Freud often insists that we should not mistake the latent thoughts that the analysis unearths under the manifest content for the unconscious desire itself, in persona-those latent thoughts pertain to the preconscious, often something unpleasant, but not foreign to con- sciousness.It even seemed that the point of analysis was to make conscious those latent thoughts one is unaware of. But desire does not reside in those thoughts themselves, its locus is, rather, between the two, in the very surplus of distortion (Entstellung) of the manifest in relation to the latent-the distortion which cannot be accounted for by latent thoughts; they never present sufficient reason for it by themselves. It resides in the form, not in the content, but the stuff of that form is precisely the surplus of the voice in the signifier.” So the sense of interpretation would then ultimately reside not in providing meaning, in reducing the contingency by displaying the logic which lies behind it, but, rather, through the very act of establishing it, in showing this contingency.
“Interpretation is not limited to providing us with the significations of the way taken by the psyche that we have before us. This implication is no more than a prelude. It is directed not so much at the meaning as towards reducing it to the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior-not in its significatory dependence, but precisely in its irreducible and senseless character qua chain of signifiers.” (Lacan 1979, p. 212)
Mladen Dolar. A Voice and Nothing More (Short Circuits)
