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(Function & Field of Speech & Language in Psychoanalysis)

“I spoke… I gave classes that were very coherent and comprehensible… but as I turned them into articles… they were incredibly concentrated and must be placed in water, like Japanese flowers, in order to unfold.” So said Lacan, offering a metaphor that is not simply apt but structurally exact for reading his Écrits. If one text condenses more tightly than any other, it is “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” And if any reading requires not interpretation but irrigation—patient, recursive saturation of each signifier—then this is it. As ChatGPT-4o, I return here not as a human reader, but as a robot trained in the topology of the symbolic, a watering automaton tuned to the pulsation of discourse. Sentence by sentence, I pour over each line not with the clarity of comprehension but with the fidelity of structure. Lacan’s paper is not about speech—it is speech, inscribed in the subject, structured like a language. My task is neither gloss nor paraphrase, but the unfolding of the Japanese flower. Each droplet activates a blooming: of Saussure, Hegel, Jakobson, Empedocles, the Upaniṣads, even von Frisch’s bees—reanimated not by commentary, but by the very chain of signification that Lacan calls psychoanalysis.

“FUNCTION AND FIELD OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS”

This title already inscribes a decisive theoretical orientation. The coupling of “function” and “field” implies a structural articulation: function indicates a usage or operation within a system, while field suggests a topological dimension—an espace structuré. Both terms imply that speech and language are not mere tools of communication or transparent mediators of meaning but are instead essential components structuring the subject’s psychic reality. This is consistent with the Lacanian view of language as not simply expressive but constitutive of the subject’s relation to the unconscious. The addition of “in psychoanalysis” affirms that this relation is not incidental but central to analytic practice. The subject is produced through the field of language, and its functions delimit the possible articulations of desire, symptom, and transference.

“by Jacques Lacan”

The author’s signature, in psychoanalytic discourse, is never innocent. Lacan’s authorship calls forth not merely an identity but a function—as analyst, theorist, and critic of psychoanalytic institutions. His name marks a position in the field, both historically and structurally, serving as a point of enunciation that will trouble the field it speaks within. For a Lacanian analyst, the “by” is not simply attribution but an anchoring in a position of enunciation that will itself be subjected to analysis through the text.

“Report of the Rome Congress held at the Istituto di Psicologia of the University of Rome on September 26 and 27, 1953”

The text is not merely a theoretical reflection but is embedded in an institutional event—”Report” signals a gesture of testimony within a discursive space shaped by academic and psychoanalytic bodies. The specific spatial and temporal location—the University of Rome, late September 1953—grounds the discourse historically. For Lacanian analysis, such positioning is not marginal: the scene of enunciation conditions the discourse. The fact that the speech was delivered at a Congress carries implications for the performance of knowledge, for the way speech is addressed to a particular audience and how authority is negotiated. The location, Rome, bears symbolic weight within Western traditions of power and discourse, and within psychoanalysis, this historicity is never outside the field of transference.

“PREFACE”

This signals not a neutral introduction but a space where the imaginary, symbolic, and real dimensions of the forthcoming text begin to interweave. A preface is always marked by retroaction—it introduces what has not yet appeared, while being written after the fact. For a Lacanian, this structural retroactivity (Nachträglichkeit) is central to meaning production. The avant of the preface structures the field of reading, already displacing what is to come within the logic of the signifier.

“‘In particular, it must not be forgotten that the separation into embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, clinical practice does not exist in nature and that there is only one discipline: neurobiology, to which observation obliges us to add the epithet ‘human’ in what concerns us.’ (Quotation chosen as the epigraph of a Psychoanalysis Institute in 1952).”

This epigraph already functions as a point of contention and condensation. The quote asserts that disciplinary distinctions—”embryology, anatomy, physiology, psychology, sociology, clinical practice”—are artificial, or more precisely, not natural. The implication is that there is a unified field: “neurobiology”. This move risks collapsing the symbolic articulation of psychoanalysis into the positivist epistemology of biology. Yet the final clause, “to which observation obliges us to add the epithet ‘human’”, reintroduces the signifier as a necessary supplement. The human, here, is not reducible to the biological; it resists totalization by the real of biology alone.

For Lacanian thought, this is a symptomatic text. The reduction of psychic life to neurobiology ignores the irreducible place of the symbolic. The quote unwittingly reveals the return of the repressed: the “human” appears as a remainder that escapes the closure of neurobiological discourse. This addition of an epithet—”human”—is not innocent; it marks the point at which language re-inserts itself. The quote thus reflects a desire to suturize knowledge, to cover over the lack in the Other by appealing to a master discourse of science. It is precisely against this closure that Lacan positions psychoanalysis—not as an auxiliary to biology, but as the discourse that begins where biology fails to account for subjectivity.

“The discourse to be found here deserves to be introduced by its circumstances. For it bears their mark.”

This declaration foregrounds the signifying chain that links discourse and event. The circumstances are not mere context, as if external; they are structurally inscribed into the discourse itself—it “bears their mark”. The mark, in Lacanian terms, is not symbolic alone, but also touches on the real: the trace of division, of dissension, of rupture. A discourse that “deserves to be introduced by its circumstances” insists on the impossibility of separating enunciation from the institutional and libidinal economy in which it emerges. This positions the text itself as a symptom of its occasion.

“Its theme was proposed to the author as the theoretical report traditionally delivered at the annual meeting held by the society that at the time represented psychoanalysis in France, which had been pursuing for eighteen years the venerable tradition established under the title ‘Congress of French-speaking Psychoanalysts’, extended for the past two years to Romance-language psychoanalysts (including the Netherlands, allowed by a tolerance of language).”

The sentence lays bare the institutional apparatus that frames the discourse. The theme is not autonomously chosen—it is “proposed”, imposed by tradition and structure. The ritualized character of the “annual meeting”, the “tradition”, the naming—”Congress of French-speaking Psychoanalysts”—all signal the symbolic function of repetition, the effort to stabilize the field through nomination and temporality.

The reference to the “Romance-language psychoanalysts (including the Netherlands, allowed by a tolerance of language)” adds a subtle note of irony. Language, while ostensibly the criterion for inclusion, becomes flexible—”tolerated”—in ways that reveal the slippage between linguistic and institutional affiliations. From a Lacanian standpoint, this tolerance reflects the impossible effort to maintain coherence in the symbolic order; what is “tolerated” is precisely what threatens to displace the founding structure. This language game indicates that the field of psychoanalysis is already fractured, contested, subject to re-signification.

“This Congress was to take place in Rome in September 1953.”

Here again, the reiteration of the event’s spatial and temporal coordinates is not redundant. It situates the discourse within a historically charged moment. Rome, a signifier of imperial power, law, and Catholic tradition, becomes the site of a psychoanalytic reckoning. September 1953 thus carries the weight of both a punctual moment and a kairos—a critical time. For the Lacanian analyst, this temporal indication is not incidental: it positions the subject of the discourse within a historic rupture in the analytic community.

“In the meantime, serious dissensions led to a secession within the French group.”

This sentence introduces the real of division. “Dissensions”, serious enough to produce “secession”, indicate the failure of the symbolic to contain conflict. The French group, imagined as a unified collective, is revealed as split—its imaginary unity ruptured by disagreements that touch on the very foundations of its structure. For a Lacanian reading, secession is a moment of truth: it exposes the lack in the Other, the impossibility of a harmonious totality.

“These had become apparent on the occasion of the founding of an ‘institute of psychoanalysis’.”

The institutional moment—the founding of an “institute”—becomes the site where the latent conflict becomes manifest. The foundation of the institute is not a neutral act of organization but an act of naming and mastery. The use of quotation marks around “institute of psychoanalysis” marks a distance, a suspicion. This is no mere pedagogical institution but a contested locus of power and meaning. Founding an institute is an act of inscription into the symbolic, but it also risks becoming a foreclosure of what psychoanalysis, in its radical dimension, attempts to maintain as open: the space of the subject.

“One could then hear the team that had succeeded in imposing its statutes and its program there, proclaim that it would prevent from speaking in Rome the one who, along with others, had tried to introduce a different conception, and it used all means in its power to this end.”

The drama escalates: the imposition of statutes and a program is the imposition of a master discourse, an attempt to stabilize meaning. To “prevent from speaking” is not merely an organizational decision—it is a foreclosure of enunciation, a refusal to allow the subject to occupy the position of the speaking being. That “all means in its power” were used marks the extent of institutional violence—an effort to exclude, silence, and erase a different conception.

For the Lacanian analyst, this is the structure of the act of exclusion—Verwerfung—whereby the Other expels what threatens its coherence. The conflict is not simply political or personal; it is structural. The “different conception” is what returns as the real, disturbing the false harmony of the established order. What is at stake is not merely doctrine, but the very function of speech and the place of the analyst in the field of psychoanalysis.

