"A sort of ignorance"

Freud has much to say about the way physicians approached their patients before psychoanalysis. What might not be clear is that in these little remarks he is hinting that the practice of psychoanalysis, as well as a good portion of the theory itself, derive precisely from an effort to combat this way of approach. Freud essentially objects to the way of treating patients as if giving them information will immediately allow them a choice in the matter of their illness. In this, he rejects much of the practices constituting Western medicine fundamentally: even though Western medicine might come to the same conclusion about a patient's inability to handle the illness, it will treat the moment in which this happens as a derivative case. For Freud, the point is thinking this case without thinking it as derivative.
Thus this rejection on his part also necessitates a theoretical rejection of what it presupposes: an idea of what the patient does not know as the subconscious, as merely "a sort of ignorance" (see below) that the patient, if he is informed by the physician, can master by himself. In short, the theoretical intervention that Freud makes here is to really install alterity back into a conception of what the patient does not know: a sort of foreignness to the subject's ability to choose, to think rationally, to be conscious that is not just merely a derivation of this conscious activity. The unconscious is totally other than a rational, conscious subject: thus, it doesn't make sense merely to tell this subject information about that other, as if one could integrate the alterity within consciousness. What is at issue is comporting yourself to its absoluteness, its being totally different, its precise inability to be appropriated into conscious action.
This, at least, is the path of the thought, from practice into theory. We can see all this in the amazing little paper on "'Wild' Psychoanalysis:"

It is a long superseded idea, and one derived from superficial appearances, that the patient suffers from a sort of ignorance, and that if one removes this ignorance by giving him information (about the causal connection of his illness with his life, about his experiences in childhood, and so on) he is bound to recover. The pathological factor is not his ignorance in itself, but the root of this ignorance in his inner resistances; it was they that first called this ignorance into being, and they still maintain it now. The task of the treatment lies in combating these resistances. Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger. The analogy goes even further than its immediate application; for informing the patient of his unconscious regularly results in an intensification of the conflict in him and an exacerbation of his troubles.
Since, however, psycho-analysis cannot dispense with giving this information, it lays down that this shall not be done before two conditions have been fulfilled. First, the patient must, through preparation, himself have reached the neighbourhood of what he has repressed, and secondly, he must have formed a sufficient attachment (transference) to the physician for his emotional relationship to him to make a fresh flight impossible.
Only when these conditions have been fulfilled is it possible to recognize and to master the resistances which have led to the repression and the ignorance.
-"'Wild' Psycho-analysis," in the Standard Edition, XI. My italics.

The problem, however, is whether even this comporting towards the alterity is itself supposing too much, reducing that alterity, in short, to something that can be comported to. What if the alterity is more radical than that? What if the unconscious is more unconscious than psychoanalysis supposes? Freud himself knew this was a possibility, and wrestled with the problem constantly. However, as I've said before, on the side of Derrida (whose thought this is), these moments need to be retrieved from his thinking: they aren't obvious, simply because this possibility was not totally clear to Freud at the time (and because it demands an even greater dismantling of all Western practices, period). For Freud at the time it was enough begin to ask of Western medicine that it overcome or at least modify its particular notion of the subject's agency in an illness.