To describe the unconscious, Freud privileges dreams — as a staging of past meanings that determine it. In contrast, Lacan uses the Freudian slip as a model — the stumble that reveals another intention that is present and undermines the expected outcome of an action. For Freud, it’s the return of past traumas; for Lacan, a current event in discourse …. This is an effect of language that is initially indeterminate, but once recognized that it concerns us, we can speculate on how it is connected to us. For this reason, we think of the unconscious as relational, that is, as an ethics.

Ricardo Goldenberg is a psychoanalyst and psychologist at the University of Buenos Aires. Initially trained in structuralism, he took an unusual path from Lacan to Freud and back to Lacan. His books include In the Cynical Circle, or, Dear Lacan, Why Deny Psychoanalysis to Scoundrels (1999), Politics and Psychoanalysis (2006), Of Crazy Love and Other Loves (2013), Un-read Lacan (2018) and The Various Unconscious (2023).