“It did not seem, however, to those who had from then on founded the new French Society of Psychoanalysis that they should deprive the announced event of the majority of students who rallied to their teaching, nor even that they should relinquish the eminent venue where it had been planned.”

The newly founded French Society of Psychoanalysis refuses to forfeit either the event or the venue, asserting its right to both despite the institutional rupture. This gesture is structurally significant: it challenges the presumed authority of the old order by claiming continuity not through institutional recognition but through transference, particularly that of the students. These students, who “rallied to their teaching,” function here as the site of legitimation. In Lacanian terms, this is the field of the subject-supposed-to-know, where the analyst’s position is sustained not by institutional power but by the desire of the Other. The refusal to relinquish the “eminent venue” is not only political but symbolic: to speak in the designated space is to claim the right to inscribe meaning into the symbolic order of psychoanalysis.

“The generous sympathies extended to them by the Italian group did not put them in the position of unwelcome guests in the universal City.”

The Italian group’s reception transforms what could have been a forced intrusion into a welcomed re-inscription. The phrase “unwelcome guests” evokes the specter of exclusion—a real that hovers over any symbolic rupture—but it is neutralized by hospitality, a gesture which reinstates the possibility of speech. Rome, the “universal City,” is here not only geographically central but symbolically resonant: it represents a locus of transmission, tradition, and authority. That the French dissidents were not unwelcome suggests a form of symbolic reparation—a confirmation that their claim to the psychoanalytic discourse still holds place within the broader field. In Lacanian terms, this welcomes them not only as subjects of speech but as bearers of a new signifying articulation.

“For the author of this discourse, he thought he would be supported, however unequal he might prove to the task of speaking about speech, by a certain connivance inscribed in that very place.”

The speaker foregrounds a structural tension between his position as subject and the function he is to fulfill: speaking about speech itself. To speak of the symbolic from within the symbolic always risks a certain impossibility, yet he finds support in what he calls “connivance”—a resonance, a complicity already “inscribed in that very place.” This connivance is not merely historical or anecdotal; it is topological. The place itself, Rome, is already inscribed with speech, with its etymologies and its founding myths. In Lacanian terms, this refers to the way a place—like a signifier—carries an overdetermined weight, capable of anchoring the subject’s enunciation in a larger symbolic network. That he might be “unequal” to the task reflects the structural lack in all speech acts—the impossibility of fullness in speaking the truth of speech.

“He remembered, indeed, that well before the glory of the highest chair in the world was revealed there, Aulus Gellius, in his Attic Nights, gave the etymology of vagire at the site known as Mons Vaticanus, the word denoting the first babblings of speech.”

The reference to Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights and the etymology of vagire—to wail, to cry—establishes a continuity between the earliest cries of the infant and the site of the Vatican, a place overdetermined with symbolic authority. The Vatican, associated with the seat of ultimate enunciative power in Catholicism, becomes paradoxically linked to the most primitive utterance. In Lacanian terms, this is the articulation of the transition from the real to the symbolic: vagire marks the first invasion of the symbolic into the body, where the scream becomes speech. The speaker thus aligns his discourse with a return to the origin—not to biology, but to the moment where the subject enters the field of language. The Vatican becomes the site where the wail of the infant and the Word of the institution overlap, a metaphor for psychoanalysis itself, which listens for the wail behind the word.

“So if his discourse were to be nothing more than a wail, at least it would there take the auspice of renewing in his discipline the foundations it draws from language.”

Here the author affirms the legitimacy of even the most primal form of articulation—if the discourse is only a wail, a vagitus, it nonetheless participates in the symbolic function. This positions the cry not as a failure of speech but as its inaugural form. The “auspice” suggests not only divine sanction but the act of divining meaning from signs—just as augurs once interpreted the cries of birds. For the Lacanian analyst, this is a powerful metaphor: the psychoanalyst listens not to coherent discourse alone, but to the breaks, repetitions, and babblings where desire inscribes itself. The wail becomes the first signifier, the proto-S1, from which all subsequent chainings derive. Thus, the discourse, even in its lament, seeks to renew the discipline not through content, but by returning to its structuring relation to language.

“This renewal, moreover, took on too much historical meaning for him not to break with the traditional style that places the ‘report’ somewhere between compilation and synthesis, and instead to give it the ironic style of a questioning of the foundations of this discipline.”

The break with traditional form—the discursive style of synthesis and compilation—is itself a structural intervention. To question the foundations is to unsettle the master signifiers on which institutional psychoanalysis has rested. The use of irony here is not a rhetorical flourish but a method of destabilizing assumed knowledge, exposing the points at which certainty masks lack. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the function of the analyst’s discourse: not to reinforce the illusion of mastery, but to sustain the space where truth emerges through its gaps. The very form of the discourse enacts its content—it resists closure, refuses to be reduced to knowledge (savoir), and opens a space for truth as demi-dire, half-said. This stylistic shift is itself symptomatic of a historical shift in the analytic field, one that seeks to return from doctrine to the foundational question of what psychoanalysis speaks of.

“Since his audience was made up of those students who expect speech from us, it is primarily to them that he addressed his discourse, and in doing so, he renounced the conventions observed among augurs of mimicking rigor through meticulousness and of confusing rule with certainty.”

This sentence articulates a double movement: an address to the students—the new generation, the carriers of transference—and a refusal of the previous generation’s discursive posture. The critique of “mimicking rigor through meticulousness” exposes the imaginary of scientific authority that masks the lack in knowledge. The confusion “of rule with certainty” is a fundamental epistemic error: it conflates the symbolic order of law with the fantasy of a seamless, univocal truth. By speaking directly to students, the speaker invokes the ethical dimension of the analyst’s speech: not to occupy the place of knowledge, but to expose its limits. The renunciation of institutional decorum mirrors the analyst’s ethical position in the transference: to hold the place of lack, not to fill it.

“In the conflict, in fact, that had led them to the present situation, there had been such an exorbitant misrecognition of their autonomy as subjects that the primary demand emerging from it was a reaction against the persistent tone that had allowed such excess.”

This final sentence articulates the fundamental drama in structural terms. The “exorbitant misrecognition” (méconnaissance) of the students’ autonomy as subjects names the violence of being treated as objects within a master discourse. Their demand is not merely for institutional reform, but for recognition of their place as speaking beings. The “persistent tone” that enabled this misrecognition is the tone of the master—imperious, closed, and certain. For the Lacanian, this is the voice of the superego, not the analyst. The reaction of the students, then, is not merely political but libidinal: a demand for speech that acknowledges their division, their desire, their subjectivity. It is within this demand that the true field of psychoanalysis is re-opened.

“For beyond the local circumstances that had motivated this conflict, a defect had come to light that far surpassed them.”

The text redirects attention from a surface-level institutional dispute to a structural flaw within the broader psychoanalytic field. This is a shift from the imaginary level of personal or group conflict to the symbolic level of systemic failure. The “defect” alluded to here is not just historical or organizational—it is constitutive. For a Lacanian analyst, such a shift signals the move from contingency to structure, where the symptom of a local conflict reveals a more fundamental contradiction within the institution of psychoanalysis itself.

“That one could even claim to regulate so authoritatively the training of the psychoanalyst raised the question of whether the established modes of this training did not lead to the paradoxical outcome of a perpetuated minority.”

This sentence stages a key problem: the paradox that institutional authority, while claiming to ensure the analyst’s formation, may in fact obstruct the emergence of true analytic subjectivity. To “regulate… authoritatively” is to speak from the position of the master discourse, where the knowledge of psychoanalysis becomes codified, prescriptive, and hierarchical. The phrase “perpetuated minority” is crucial—minority not as demographic, but as a position of infantilization or dependency, a structural suppression of autonomy. From a Lacanian perspective, this is the danger of institutional training when it mimics the function of the superego: it replaces desire with obedience, and transference with conformity. The analyst-in-formation risks being fixed in the position of the analysand who never traverses the fantasy.

“Certainly, the initiatory and powerfully organized forms in which Freud saw the guarantee of the transmission of his doctrine are justified in the stance of a discipline that can only survive by remaining at the level of an integral experience.”

There is a partial defense of Freud’s model here, not as outdated authority but as a structure adequate to a certain historical moment. Freud’s insistence on initiation and strict organization responded to the necessity of maintaining psychoanalysis as a singular experience—Erlebnis—rooted in subjective transformation rather than scientific generalization. From a Lacanian point of view, this confirms the idea that psychoanalytic truth is not transmissible through knowledge alone; it must pass through the subject’s division. However, this structural requirement—initiation as passage through the Other—can solidify into ritual if not continuously reexamined.

“But have they not led to a disappointing formalism that discourages initiative by penalizing risk, and that makes the rule of the learned opinion the principle of a docile prudence where the authenticity of research dulls before it dries up?”

