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In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan sought to clarify Freud’s definition of the unconscious and especially the question of what is repressed.
For Freud there can be no unconscious without repression, but what exactly is it that is repressed: words, images, feelings?
For Lacan, what is repressed is not iamges, words or emotions but something much more fundamental.
Freud hit upon this when, in ‘’[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]’’, he suggested that there was a hard impenetrable core of the dream – what he called the ‘navel’ of the dream – that is beyond interpretation.
What is repressed, argues Lacan, is this hard impenetrable core.
This is always a core of the real that is missing from the symbolic and all other representations, images and signifiers are no more than attempts to fill this gap.
In seminar VII Lacan identified this repressed element as ‘’the representative of the representation’’, or ‘’dad Ding’’ (the Thing).
The Thing is the beyond of the signified – that which is unknowable in itself.
It is something beyond symbolization, and therefore associated with the real, or as Lacan puts it, “the thing in its dumb reality.”<ref>1992: 55</ref>
The Thing is a lost object that must be continually refound.
However, it is more importantly an ‘object that is nowhere articulated, it is a lost object, but paradoxically an object that was never there in the first place to be lost.”<ref>1992: 58</ref>
