Freud decentered identity by revealing an unconscious inaccessible to introspection

Evidence

Freud came knocking from underneath, like Hamlet’s ghost, and said, “While you’re being decentered from left to right like that, let me decenter you from below a bit, and remind you that this stable language of identity is also set from the psychic life about which you don’t know very much, and can’t know very much. And which you can’t know very much about simply by taking it at face value: the great continent of the unconscious speaks most clearly when it’s slipping rather than when it’s saying what it means.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 183

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to colonial psychology and the psychologization of race in the Islamophobia toolkit — identity grounded in unrecognized psychic life.