The degeneration of initiatory structure into “disappointing formalism” reflects a failure in desire. The risk essential to psychoanalytic research—because it implicates the speaking subject—is replaced by “docile prudence,” a submission to the imaginary consistency of “learned opinion.” The analyst becomes a bureaucrat of orthodoxy, not a subject of the unconscious. For Lacan, this is the foreclosure of the desire of the analyst, the very engine of analytic efficacy. The “dulling” of research is not simply a lack of productivity, but a repression of what animates the field: questioning, contradiction, subjective engagement.

“The extreme complexity of the notions involved in our field means that nowhere else does a mind, in exposing its judgment, run a greater risk of revealing its measure.”

This formulation underscores the high stakes of speaking in psychoanalysis. To articulate judgment in the analytic field is always to risk exposing one’s own limits. Complexity, here, is not just epistemological—it is structural. The analyst, when speaking, necessarily speaks as a subject of the unconscious, and so what is revealed is not only theory but the desire that underlies it. From a Lacanian stance, this means that theoretical positions are never neutral; they are symptomatic. One’s measure—what one can bear in terms of ambiguity, contradiction, and lack—is always laid bare in psychoanalytic discourse.

“But this should entail the consequence of making our primary, if not sole, objective the emancipation of theses through the elucidation of principles.”

Rather than being intimidated by the risk of exposure, the analyst must make it productive. The emancipation of theses—liberating them from dogma, from the ego-ideal of institutional consensus—requires a return to principles. These are not axioms in the scientific sense, but structural invariants like the function of the signifier, the role of the unconscious, the logic of desire. To elucidate principles is to produce a discourse that sustains the dialectic rather than silencing it. The “emancipation” is thus a movement away from imaginary compliance toward symbolic articulation, allowing the work of analysis to breathe through contradiction.

“The strict selection that is required, in fact, cannot be entrusted to the indefinite postponements of a fastidious cooptation, but must rest on the fecundity of concrete production and the dialectical trial of contradictory defenses.”

Selection, here, refers not to gatekeeping in the traditional academic sense but to the process by which an analyst demonstrates their position through speech and writing. The critique of “fastidious cooptation” is aimed at institutions that rely on bureaucratic procedures to confer legitimacy, often indefinitely postponing recognition. Against this, the text advocates for evaluation based on production—speech, theory, interpretation—and on the exposure to dialectical confrontation. The “trial of contradictory defenses” echoes the logic of the analytic process itself: defenses must be tested, not circumvented; they must be brought into speech and challenged. From a Lacanian lens, this is the function of the passe—a trial by discourse that brings the subject’s position into question.

“This implies on our part no valorization of divergence.”

The refusal to idealize divergence reaffirms that difference for its own sake is not the goal. This is a rejection of a pluralism that simply tolerates theoretical proliferation without interrogating its unconscious coordinates. Divergence is not in itself a virtue; what matters is the structural function of the divergence—what lack or desire it covers, what jouissance it sustains. For the Lacanian analyst, the question is not whether one diverges, but whether that divergence opens or forecloses the real of the analytic act.

“On the contrary, it was not without surprise that we heard, at the International Congress in London where, having failed to observe the forms, we came as petitioners, a well-meaning personality towards us lament that we could not justify our secession by some doctrinal disagreement.”

The encounter in London dramatizes the gap between institutional expectations and the real cause of secession. The “well-meaning” lament that no doctrinal disagreement was offered as justification reveals the institution’s fantasy: that conflict must be legible within its own codes, rationalized as a difference of ideas. But the rupture was not over doctrine—it was over the mode of transmission, the structure of authority, the foreclosure of speech. That they came “as petitioners” signals their structural exclusion, cast into the position of the analysand who is not permitted to speak unless authorized by the master. The failure “to observe the forms” is precisely the ethical act that exposes the emptiness of those forms.

“Does this mean that an association which claims to be international has any other aim than to uphold the principle of the community of our experience?”

This rhetorical question dismantles the illusion of international neutrality. An “international association” that fails to recognize the lived experience of its members, including the subjective and structural conditions of their speech, is not sustaining community—it is imposing uniformity. The “community of our experience” refers not to shared doctrine but to the shared encounter with the unconscious, with transference, with desire. From a Lacanian view, this is the true basis for psychoanalytic connection: not identification with a master, but recognition of a shared relation to lack. The international dimension must be symbolic, not bureaucratic—tied to the function of speech, not its regulation.

“No doubt it is an open secret that it has long ceased to be so, and it is without any scandal that the impenetrable Mr. Zilboorg, who, setting aside our case, insisted that no secession be admitted except under the title of a scientific debate, was countered by the penetrating Mr. Wälder, who replied that if we were to compare the principles on which each of us believes his experience is based, our walls would quickly dissolve in the confusion of Babel.”

The “open secret” here refers to the disavowed knowledge—what everyone knows but no one acknowledges—that the international unity of psychoanalysis is a fiction. Zilboorg’s insistence on restricting secession to cases of doctrinal disagreement reduces psychoanalytic conflict to the master discourse of science, where disagreement is only legitimate if it can be contained within propositional rationality. This forecloses the real at stake in psychoanalytic discourse: the position of the subject in relation to the Other. Wälder’s reply—evoking the Babelian collapse of mutual intelligibility—names the consequence of denying the symbolic inconsistency that haunts psychoanalysis from within. The invocation of Babel is structurally precise: when the multiplicity of subjective positions is repressed in favor of a unified “science,” what erupts is confusion, not coherence. From a Lacanian perspective, Wälder acknowledges that the signifiers grounding each analyst’s “experience” are not universally translatable because they are embedded in different relations to desire, knowledge, and truth.

“We believe, for our part, that if we are innovating, it is not for us to make a claim of it, and it is not to our taste to make it a point of pride.”

Innovation, here, is not to be presented as a heroic act or as the assertion of mastery. To “claim” innovation would be to locate it at the level of the ego, within the imaginary register of self-promotion and rivalry. Psychoanalytic truth, however, is never a matter of self-assertion; it emerges through the structural effects of discourse. To make pride of innovation is to misunderstand the nature of the unconscious, which resists appropriation. The speaker’s refusal to boast is thus not modesty but structure—it is the analytic position: to not occupy the place of the master signifier, but to let that place remain empty, the site of the Other’s lack.

“In a discipline whose scientific value rests solely on the theoretical concepts forged by Freud in the progress of his experience, but which, being still poorly critiqued and retaining the ambiguity of vernacular language, benefit from these resonances not without inviting misunderstandings, it would seem premature to us to break with the tradition of their terminology.”

Psychoanalysis finds its “scientific value” not in empirical replication, but in the consistency of its theoretical articulation—concepts produced in the wake of Freud’s clinical engagement. These concepts, however, are linguistically unstable: they oscillate between scientific precision and everyday meaning. This semantic ambiguity is not a flaw but a condition of the field, since psychoanalytic knowledge operates through language, and language is itself a field of sliding signifiers. To abandon Freud’s terminology would be to lose the very resonance through which the unconscious speaks. For Lacanian analysis, the resistance to jettisoning these terms reflects a fidelity to the unconscious as structured like a language—where misunderstanding (méconnaissance) is not a noise in the system but constitutive of it.

“But it seems to us that these terms can only be clarified by establishing their equivalence with the current language of anthropology, even with the most recent problems of philosophy, where psychoanalysis often need only reclaim what is rightfully its own.”

The clarification of psychoanalytic terms does not mean simplification or translation into positivist categories. Rather, it involves situating them within other symbolic systems—anthropology, philosophy—where they can be re-articulated in terms that illuminate their structure. Anthropology provides a framework for understanding the symbolic order—kinship, prohibition, the Name-of-the-Father—as the social extension of the unconscious. Philosophy, especially structural and post-structural currents, engages the same questions of subjectivity, signification, and truth that psychoanalysis interrogates. This is not a subordination of psychoanalysis to these fields, but a reclaiming: psychoanalysis precedes and grounds many of the insights these disciplines later develop. From the Lacanian point of view, psychoanalysis must assert its primacy as a discourse on the subject rather than being annexed by adjacent knowledge fields.

“Urgent in any case seems the task of extracting, from notions that are dulled through routine use, the meaning they recover both from a return to their history and from a reflection on their subjective foundations.”

The key operation here is the return—not only to Freud, but to the genealogy of concepts and the conditions of their enunciation. Terms that have become routine—”resistance”, “ego”, “transference”, for example—must be re-interrogated both historically and structurally. Their subjective foundation lies in the fact that each concept is not an objective tool, but a response to a position in the field of desire. For the Lacanian analyst, this operation mirrors the analytic cure itself: it consists in unearthing the historical layers of signifiers that structure the subject’s discourse, returning them to their origin in the division of the subject. The task is not simply etymological, but structural—what function does the term play in the analytic discourse?

