One of the most basic insights of psychoanalysis is that human beings say more than they know. Their various utterances and behaviors are significantly shaped by an unconscious dimension woven into the fabric of their awareness. Accordingly, the art of analysis doesn’t involve dogmatically disregarding the manifest features of quotidian existence in favor of groping about in search of some dark and hidden psychical underbelly; it isn’t a vulgar depth psychology in which the superficial structured façade of sociosymbolically mediated cognition is crudely opposed to the murky and opaque bog of a fleshly nature in its wild, untamed essence.
The unconscious is “out there,” inscribed within the field of consciousness and its correlative reality as a set of internally excluded configurations. And these configurations, rather than being relatively superfluous parasitical supplements or marginalities, lend this reality its very texture and determine the actual contours of consciousness itself.
If individuals are born into the world as mere bundles of drives, as purely pleasure-seeking organisms, then how is it that the germinal seeds of the super-ego ever take root? Wouldn’t the psyche reject this foreign entity like the body rejects an unsuccessful organ transplant? xxxvi