The Unsayable by Annie S. Rogers. 2006. Random House.

When I take notes for my private use I have a couple of conventions which I’ll use here.

##/ the page number followed by the quote without quote marks.

[My comments are between brackets.]

298/ The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it—mostly in the form of your own ideas—and instead listen for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body.

[I feel these are the topic sentences for the entire work.]

108/ [Psychoanalytical theorist Jacques] Lacan describes savior as knowledge based on the experience, and in a psychoanalytical psychotherapy this knowledge comes from the unconscious.

117-118/ When we experience something that takes us beyond the here and now of reality, something that pushes us beyond the limits of what keeps the organism in balance, this is what Lacan calls jouissance. Jouissance is not pleasure, or within what Freud called “the limits of pleasure,” but rather an excess that takes us into a state of being out of control, where the next limit for the organism is felt to be death.

139/ What is it like to know something, unconsciously, something beyond words, and respond nevertheless because it’s all too real? A person might then say things, or do things, that are at odds with her or his morality and self-regard.

285/ When words function as symbols, a new world comes to light—a world of concepts, ideals, positions in society, the value of symbolic exchanges, etc.—and as a result, the fullness of what is actually there falls away. The child with a neurotic structure will come to mistake the symbolic world for the real.

293/ If we don’t understand how we are predators to one another through language—how our speaking sounds and resounds through the unconscious and determines our actions—we will certainly destroy one another and our fragile little planet.

296/ The world I am entering requires a kind of courage I find compelling …

297/ [Freudian School of Quebec has 60% success rate with “untreatable” psychotic young adults.]