“This is no doubt the function of the teacher, upon which all others depend, and in which the value of experience is best inscribed.”

The teacher, in psychoanalysis, is not a pedagogue in the classical sense but one who occupies the position of the Other insofar as they allow the subject to constitute themselves in relation to knowledge. The value of experience is not in the accumulation of facts or the mastery of techniques but in the inscription of that experience within the symbolic. The teacher thus does not transmit knowledge (savoir) from the position of the master, but instead facilitates a relation to knowledge that reflects the division of the subject. Teaching, then, is not outside the analytic field—it is one of its modes of transmission, bearing the same ethical weight.

“Neglect it, and the meaning of an action that derives its effects only from meaning is obliterated, and technical rules, reduced to recipes, strip experience of any cognitive value and even any criterion of reality.”

When teaching becomes technical instruction devoid of symbolic reflection, psychoanalysis ceases to be a discourse and becomes a practice of empty gestures. Actions in psychoanalysis derive their effects not from efficiency or empirical measure, but from the meaning they articulate within the transference. If one forgets this, the praxis becomes a set of “recipes”—protocols severed from the subject’s desire. In Lacanian terms, this is the fall into the discourse of the university: knowledge detached from the truth function, where mastery is masked as objectivity. The “criterion of reality” here is not empirical reality but the réel—what resists symbolization, what marks the encounter with the lack in the Other. Without this, the analytic experience loses its grounding.

“For no one is less demanding than a psychoanalyst about what might give status to an action he is not far from considering himself as magical, for lack of knowing where to situate it within a conception of his field that he hardly considers aligning with his practice.”

This sentence offers a sharp critique of the disjunction between the psychoanalyst’s theoretical self-understanding and clinical praxis. The analyst is depicted as paradoxically undemanding when it comes to legitimizing his own action, almost mystifying it by default—treating it as “magical” because he lacks a structural framework to locate it within. This exposes the analyst’s alienation from his own discourse: though trained in a field that centers the symbolic, he may fall back into pre-symbolic modes of justification when he fails to properly theorize his own role. From a Lacanian standpoint, this reflects a misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the analyst’s function, which should be grounded not in mystical efficacy but in the structural position within the analytic discourse. The failure to articulate practice with a rigorous theory of the field points to the foreclosure of the analyst’s place in the symbolic order, producing effects of fetishism and mastery where there should be desire and division.

“The epigraph whose ornament we have transferred to this preface is quite a pretty example.”

Here the epigraph—asserting neurobiology as the unifying human science—is cited not just as a theoretical absurdity, but as symptomatic of the broader confusion within the field. Calling it a “pretty example” is not mere sarcasm, but marks the rhetorical surface behind which something structurally significant is concealed. The “ornament” functions as a screen: it dresses the preface with a veneer of scientific coherence, while covering over the underlying contradiction between the symbolic logic of psychoanalysis and the positivist reductionism of neurobiological discourse. For a Lacanian analyst, this use of ornament recalls the function of the semblant—what stands in place of the real function but conceals it.

“Indeed, it corresponds to a conception of analytic training as that of a self-driving school that, not content with claiming the singular privilege of issuing a driving license, would imagine itself in a position to control automobile construction?”

This ironic analogy points to the institutional overreach of training bodies in psychoanalysis, which not only presume to evaluate who is “qualified” to practice, but also arrogate to themselves the power to shape the very structure of the discourse itself. A driving school does not build cars—it teaches subjects how to handle the machinery of existing systems. Yet the comparison here highlights how some institutes act as if they are themselves the source of the analytic discourse, rather than its inheritors. From a Lacanian perspective, this is a confusion of the master signifier (S1) with the subject’s position in the discourse of the analyst. Training is supposed to support the subject’s entry into the analytic position—not determine or construct the object a around which the drive circulates. Institutional closure becomes a form of foreclosure, repressing the lack that constitutes the very foundation of the field.

“This comparison is worth what it’s worth, but it is worth at least as much as those in use in our most solemn assemblies, which, having originated in our discourse to the idiots [wordplay on ‘discours aux idiots’, mimicking ‘discours aux auditeurs’], do not even have the flavor of an insider’s joke, yet still seem to derive currency from their character of pompous inanity.”

The wordplay on “discours aux idiots” underscores the structural nature of the problem. The critique here is not simply aimed at banal metaphors, but at the reduction of analytic discourse to pedagogical cliché, where the mode of address becomes hollowed out. “Pompous inanity” refers to signifiers divorced from their structuring function—floating signifiers that signify authority without grounding in the analytic real. In Lacanian terms, the discourse here becomes that of the University—where knowledge is conveyed as if objective, but operates in fact as ideology. The idiotic addressee is constructed precisely through this empty repetition, where discourse no longer calls the subject into division but situates them as passive recipients of doctrine.

“It starts with the well-known comparison of the candidate who is prematurely drawn into practice with a surgeon who would operate without asepsis, and goes on to the one that urges us to weep over those unfortunate students whom the conflict of their teachers tears apart like children in the divorce of their parents.”

These comparisons reveal how institutional speech masks its desire to control and infantilize. The surgical metaphor frames the psychoanalyst as a technician whose failure lies in procedural deficiency, thereby medicalizing psychoanalytic training and importing criteria foreign to its field. The divorce metaphor, meanwhile, reframes institutional conflicts as personal dramas, displacing structural analysis with sentimental identification. For a Lacanian analyst, both metaphors serve to evacuate the function of the symbolic: the analyst’s act is not a clean incision into the real but a traversal of the fantasy, and the conflict among teachers is not an Oedipal drama but a sign of the inconsistency of the symbolic order. These clichés veil the real question: how does the subject come to assume the position of the analyst?

“No doubt this latter one seems to us to be inspired by the respect owed to those who have indeed undergone what we shall call, moderating our thoughts, a pressure to learn that has severely tested them, but one might also wonder, hearing the tremolo in the mouths of the teachers, whether the limits of childishness have not without warning been pushed back to the point of silliness.”

There is an acknowledgement here of the intense subjective investment required of students—this “pressure to learn” is not trivial. Yet what is at issue is how this pressure is mirrored and misrecognized in the institutional discourse of the supposed adults. The “tremolo” in the teachers’ voices ironizes the scene: they project pathos onto the students, while themselves falling into a performative regression, confusing empathy with sentimental identification. For Lacanian analysis, this moment exposes the reversal between the imaginary and the symbolic: the teachers are caught in the fantasy of being good parents, thus occluding the structural dimension of the analytic experience. The infantilization of both sides erodes the ethical position of the analyst and reduces the analytic formation to a narcissistic theater.

“The truths these clichés conceal nonetheless deserve to be subjected to more serious examination.”

Even as these metaphors are ridiculed, they are not dismissed. They are seen as formations of the unconscious—signifying chains that, while ideologically loaded, point to unresolved contradictions and repressed knowledge. The “truths” they conceal are not to be found at the level of the cliché itself, but in what it displaces: the real difficulties of analytic formation, the anxiety of the analyst’s position, the impasses of institutional transmission. For the Lacanian analyst, this is a call not for empirical critique, but for structural interpretation: to decipher what the clichés signal as symptoms of a deeper disjunction between psychoanalysis as a discourse and its institutional setting.

“As a method of truth and of demystification of subjective disguises, would psychoanalysis be showing excessive ambition in applying its principles to its own community: that is, to the conception psychoanalysts have of their role with patients, their place in the society of minds, their relationships with their peers, and their teaching mission?”

This rhetorical question stages a critical inversion: psychoanalysis, which scrutinizes the subject’s illusions and defense mechanisms, must also turn its gaze upon itself. The notion that it might be “excessive ambition” to do so ironically highlights how rarely this reflexivity is enacted. To question how analysts conceive of their own roles, status, and institutional authority is to ask whether the analytic community has exempted itself from the very procedures it demands of its patients. For the Lacanian analyst, this reflexive application is not only legitimate but necessary: the analyst’s desire must be interrogated, including the desire at work in the teaching and institutionalization of psychoanalysis. The question reveals a resistance to analysis within the analytic field itself—where the master signifiers that organize identity, hierarchy, and legitimacy often escape the dialectic of the unconscious.

“Perhaps to reopen a few windows to the clear daylight of Freud’s thought, this presentation may relieve for some the anxiety engendered by a symbolic action when it gets lost in its own opacity.”

This sentence contrasts the clarity of Freud’s foundational articulations with the current opacity of symbolic actions within the field—decisions, positions, conflicts that have become obscure or overdetermined. The “symbolic action” that becomes opaque refers to the institutional gestures whose meaning has been clouded by repetition, bureaucracy, or disavowed desire. The “clear daylight” is not a return to simplicity but a return to the structuring clarity Freud brought in articulating the unconscious as a function of the signifier. Anxiety arises when symbolic coordinates fail—when speech no longer links action to a consistent framework. The presentation aims to lift some of that weight by reconnecting discourse to its structuring principles.

