The haunting shape in Freud’s text can only be known through its effects.

Evidence

Precisely because the goal of the inquiry must be to discover a choice and not a state, the investigator must recall on every occasion that his object is not a datum buried in the darkness of the unconscious but a free, conscious determination—which is not even resident in consciousness, but which is one with this consciousness itself. … But nothing in his principles or in his initial postulates permits him to understand or to utilize this testimony. Where could he get any such right? If the complex is really unconscious—that is, if there is a barrier separating the sign from the thing signified—how could the subject recognize it? Does the unconscious complex recognize itself? But haven’t we been told that it lacks understanding? And if of necessity we granted to it the faculty of understanding the signs, would this not be to make of it by the same token a conscious unconscious? What is understanding if not to be conscious of what is understood? — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1344 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Only psychoanalytical interpretation can expose the affects structuring the colonial complex.; Freud decentered identity by revealing an unconscious inaccessible to introspection; Only psychoanalytical interpretation can lay bare the anomalies of affect — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 40 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Empirical psychoanalysis cannot explain why the subject recognizes the truth of its interpretations #complicates (0.71) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1344