Analysing the Cultural Unconscious: Science of the Signifier

What are we doing when taking
psychoanalysis from the couch to the analysis of society, culture, and arts?
How is it possible to do so? How is it possible to move from singular
experiences to universal structures detected in culture and
society? Could psychoanalysis applied to art works become more sensitive to
their aesthetics form?

Psychoanalysis is often disclaimed
as non-scientific, since its main object - the unconscious - has no positive
existence. This book, however, proposes psychoanalysis to be a science of
the signifier . It takes as its object the signifier - the signifying part of
the sign - insisting that it always says more (or less) than intended,
because its very materiality carries unintended messages. By defining the
object of psychoanalysis as the signifier, this volume argues that we can
speak of psychoanalysis as a science, even if it is closer to semiotics than
biology.

Analysing the
Cultural Unconscious builds on this idea by arguing that the analysis of the signifier is
the way to understand not only the individual unconscious, but also the
cultural one. Replacing a person’s monologue on the couch with ideology
criticism or a piece of art, applied psychoanalysis allows us to analyse
culture and the arts in a new way, uncovering the cultural unconscious.