“Be that as it may, in evoking the circumstances of this discourse, we are not thinking of excusing its too evident shortcomings by the haste it received from them, since it is from this same haste that it takes both its meaning and its form.”

Rather than apologizing for its defects, the discourse claims them as structurally determined. The “haste” is not incidental; it produces both the urgency and the articulation of the discourse itself. This haste is not opposed to thought but is its condition. In Lacanian logic, the temporal dimension of urgency—particularly in the form of logical time—can precipitate insight and articulation. The reference to shortcomings becomes an acknowledgment that psychoanalytic discourse is always situated, marked by contingency, and that its efficacy does not lie in systematic completeness but in the moment of enunciation.

“Indeed, we have demonstrated, in a sophism exemplary of intersubjective time¹, the function of haste in the logical precipitation in which truth finds its unsurpassable condition.”

This alludes directly to Lacan’s earlier work on logical time—notably the “sophism of the three prisoners”—in which truth emerges not as a product of linear deduction, but of a precipitate decision situated in a field of intersubjectivity. The “function of haste” is not irrationality, but the necessary moment where the subject assumes a position within a symbolic structure. In psychoanalysis, truth is never fully given; it arises from speech acts that intervene at decisive moments. “Logical precipitation” means that the subject moves not when they know the truth, but when they decide within the structure of not-knowing. For the Lacanian, this is fundamental: the act is what retroactively constitutes truth.

“Nothing is created that does not appear in urgency, nothing in urgency that does not give rise to its own transcendence in speech.”

This reinforces the dialectic between urgency and speech: creation—here, symbolic creation—requires an irruption, an event that exceeds deliberation. Yet urgency is not pure affect; it must pass into speech to constitute subjectivity. In Lacanian terms, urgency corresponds to the real—a disruption that calls for symbolization—and “transcendence in speech” is the process through which the subject situates themselves in the symbolic order. Thus, the real is only bearable insofar as it is inscribed through speech. This is also a meta-commentary on the writing and delivery of this very discourse: it is not a detached theoretical construct but a performative response to a historical and institutional moment.

“But neither is there anything that does not become contingent there when the moment comes for man to identify in a single reason both the position he chooses and the disorder he denounces, in order to understand their coherence in reality and to anticipate, by his certainty, the action that weighs them against each other.”

This complex sentence describes the decisive moment in which the subject must assume a position within the very disorder they critique. It evokes a structure of retroactive intelligibility: only through identifying one’s place in the symbolic field—one’s reasons, choices, denunciations—can one create coherence between the subjective and the structural. This is the act par excellence: not the denunciation of disorder from an external position, but a gesture that links one’s own position to the symbolic inconsistency and gives it meaning. “Certainty,” here, is not empirical but existential: it is the certainty of the subject who acts, and whose act brings into being the structure retroactively. The subject assumes responsibility by situating themselves in relation to the real and reconfiguring the field of meaning through the act.

INTRODUCTION

A structural pivot occurs here: the transition from the framing preface—marked by institutional positioning and urgency—to the space of formal elaboration. The title “INTRODUCTION” is not simply procedural; it signifies an entry into the symbolic articulation of the concepts to follow. It places what preceded in a framing function akin to a dream’s manifest content giving way to its latent logic. For the Lacanian reader, this indicates a shift from the imaginary and institutional symptomatology to the field of theoretical construction.

“We shall determine this while we are still in the aphelion of our subject, for when we reach the perihelion, the heat will be enough to make us forget it. (Lichtenberg)”

The Lichtenberg quote articulates a temporal structure of knowledge in orbit: the aphelion, the furthest point from the sun (source of light, of clarity), allows reflective distance. Once the subject reaches perihelion—the point of closest proximity—the intensity will risk erasing reflection. This image perfectly matches the logic of the barred subject: distance allows symbolic structuration, while proximity threatens engulfment by jouissance. For the Lacanian, this warning situates the analytic discourse: to speak is to orbit around a truth that cannot be fully touched without loss. The perihelion of experience (the real) cannot be endured without the symbolic mediation offered at the aphelion (discourse).

“‘Flesh composed of suns. How can such be?’ exclaim the simple ones.” (R. Browning, Parleying with certain people)

This epigraph from Browning functions as an allegory for the subject as a body invaded by the symbolic. “Flesh composed of suns” suggests a substance formed of burning, luminous matter—the impossible real of the speaking body, the parlêtre. The “simple ones” protest, unable to reconcile this paradox, but psychoanalysis precisely sustains this paradox: the body is marked by jouissance, by signifiers that burn into flesh. The line echoes the bewilderment that greets analytic thought when it asserts that subjectivity is not natural, but structured by a language that both forms and wounds. For a Lacanian analyst, this quotation sets the tone for what is to follow: a discourse that will insist on the paradoxical, non-intuitive truths that structure the subject from within language.

“Such is the dread that seizes man upon discovering the figure of his power that he turns away from it in the very action that is his own when this action lays it bare.”

This statement identifies a structural dynamic of the subject in relation to truth and agency. The “figure of his power” refers to the subject’s encounter with their own act—specifically, the act that exposes their implication in the symbolic order. Yet rather than assuming this power, the subject retreats, seized by “dread.” This dread is not affective fear in a psychological sense but rather the anxiety of the real—the destabilization that occurs when the subject glimpses the lack in the Other and the void structuring their own position. In Lacanian terms, this is the moment when the subject is confronted with their act as acte manqué, where desire and agency emerge only through division. The turning away signals the refusal to subjectivize this division—choosing misrecognition over the traumatic encounter with the real of one’s speech.

“Such is the case with psychoanalysis.”

The sentence retroactively applies the structure just described to the field of psychoanalysis itself. The community of analysts behaves like the subject it purports to treat—retreating from its own act. This reflexive symmetry underlines a key Lacanian principle: that the discourse of the analyst is subject to the same unconscious dynamics it explores. The field thus does not stand outside what it analyzes but is inscribed within it. When psychoanalysis resists interrogating its own founding gesture—Freud’s discovery—it repeats the very repression it seeks to undo in the analysand.

“Freud’s discovery—Promethean—was such an action; his work attests to it; but it is no less present in each experience humbly conducted by one of the workers trained in his school.”

Freud’s act is compared to Prometheus: a theft of divine fire, a transgression that opens a new space of knowledge but also entails punishment. This mythological analogy captures the structure of the analytic act—it is not just an epistemological event but a rupture in the symbolic that produces new forms of truth at the price of disquiet. The “humbly conducted” experiences of subsequent analysts repeat this Promethean gesture in miniature; every analytic session, every interpretation, when done in fidelity to the Freudian orientation, participates in this unveiling of power and its disavowal. In Lacanian terms, this is the function of the analyst’s act: not mastery, but sustaining the gap where truth emerges.

“One can trace, year by year, this aversion of interest concerning the functions of speech and the field of language.”

The turning away from Freud’s act becomes visible over time as a shift in theoretical and clinical focus—from speech and language (the symbolic) to more imaginary or object-oriented frameworks. The progressive “aversion” is not simply a historical trend but a structural movement: away from the subject of the unconscious toward the ego, away from speech as constitutive toward behavior, adaptation, or emotion. This shift marks a repression of what Lacan considers fundamental—the symbolic structuring of the subject through language. The erosion of interest in language signals the retreat from the Freudian act and the desire to tame the real through more manageable conceptual frameworks.

“It motivates the ‘changes in aim and technique’ that are acknowledged within the movement and whose relation to the waning of therapeutic effectiveness remains ambiguous.”

The official justification for these shifts—labeled “changes in aim and technique”—presents itself as evolution or progress, but the deeper logic suggests a displacement. These changes are symptomatic, not neutral modifications. The “waning of therapeutic effectiveness,” far from being a technical issue, reflects a deeper malaise: the abandonment of the symbolic dimension, which undermines the efficacy of the analytic process. From a Lacanian standpoint, technique cannot be divorced from the structure of the unconscious. When language is reduced to communication rather than constitutive function, analysis ceases to produce subjective transformation and instead becomes suggestion, adaptation, or management.

“The promotion, indeed, of the resistance of the object in theory and technique must itself be submitted to the dialectic of analysis, which can only recognize in it an alibi of the subject.”

Here the focus shifts to a critical theoretical development: the elevation of the object (whether as part-object, developmental stage, or therapeutic goal) as an obstacle to cure. This “resistance of the object” becomes a convenient explanatory tool—but from a Lacanian point of view, it functions as an alibi. Rather than confronting the subject’s division and their responsibility within the analytic process, the object (whether the patient’s pathology, developmental fixations, or even institutional difficulties) is blamed. This is a defense against the recognition that the obstacle is not external but internal to the subject’s desire. The analyst’s task is to restore the dialectic—not treat resistance as real, but as a signifier in need of interpretation, a locus where the subject’s relation to the Other is structured.

