This statement is, in fact, reminiscent of Lacan’s own insistence, quoted earlier, on the unknowability of the unconscious: ‘this Elsewhere (…) in which Freud discovered that, without thinking about it, and thus without anyone being able to think he thinks about it better than anyone else, it thinks. (Lacan 2006 [1955]: 458-9, my italics).
And these ‘inferences’, he points out, act as an ‘imaginary’ foundation, upon which the ‘imaginary’ psychoanalytic mechanisms such as life and death instincts, internal objects and so on are piled on top: ‘the whole of psychoanalytic theory rests upon the validity of such inferences; if they are wrong, everything built upon them loses its raison d’être.’ (Laing 1971: 30).
However, Laing is reluctant to rule out the relevance of an unconscious dimension to our experience. He proposes a model of experience (Laing 1971: 30) in which three modalities are in play at the same time: imagining, perceiving and remembering, with the diagram (Laing 1971: 31) demonstrating how ‘Peter’s’ experience is divided:
I would be prepared to say, speaking in a rough and ready way, that Peter is split. He is unconscious of his imagination at that moment. The part of Peter in communication with Paul is unconscious of what is going on in his imagination (Laing 1971: 31).
And he suggests that the other may have an insight into this: ‘The ‘unconscious’ is what we do not communicate, to ourselves or to one another. We may convey something to another, without communicating it to ourselves. Something about Peter is evident to Paul that is not evident to Peter. This is one sense of the phrase, ‘Peter is unconscious of…’’ (Laing 1971: 32).
There seems to be a confusion here between ‘conveying’ and ‘communicating’ as well as regarding whether something unconscious is conveyed/communicated to the other or not. However, Laing does acknowledge a domain which is unavailable to, or disguised from the subject—although he does not specify whether or not this material is under repression—but which may be revealed to the other, let slip in the Freudian sense, through the subject’s behaviour.
Furthermore, for Laing, phantasy is one of a number of possible modalities of experience, it is ‘a particular way of relating to the world’. In Self and Others he goes on to describe the way that all ‘sane’ people live in a perpetual state of phantasy: ‘We are aware of the content of experience, but are unaware that it is illusion.’ In order to function in a family ‘nexus’, for example, one must remain suspended in its shared phantasy. In this sense, we are all living in an unconscious way:
The usual state of affairs is to be in a tenable position in phantasy systems of a nexus… We never realize we are in it. We never even dream of extricating ourselves. We tolerate, punish, or treat as harmless, bad, or mad those who try to extricate themselves, and tell us that we should also (Laing 1971: 41).
One way of understanding psychosis is as an emergence from this state of illusion: ‘A person in an alienated false position within a social phantasy system, who begins partially to apperceive his position, may give ‘psychotic’ expression to his partial apperception of the actual phantasy state of affairs’ (Laing 1971: 39). Thus having gone some way towards the unconscious in the previous chapter, Laing seems to again retrench in a notion of phantasy as an ‘elected’ modality of experience, which cancels out the unconscious as an uncontrollable, dynamic force.
In my view, Laing is attempting to fudge the question which disturbs him of ‘unconscious experience’. However, this does not resolve his fundamental difficulty with the unconscious as Other, nor does it address the status of repression which rules out the fully conscious subject which Laing seems to be evoking.