Brody E B
Sheppard & Enoch Pratt Hospital, Towson, Maryland 21204.
Int J Psychoanal. 1987;68 ( Pt 4):465-74.
Sapir defined the human unconscious as a mechanism (based on phonemes learned during language acquisition) which imposes linguistic forms upon out-of-awareness 'psychic content' or 'elements of experience', rather than as a repository of repressed impulses or ideas striving for expression. In contemporary terms this activity may be regarded as unconscious information processing prequisite to experiential residues becoming available to conscious attention. It also imposes (as in 'projecting') the observer's cultural forms, modified by developmental experience, upon communications from others. This view antedates Lévi-Strauss' unconscious which 'transforms' elements of the past 'into language' and Lacan's unconscious structured 'like a language'. The clinical psychoanalytic study of out-of-awareness mental processes, understood as a dialectic shaped by the discrepancy in power between analyst and patient, illuminates the unstable relationship between the words or signifiers selected by the patient from the infinite lexicon of available, usually socially shared, verbal or non-verbal language (his plane of expression) and his varied preconscious collections of signifieds, including cultural as well as personal developmental knowledge (his plane of content).
萨丕尔将人类无意识定义为一种机制（基于语言习得过程中所学的音素），这种机制将语言形式强加于意识之外的“心理内容”或“经验元素”，而不是将其定义为压抑冲动或渴望表达的观念的储存库。用当代术语来说，这种活动可被视为无意识信息处理，它是经验残余能够进入意识关注的前提条件。它还会（如“投射”那样）将观察者经发展经验修正后的文化形式强加于他人的交流之上。这种观点早于列维-斯特劳斯的无意识概念，即无意识将过去的元素“转化为语言”，也早于拉康的像语言一样结构化的无意识概念。对意识之外心理过程的临床精神分析研究，被理解为由分析师与患者之间权力差异所塑造的辩证法，它阐明了患者从通常社会共享的可用语言或非语言的无限词汇表（其表达层面）中选择的词语或能指与他多样的包括文化以及个人发展知识的前意识所指集合（其内容层面）之间不稳定的关系。