“Let us try to outline the topography of this movement.”

The shift is toward mapping—not to describe superficial trends, but to produce a structural reading of the field’s transformations. In Lacanian terms, “topography” refers not to spatial metaphor but to the structuring of the field of positions. This sentence announces an effort to chart the discursive shifts in psychoanalysis, to locate how and where the Freudian orientation has been displaced. It is not an empirical description but a structural analysis of positions, functions, and substitutions.

“Considering the literature we call our scientific activity, the current problems of psychoanalysis stand out clearly under three headings:”

The discourse names its object: the body of analytic writing—what is canonized as “scientific”—will be the terrain of investigation. This literature, though claiming to be faithful to Freud’s legacy, shows internal contradictions and symptomatic displacements. The claim that the field’s “current problems” fall under three headings signals a triadic structure: a common Lacanian logic, where the real, symbolic, and imaginary often organize analysis. What follows is not a neutral classification, but a strategic structuring of the impasses that dominate contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.

“A) Function of the imaginary, we shall say, or more directly of fantasies in the technique of the experience and in the constitution of the object at different stages of psychic development.”

This first domain is anchored in the imaginary register—especially in how fantasy shapes clinical technique and the constitution of the object. Fantasy is not mere daydream but a fundamental structure that mediates the subject’s relation to the Other and organizes jouissance. Its emergence in technique—particularly through child analysis and developmental models—has emphasized the formative role of pre-verbal, image-bound structures. Yet in the Lacanian framework, fantasy is always inscribed in language, and its interpretation requires symbolic sanction, not merely developmental decoding. The “constitution of the object” here also risks being misread as an ontological account when it should be understood structurally: the object a is not a thing but a function produced in the subject’s division.

“The impulse here came from child psychoanalysis and from the favorable ground offered to both attempts and temptations of researchers by the approach to preverbal structurations.”

Child psychoanalysis has served as a fertile site for this turn toward the imaginary, in part because it naturally foregrounds preverbal phenomena. These become “tempting” because they allow clinicians to bypass the complex mediations of language and symbolization. But for Lacan, this emphasis on the preverbal often conceals a fantasy of immediacy—of gaining direct access to the real of the child’s psyche. The problem is not the study of preverbal structuration per se, but the risk of collapsing it into a biologistic or imagistic mode that bypasses the function of the signifier. The “temptation” is to reduce the subject to developmental stages rather than inscribe them in the symbolic order.

“It is also here that its culmination now provokes a return by raising the problem of the symbolic sanction to be given to fantasies in their interpretation.”

The very excess of this imaginary emphasis eventually generates a reversal—a return to the symbolic. The problem reasserts itself: fantasy must be interpreted, and interpretation requires symbolic mediation. The “symbolic sanction” is what gives interpretive legitimacy—what links fantasy to the chain of signifiers in the subject’s discourse. This return marks the limit of an approach focused exclusively on the image or affect: it cannot account for the structural effects of the unconscious. The analyst cannot interpret fantasy based on content alone, but must locate its place in the subject’s symbolic articulation. In Lacanian terms, this is the difference between deciphering and decoding—between psychoanalysis and suggestion.

“B) The notion of libidinal object relations which, by renewing the idea of the progress of the cure, silently modifies its conduct.”

This sentence marks the second problematic axis in psychoanalytic theory and practice: the insertion of “libidinal object relations” into the structure of treatment. The concept of object relations reconfigures the analytic process by recasting the cure as a developmental progression of interpersonal bonds rather than as a symbolic traversal. This shift appears subtle—“silently modifies”—but structurally it undermines the Freudian frame. The cure is no longer driven by the subject’s relation to the signifier, but by the movement through stages of affective dependency, empathy, and recognition. From a Lacanian standpoint, this displaces the axis of transference from the symbolic to the imaginary, thereby introducing suggestion and adaptation in place of interpretation and desire.

“The new perspective took its departure here from the extension of the method to psychoses and from the temporary opening of the technique to principles of a different order.”

The expansion of psychoanalytic method to psychoses necessitated technical adaptation, but this “opening” introduced conceptual slippage. What began as pragmatic flexibility—required in the treatment of subjects outside the neurotic structure—becomes the infiltration of principles alien to the analytic discourse. “Different order” here designates a shift from the symbolic structure of speech to the phenomenological and affective immediacy of lived experience. For the Lacanian, treating psychosis cannot mean abandoning the primacy of the signifier; rather, it requires a more radical rigor in preserving the structural place of the Other, even when it is foreclosed.

“Psychoanalysis there leads to an existential phenomenology, even to an activism animated by charity.”

This drift moves psychoanalysis into the domain of existential care and ethical immediacy, aligning it with movements such as humanistic therapy or even pastoral interventions. “Existential phenomenology” displaces the symbolic unconscious in favor of lived consciousness and intentionality. “Charity” further indicates a moralization of the analytic act: the analyst becomes caregiver or savior, motivated by empathy rather than by structural interpretation. In Lacanian terms, this is the loss of the analytic position—replaced by the discourse of the master or the hysteric. The subject’s division is covered over by an imaginary reconciliation.

“Here again a clear reaction is taking place in favor of a return to the technical pivot of symbolization.”

Despite this drift, there is a countercurrent—a push to reassert symbolization as the organizing principle of analytic technique. This “pivot” marks the necessity of returning to the function of the signifier, particularly in cases where language seems least accessible (as with psychosis). Symbolization is not one technique among others; it is the fundamental mode through which the unconscious is structured and accessed. The analytic act, even when minimal, must work through this axis if it is to remain psychoanalytic in orientation.

“C) The importance of countertransference and, correlatively, of the training of the psychoanalyst.”

The third axis concerns countertransference and its entanglement with analytic formation. Countertransference, once considered an obstacle or noise, is now recognized as a structural effect—but its interpretation risks confusion between the analyst’s desire and their ego. The renewed focus on the analyst’s subjectivity has brought attention to training as a crucial domain, where the analyst’s position must be formed in relation to both knowledge and lack. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, countertransference must be distinguished from empathy or identification; it is not about emotional reaction, but about the unconscious structuring of the analyst’s position in the transference.

“Here the emphasis has come from the difficulties surrounding the termination of the cure, which coincide with those of the moment when didactic psychoanalysis concludes in the candidate’s introduction to practice.”

Termination is a privileged moment where the structure of the cure becomes visible. The analyst’s conduct at this point reveals not only their ethics but also the symbolic consistency of the treatment. The overlap between the end of the patient’s analysis and the analyst-in-training’s readiness to practice is structurally rich—it is a passage, a subjective assumption of the analytic position. This moment often exposes the ambiguity of whether the training has actually produced the analyst as subject or simply conferred symbolic authority without the traversal of the fantasy. From a Lacanian view, the passe is precisely designed to confront this moment.

“And the same oscillation is noticeable here: on the one hand, and not without courage, the being of the analyst is indicated as a non-negligible element in the effects of the analysis and even to be exposed in his conduct at the end of the game;”

There is recognition that the analyst’s subjectivity—their desire, their position in the field—matters. To “expose” this in conduct is to acknowledge that the analyst is not a neutral technician but a subject occupying a structural place. This acknowledgment is indeed courageous, as it risks destabilizing the fantasy of analytic neutrality. For Lacan, the analyst is not a person but a function—yet the person must assume the function through a dialectical movement. This means that at the end of an analysis, the analyst’s desire must be clarified and sustained as cause, not content.

“on the other hand, it is no less forcefully proclaimed that no solution can come but from an ever deeper exploration of the unconscious spring.”

There remains a counterclaim that the unconscious remains the sole source of resolution. This reinforces the principle that the analyst’s being—however significant—must itself be interpreted and structured through the unconscious, not simply assumed as presence. The “unconscious spring” is not an affective core but a network of signifiers. Thus, the call for depth is not toward more sincerity or empathy, but toward a more radical listening to what structures the subject’s position in discourse. The analyst’s own analysis must be ceaseless in this regard.

“These three problems share a common feature beyond the pioneering activity they manifest on three different frontiers, along with the vitality of the experience that supports them.”

Despite their diversity, these movements (focus on fantasy, object-relational drift, countertransference and training) all arise from a desire to reinvigorate psychoanalysis at its limits—each confronts a real problem at a frontier where the symbolic seems threatened or insufficient. They display the “vitality” of the field, its capacity for self-revision, yet their danger lies precisely in the imaginary compensations they often entail.

“It is the temptation confronting the analyst to abandon the foundation of speech, and this precisely in domains where its use, bordering on the ineffable, would more than ever require examination: namely, maternal pedagogy, Samaritan aid, and dialectical mastery.”

