The term '[[consciousness]]' ([[French]]:''conscience''), as [[Sigmund Freud]]
In the so-called 'topographical model', [[Freud]] isolates consciousness as one of the parts of the [[psyche]], along with the [[unconscious]] and the [[preconscious]].
[[Lacan]] finds [[Freud]]'s remarks on [[consciousness]] far weaker than his formulations on the [[unconscious]].
<blockquote>"While he [Freud] can give a coherent, balanced account of the majority of other parts of the psychic apparatus, when it's a question of consciousness, he always encounters mutually contradictory conditions."<ref>{{S2}} p.117</ref></blockquote>
According to [[Lacan]], [[Freud]]'s problems with discussing [[consciousness]] return again and again to haunt his theory:
"The difficulties which this system of consciousness raises reappear at each level of Freud's theorising."<ref>{{S2}} p.117</ref>
In particular, [[Lacan]] rejects the apparent attempts in [[Freud]]'s work to link the [[consciousness]]-perception system to the [[ego]], unless this link is carefully theorised.
If there is a link between the [[ego]] and [[consciousness]], it is in terms of a [[lure]]; the [[illusion]] of a fully self-[[transparent]] [[consciousness]] is subverted by the whole psychoanalytic experience (see [[cogito]]).
<blockquote>"Consciousness in man is by essence a polar tension between an ego alienated from the subject and a perception which fundamentally escapes it, a pure percipi."<ref>{{S2}} p.177</ref></blockquote>
In 1954 [[Lacan]] gives "a materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness."<ref>{{S2}} p.40-52</ref>
However, matter is not to be confused with [[nature]]; [[Lacan]] argues that [[consciousness]] does not evolve from the [[natural]] [[order]]; it is radically discontinuous, and its origin is more akin to creation than to [[evolution]].<ref>{{S7}} p.213-14; 223</ref>
In the 1960s [[Lacan]] rethinks the [[illusion]] of a self-[[consciousness]] (''Selbstbe-wu?tsein'') fully present to itself in terms of his concept of the [[subject supposed to know]].
==See Also==
