How can he be correct?

He is correct because, in my view, if the unconscious exists, it can only exist within the field of psychoanalysis, and more precisely, within the field of the cure. Now your friend seems to situate himself outside of the field and consequently outside of the unconscious. I realize that my position may strike you as overly restrictive and that there are many grounds to oppose it. I imagine for example that you could remind me of Freud’s various texts, such as the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which he demonstrates the existence of the unconscious in a field that is as far from the cure as is everyday life. However, if we reconsider the Lacanian principle of the unconscious that is structured like a language, as well as our discussion developed in the first lesson, then we conclude that in fact the unconscious only exists within the analytic cure. I did not expect to begin this lesson in this way. Your intervention leads me to pose now a series of propositions that justify my thesis that there would only be an unconscious in analysis. I want to specify that these propositions are a result of my reading of Lacan’s work but have never been stated by Lacan himself. I will advance these propositions as if they were responses to the question, “When can it be said that the unconscious exists?”