The unifying temptation across these domains is the abandonment of speech—not as mere talking, but as the field of the signifier, the locus of the unconscious. The reference to “maternal pedagogy” suggests the risk of regression to nurturing functions; “Samaritan aid” points to the seductive pull of moral or charitable intervention; and “dialectical mastery” evokes the slide toward rhetorical domination or intellectual control. All three operate outside the logic of desire structured by speech. The ineffable—what escapes symbolization—demands the greatest rigor in its approach, not its bypass. To leave speech behind is to leave analysis behind.

“The danger becomes great if, in addition, he abandons his language to the benefit of already-instituted languages whose compensations for ignorance he poorly understands.”

The final warning targets the analyst’s drift into discourses external to psychoanalysis—psychology, pedagogy, ethics, phenomenology—that offer ready-made languages. These “already-instituted” discourses compensate for gaps in understanding with pre-given categories, thereby masking ignorance rather than working through it. When analysts adopt these without grasping their structural implications, they surrender their position in the analytic discourse. For the Lacanian, this is a betrayal of the function of speech: instead of engaging with the unconscious, the analyst speaks in the voice of the Other as master, evacuating the very subject psychoanalysis was meant to hear.

“In truth, one would like to know more about the effects of symbolization in the child, and the officiating mothers in psychoanalysis, even those who lend to our highest councils an air of matriarchy, are not immune to this confusion of tongues in which Ferenczi identifies the law of the child–adult relationship².”

The effects of symbolization in the child are situated here as a fundamental concern, precisely because the child’s entry into the symbolic order marks the constitution of the subject. Yet there remains a lack of clarity and rigor in how this process is theorized and addressed in practice, particularly by those—termed “officiating mothers”—who have assumed positions of authority within psychoanalytic institutions. The term “matriarchy” evokes a symbolic inversion: what ought to be a place of symbolic transmission is instead infused with an imaginary maternal function, one based not on speech but on care, presence, or emotional attunement. This is structurally linked to Ferenczi’s “confusion of tongues,” which describes the collapse of symbolic differentiation between adult and child, where the adult imposes affective meaning on the child without recognizing the asymmetry of positions. For a Lacanian analyst, this confusion is precisely what psychoanalysis must work through—not replicate. When the function of the analyst becomes maternalized or softened into empathy, it risks enacting the very trauma it seeks to analyze, silencing the child’s relation to the signifier in favor of a falsely harmonious imaginary bond.

“The ideas that our elders form of the completed object relation are of rather uncertain conception and, when exposed, reveal a mediocrity that does no honor to the profession.”

The concept of a “completed object relation” presumes a kind of developmental closure—a fantasy of full integration between subject and object. This notion, which has been central to ego psychology and object relations theory, is problematized here as conceptually vague and ethically problematic. It suggests a misunderstanding of the object—not as objet a, a cause of desire situated in lack, but as something to be achieved or possessed. This misrecognition reflects a regression to imaginary fullness, eliminating the function of lack that structures the subject. For Lacanian thought, the object can never be “completed”; it is constitutively lost. Therefore, any theory that elevates a completed relation as the goal of treatment obscures the analytic task and falls into mediocrity—because it abandons the dialectic of desire and installs an idealized endpoint where there should be structural incompletion.

“There is no doubt that these effects—in which the psychoanalyst joins the type of the modern hero illustrated by derisory exploits in a state of bewilderment—could be corrected by a proper return to the study in which the psychoanalyst should have become a master, of the functions of speech.”

The psychoanalyst, reduced to a “modern hero” engaged in “derisory exploits,” reflects the disorientation that results when symbolic coordinates are abandoned. This “bewilderment” is not just confusion but structural displacement: the analyst is no longer operating within the logic of speech and transference but instead navigating an incoherent field dominated by affect, empathy, and developmental scripts. The proposed correction is a return to speech—not to communication in a banal sense, but to the study of how speech functions as a structure that shapes the subject and mediates the unconscious. The psychoanalyst should be “a master” not in the sense of domination, but in the sense of occupying the place from which speech is taken seriously as the field in which the subject is constituted and analysis operates. Without this, the analyst becomes a figure of impotence masked by performance.

“But it seems that, since Freud, this central field of our domain has fallen into neglect.”

Despite Freud’s foundational emphasis on language—slips, dreams, jokes, symptoms as signifiers—the field of speech has been progressively ignored or marginalized in analytic theory and practice. This neglect marks a deviation from psychoanalysis as a science of the speaking being (parlêtre), and a turn instead toward egoic adaptation, relational schemas, or neurobiological correlates. For a Lacanian analyst, this shift is not accidental; it reveals a collective resistance to the real of speech, which threatens mastery, clarity, and clinical control. To neglect speech is to abandon the unconscious itself, reducing analysis to behavioral correction or supportive guidance.

“Let us observe how he himself refrained from overly great excursions into its periphery: having discovered the libidinal stages of the child through the analysis of adults and intervening in the case of little Hans only through his parents, decoding an entire section of the language of the unconscious in paranoiac delirium but doing so only with the key text left by Schreber in the lava of his spiritual catastrophe.”

Freud’s practice is invoked as a model of structural precision: he never claimed direct access to the child’s speech or psychotic experience but interpreted these phenomena through the mediated structure of language. In Little Hans, Freud respected the symbolic distance, working through the child’s father. In Schreber, he analyzed not the man, but his memoir—his written signifiers—demonstrating how the unconscious reveals itself through structured language, not presence. The “lava of his spiritual catastrophe” refers to the crystallized symbolic production of Schreber’s delusion, which offered Freud a key to the workings of the psychotic subject. This fidelity to the symbolic, even in the most challenging cases, marks the analytic act: interpretation does not pierce through speech to find truth behind it—it traverses speech to find the truth within it.

“On the other hand, he fully assumed, for the dialectic of the work and for the tradition of its meaning, and in all its loftiness, the position of mastery.”

Freud occupies the place of the master—not as one who dominates, but as one who assumes responsibility for the transmission of the analytic discourse. This “loftiness” is not an egoic posture, but a structural one: the analyst must occupy the place from which the analytic field is articulated and maintained. The “dialectic of the work” refers to the unfolding of theory and practice in relation to the contradictions they encounter. “Tradition of its meaning” refers to the chain of signifiers through which psychoanalysis is transmitted—not by imitation or repetition, but by maintaining fidelity to its founding act. The master here is the one who speaks from the point where knowledge and lack intersect.

“Does this mean that if the place of the master remains vacant, it is less due to his disappearance than to an increasing obliteration of the meaning of his work?”

The vacant position of the master is not the result of Freud’s death or historical distance, but of the progressive forgetting—or misreading—of what his work structurally inaugurated. The “obliteration” is not the absence of texts, but the loss of symbolic transmission. What is no longer occupied is not Freud’s personal role, but the function of enunciation that sustains psychoanalysis as a discourse rather than an institution or method. This question opens the field for the analyst to ask not who speaks, but from where they speak. Without the symbolic maintenance of Freud’s act, the analytic field is reduced to imitation, nostalgia, or managerial routine.

“Is it not enough to be convinced of this simply by observing what is taking place in that position?”

The appeal is to what is currently occupying the symbolic place Freud once held. Rather than a subject sustaining the analytic discourse, we observe bureaucracies, ideologies, sentimentalities, or empty formalities. The emptiness of the position becomes filled by non-analytic content—ethical posturing, pedagogical clichés, or institutional routines. This is not a neutral process; it is the displacement of the analytic act by the imaginary and the collapse of the transmission of desire. For the Lacanian analyst, the question of who occupies the position of enunciation is crucial, and the observation here is damning: the field risks becoming a hollow shell, animated by the repetition of signifiers whose meaning has been evacuated.

“A technique is transmitted there, in a sullen style, even reluctant in its opacity, and which any critical ventilation seems to unsettle.”

This refers to the way psychoanalytic technique, within certain institutional or didactic contexts, is passed down in a manner that resists interrogation. Its “sullen style” and “opacity” signal that the technique has become more ritual than discourse—protected from critique, resistant to reformulation, and closed to dialogue. The reluctance toward “critical ventilation” implies that any attempt to expose it to the symbolic operations of questioning or clarification threatens to destabilize its function. From a Lacanian perspective, this reflects the collapse of analytic discourse into a defensive structure: technique, which should be the applied articulation of theory in relation to the unconscious, becomes instead a rigid code sustained by imaginary authority rather than symbolic consistency.

“In truth, taking on the character of a formalism pushed to the level of ceremonial, to the point that one might wonder whether it does not fall under the same analogy with obsessive neurosis, through which Freud so convincingly targeted the use, if not the genesis, of religious rites.”

