#unconscious

When you go out onto the stage, all the preparation has to be forced into your subconscious. For the moment of the performance, we all have to return to a new level of unconsciousness. All the reflection and all the doubts have to be laid aside before you start. ↗

— Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

#before #doubts #forced #go #into

Symbolic violence is violence wielded with tacit complicity between its victims and its agents, insofar as both remain unconscious of submitting to or wielding it. ↗

— Pierre Bourdieu

#between #both #complicity #insofar #remain

We lie to one another every day, in the sweetest way, often unconsciously. We dress ourselves and compose ourselves in order to present ourselves to one another. ↗

— John le Carre

#compose #day #dress #every #every day

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#freud #horses #lacan #language #post-structuralism

The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is itself unconscious. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#may #nature #psychical #unconscious #whatever

I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. ↗

— Jackie Cooper

#dying #good #good work #half-hour #hope

To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. ↗

— Willard Gaylin

#behavior #completely #define #distortion #exclusively

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us. ↗

— Carl Jung

#being #dealing #glows #gnaws #heart

There is nothing respecting which a man may be so long unconscious as of the extent and strength of his prejudices. ↗

— Francis Jeffrey

#his #long #man #may #nothing

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#could #deceives #element #heavenly #love