The Unconscious and the Law the Law and the Unconscious

Authors

Jorge DeGregorio, Freudian Research Center

Abstract

The god Apollo, whose diverse gifts included the ability to interpret dreams, was recognized as the first author of the law, which was dictated through his oracle in Delphi. For his sacred person, dreams were laws and laws, dreams. Let us invent a story in order to fill in the missing pages of the myth:

Laws, as well as the power to decipher the soul's mysteries from dreams, were bestowed upon the Androgyns by the god. Once they acquired the power of law and of dream interpretation, they attempted to scale Olympus and sit on the gods' stage. Zeus, presiding over the Olympic Tribunal, decided to split them in two. Each half-"Law Interpreter" (hereinafter the "Judge") and "Dream Interpreter" (occasionally referred to as the "Psychoanalyst")-took a different path. One chose "repression," the other "clearing away of repression." The Judge saw on his path of repression the security of preserving life, properties, and values. The Psychoanalyst saw repression as the source of sickness and suffering.

Down one path or another, experiences led both Judge and Dream Interpreter alike to the heart of the human soul, its hopes, destructiveness, and confusion. They were even led down deviant paths, where man2 tends to construct his own prison.

Under the splendor of Apollo Pythio, two conceptions of the world and of life meet here today in what I will call a "dialogue" between the Judge and the Dream Interpreter. The two halves of an ancestral androgyn are brightened up in an attempt to reconstitute that essence, which with Apollo's intuitive idea was gestated in man's mind. An intuitive idea concerning the determining powers of our existence, powers I will name here today in "The Unconscious and the Law, The Law in the Unconscious."

Keywords

Copyright, Intellectual Property Law, Medical Jurisprudence, Civil Rights, Politics (General), Desegregation, Race and Ethnicity Issues

Disciplines

Civil Rights and Discrimination | Intellectual Property Law | Law | Law and Race

Recommended Citation

Jorge DeGregorio, The Unconscious and the Law the Law and the Unconscious, 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 1023 (1995).
Available at: https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol16/iss3/10