Fragments of Unconscious Experience

Abstract

In constructionist and dialogical psychology there have been few attempts to reach an understanding of that which is “unconscious.” The exception to this is Billig’s re-reading of Freudian repression in terms of conversational rules that bar certain topics, and his use of Marx’s ideas from Capital to show how collective, habitual forms of acting, speaking, and thinking make us unmindful of aspects of reality. To extend the analysis of the unconscious in this vein, I draw on the ideas of Bakhtin, Merleau-Ponty, Vološinov, and Lichtman to move towards a dialogical, relational, and sociological understanding of that which is unconscious; a move which can also accommodate a phenomenological understanding of how we might actively conceal from ourselves things we already know and see. I use fragments drawn from literary and biographical sources to illustrate how divided voices and tones spoken in interpersonal, ethical, and ideological dialogues can be refracted in a person’s micro-dialogue, leading to some voices and tendencies of the self to be concealed or placed on the threshold of verbalized, conscious experience. Similarly, the social context in which people act is not always fully articulated in dialogue, leaving sociality as an implicit factor in people’s intentional actions.