The link between physical impulse and word is severed; from then on, the content operates unconsciously. Only both paths together – the systematically never-symbolised and the once-symbolised and then desymbolised – constitute that ‘counter-system to the dominant consciousness of the linguistic community’ of which Lorenzer speaks. The formation of the unconscious is thus not a one-off act, but the ongoing fate of symbolisations that succeed, fail or are reversed.
Language destruction and educational inhibition: two paths of desymbolisation
Lorenzer describes two clinically very different forms of desymbolisation. At the discursive-symbolic level, he speaks of language destruction: a form of interaction was once put into words, but is now split off. The “personality deformation takes the form of a separation between sensory experience (socialised forms of interaction) and consciousness (figures of speech)”. The person continues to speak, often even perfectly, but what they say has lost its connection to the body.
More serious and far-reaching is the hindrance to the development of presentational-symbolic forms of interaction. Where advertising, the culture industry, mechanical toys and stereotypical images short-circuit the child with ‘kitschy aesthetic templates’, the middle layer cannot fully develop in the first place. The consequence is a narrowing of the scope of experience that goes even deeper than the destruction of language. Here, it is not merely access to language that is cut off; here, the symbolic bridge between body and world is not built in the first place.
False Self: Where Winnicott’s and Lorenzer’s concepts converge
Winnicott’s concept of the false self and Lorenzer’s concept of the ‘false self’ describe the same clinical phenomenon from two different perspectives. Winnicott sees a child whose environment was too early, too demanding, or too lacking in support; the child adapts, constructs a surface that meets the demands, and cuts off its own vitality. Lorenzer sees a person who follows the ‘dictates of objectivist sign systems’, ‘functions extremely well’, but is ‘free from the burden of sensory experience’. Both authors describe a price: adaptation succeeds because certain forms of interaction are excluded from the process of symbolisation.
Seen in this light, the false self is not a psychological defect, but the clinical manifestation of a socialisation trajectory. What is silenced in the false self are precisely those life plans that were physically laid down in the early mother-child dyad, but found no path to symbolisation in the transition to language and society. The unconscious is not the ‘other’ of the self; it is the self’s own, excised material.
The key findings at a glance
· According to Lorenzer, the unconscious is ‘that which is excluded from language’, not the shadow of consciousness, but an independent, body-bound structure of meaning.
· It does not first emerge with language, but begins in the mother-child dyad, where the ‘agreement on certain forms of interaction’ takes place.
· The mother is always already sociallyised through language; through her practice, society enters the child’s body long before the first word is spoken.
· Lorenzer distinguishes three layers: specific (sensomotor-organismic), presentational-symbolic and discursive-symbolic forms of interaction. These interlock precisely with Winnicott’s waking space, transitional object and transition to the reality principle.
· Physical needs are transformed into social needs within the context of social interaction; from this perspective, instincts are ‘socialised nature’ and underpin socialised life plans.
· The formation of the unconscious proceeds along two paths: the systematic unconscious arising from forms of interaction that have never been symbolised, and the repressed arising from desymbolised linguistic symbols.
· The destruction of language separates language from bodily experience; the inhibition of the development of presentational symbolism cuts even deeper, impoverishing the world of meaningful images.
· Winnicott’s ‘false self’ and Lorenzer’s ‘false ego’ describe the same process: adaptation to a social sign system at the expense of non-symbolised life plans.
· Against this backdrop, therapy means restoring severed pathways of symbolisation as far as possible, so that the unconscious can once again enter into dialogue with the body and the linguistic community.
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