Re:

["Michael Kee" <mkee@mail.sonic.net>]

In message <Pine.OSF.3.96.971017163321.12571B-100000@ccins.camosun.bc.ca>  
writes:
> Can anyone suggest an answer to this perhaps banal question?
> Why does the dream-censor never get smarter? Or does it?
> I'm new to Lacan so I don't know to what he atrributes that
> censorship, but whatever it is, surely it learns when our
> Cs reads Freud's work that the Ucs emplys condensation and
> displacement to evade the dream-censor. So why does it still
> permit such evasive strategies?
> 
I think we make a mistake when we begin to personify aspects of psyche. Maybe 
it's a mistake to even use the term "psyche" because we think of a person or 
entity. Western science makes the same mistake repeatedly, utilizing the 
homunculus to "explain" brain function. It doesn't explain anything, it just 
defers the question into infinity. I still remember watching a film in the 4th 
or 5th grade which showed the homunculus pulling levers and switching switches 
inside the brain. I became very unpopular with my teacher for asking about the 
operation of the homunculus brain.
So if the question is why doesn't the dream-censor get smarter, the answer is 
that there is no dream censor. Or, if you prefer a psychotic explanation (and 
they often are more to the point, one could extrapolate from Daniel Schreber who
found that "God does not learn from experience." These are both ways of talking 
about things we can't comprehend. And of course, we can't get outside the 
"logic" (or madness) of our own language to see how it is shaping the things 
that move within it (like ourselves). 
Or again, Freud held that there is no time in the unconscious: associations are 
fixed there and they don't die, nor would they change due to conscious 
experience. 
Freud's thinking is very radical and also very cautious, for all his willingness
to speculate beyond science: he stated somewhere that consciousness is a 
"symptom" of unconscious conflicts. He stated as well that we have consciousness
"instead of" memory traces. He used the term "psychic apparatus" and I think he 
held onto such a clumsy term to remind us we don't know what is going on "in 
there" and we should keep in mind that whatever constructs we use to imagine how
the mind works are just that: our own constructs, fictional and fallible.
I'm not saying that censorship doesn't happen: it does. I'm just commenting that
how we ask the questions is crucial.
M. K.