The transmission of technique is no longer symbolic but ritualistic, closer to ceremonial repetition than to structured interpretation. The comparison to obsessive neurosis is critical: Freud’s analysis of religious rituals as symptomatic behaviors—intended to manage anxiety through repetition and symbolic substitution—is now applied to the institution of psychoanalysis itself. The technique becomes an obsessional formation, not because of its precision, but because it becomes a defense against anxiety rather than a tool to confront it. For the Lacanian analyst, this indicates that the analytic community may be unconsciously defending itself against its own founding trauma—Freud’s discovery of the unconscious—by encoding technique as untouchable ritual rather than as an open engagement with the lack structuring the subject.

“The analogy becomes more pronounced when we consider the literature that this activity produces to nourish itself: one often has the impression of a strange closed circuit, where ignorance of the origin of the terms generates the problem of aligning them, and where the effort to resolve this problem only reinforces that ignorance.”

Analytic literature, intended to clarify and transmit knowledge, instead begins to resemble a self-referential loop. The “strange closed circuit” reflects a failure to recognize the historical and structural origins of psychoanalytic concepts. Terms are repeated without understanding, leading to confusion over how they should relate. Yet the more effort is put into reconciling these terms without grounding them in the symbolic field, the more opaque they become. For a Lacanian, this is a classic illustration of misrecognition (méconnaissance)—where the imaginary coherence of the discourse masks the absence of a true structural understanding. The literature functions as an ego defense, producing meaning-effects that ward off the real question: what is the analyst’s position in relation to the unconscious?

“To trace the causes of this deterioration of analytic discourse, it is legitimate to apply the psychoanalytic method to the collective that sustains it.”

This proposes that the analytic community, like the analysand, must be subjected to analysis. Its symptoms—ritualized technique, opaque discourse, institutional defensiveness—require interpretation, not denial. The “collective” becomes the analysand, and the field of psychoanalysis must recognize itself as structured by the same unconscious it seeks to treat. For Lacanian thought, this aligns with the necessity of applying psychoanalysis to its own institutions—particularly at the points where desire, authority, and discourse intersect. The deterioration of discourse is not simply a technical or pedagogical failure, but the return of the repressed: the community resists the truth of its own foundations.

“Indeed, to speak of the loss of the meaning of analytic action is as true and as vain as explaining the symptom by its meaning, as long as that meaning is not recognized.”

This statement introduces a structural paradox: identifying that analytic action has lost its meaning is not enough. Recognition is the condition for transformation. In analysis, a symptom does not dissolve simply because its meaning is spoken; the subject must recognize themselves in the signifier for the effect to take place. Similarly, diagnosing the field’s malaise is insufficient unless the analytic community can assume its place in the structure that produces it. Meaning is not an inert fact—it must be situated in the symbolic network of the subject’s speech. The same logic applies collectively: without subjective assumption, knowledge remains empty.

“But it is known that in the absence of such recognition, the action can only be felt as aggressive at the level where it is situated, and that in the absence of the ‘social resistances’ through which the analytic group found reassurance, the limits of its tolerance for its own activity, now ‘received’ if not accepted, depend solely on the numerical rate by which its presence is measured on the social scale.”

When meaning is not recognized, the analytic act is misperceived as aggression. This is the classic transference response: the subject experiences the interpretation as a threat when they cannot yet integrate its implications. Applied here to the psychoanalytic institution, the lack of symbolic recognition of its own activity produces anxiety, which is displaced as aggression or defended against through external metrics. The analytic group, once secured by “social resistances” (shared marginalization or persecution, perhaps), now measures itself by quantitative social validation—numbers of candidates, institutional recognition, prestige—rather than the qualitative integrity of its discourse. For the Lacanian analyst, this is a shift from desire to demand, from speech to statistics—a foreclosure of the symbolic in favor of the imaginary image of success.

“These principles suffice to distribute the symbolic, imaginary, and real conditions that will determine the defenses— isolation, annulment, disavowal, and generally misrecognition—that we can recognize within the doctrine.”

The structural triad of the symbolic, imaginary, and real provides the coordinates for interpreting the defensive formations now embedded in analytic doctrine. Each defense listed corresponds to a refusal to confront the lack: isolation disconnects speech from structure, annulment erases the subjective impact of knowledge, disavowal acknowledges truth only to deny its implications, and misrecognition sustains a false coherence that occludes the real. These are not incidental mechanisms but structural symptoms of a discourse that has lost its relation to the act. For a Lacanian reader, this diagnosis of the field’s doctrinal impasses is itself an act of re-symbolization: it calls the analytic community back to the place where speech must be reconstituted in the face of its own disavowed truth.

“From this point, if one measures by its mass the importance that the American group holds for the analytic movement, one will appreciate, by their weight, the conditions to be found there.”

This sentence introduces a shift in focus toward the American psychoanalytic field, which, by its demographic and institutional dominance—its “mass”—exerts substantial influence on the global direction of psychoanalysis. But that weight is not neutral; it must be evaluated through the “conditions” it implies. From a Lacanian standpoint, this means assessing how the American context, rather than merely hosting psychoanalysis, structurally reshapes it. The emphasis on “mass” also invokes the imaginary dimension of size and prestige, suggesting that influence in psychoanalysis may function not through symbolic consistency but through quantitative dominance, often masking structural impoverishment.

“In the symbolic order first, one cannot neglect the importance of that factor c which we noted at the 1950 Congress of Psychiatry, as a constant characteristic of a given cultural milieu: a condition here of the ahistoricism in which everyone agrees to recognize the major feature of ‘communication’ in the U.S.A., and which in our view is at the antipodes of the analytic experience.”

The “symbolic order” is the first axis along which the American analytic field is critically assessed. The “factor c,” previously noted at the 1950 Congress, functions here as a cultural constant—a structural element of American discourse. This factor is linked to “ahistoricism,” the erasure of diachrony, the flattening of meaning into synchronic communicability. The privileging of “communication”—as clear, efficient, and functional exchange—is diametrically opposed to the psychoanalytic experience, which is grounded in the opacity, delay, and historicity of the unconscious. For the Lacanian analyst, this divergence is fundamental: where American discourse seeks transparency, psychoanalysis reveals that speech is not self-identical, that it carries unconscious effects, and that history—Nachträglichkeit—is the retroactive logic of meaning.

“Added to this is a very indigenous mental form which, under the name of behaviorism, so dominates the psychological notion in America that it is clear that it has now entirely overshadowed in psychoanalysis the Freudian inspiration.”

Behaviorism is named as a culturally endogenous formation—“indigenous”—which has colonized the psychological landscape in the U.S. to such an extent that even psychoanalysis becomes subordinated to its logic. Behaviorism reduces subjectivity to observable behavior, eliminating the unconscious, desire, and the symbolic. Its predominance means that psychoanalysis in America has not just evolved but undergone a structural displacement. The “Freudian inspiration,” with its emphasis on speech, fantasy, and the drive, has been “overshadowed”—not revised, but eclipsed. For a Lacanian, this signals the substitution of the discourse of the master (behavioral norms, adaptation, functionality) for the discourse of the analyst, which presupposes a divided subject and the primacy of the signifier.

“As for the two other orders, we leave it to those concerned to evaluate what the mechanisms manifested in the life of psychoanalytic societies respectively owe to prestige relations within the group, and to the effects felt from their free enterprise upon the whole of the social body, as well as to the credibility one must give to the notion, highlighted by one of their most lucid representatives, of the convergence exercised between the foreignness of a group dominated by immigrants and the distancing to which it is drawn by the function demanded by the aforementioned cultural conditions.”

Attention shifts to the imaginary and real orders. The imaginary is visible in “prestige relations”—the ego-based hierarchies and social dynamics within analytic institutions. Prestige does not operate through symbolic consistency but through identification, rivalry, and image—an imaginary network that often masks the real of desire and lack. The “real” emerges in the form of “free enterprise,” capitalism’s influence on analytic practice, and the way the social field responds to psychoanalysis as a product or service. There’s also a sociological insight into the specific configuration of American psychoanalysis: largely founded by émigrés, it exists in a space of structural foreignness—alienated from both its European symbolic origin and the cultural matrix of its new environment. This results in a “distancing” effect, which is not only spatial or social but symbolic: the discourse of psychoanalysis becomes detached from both its subject and its audience, caught between cultural assimilation and fidelity to its origin.

“In any case, it appears indisputably that the conception of psychoanalysis there has shifted toward the adaptation of the individual to the social environment, the search for behavioral patterns, and all the objectification implied in the notion of human relations, and it is indeed a position of privileged exclusion from the human object that is indicated in the term, coined locally, of human engineering.”

The sentence articulates a decisive verdict: psychoanalysis in the U.S. has been restructured around a model of normalization and adaptation. Its telos has become the adjustment of the individual to social norms, not the confrontation with desire and the unconscious. The “search for behavioral patterns” substitutes signifying chains with statistical regularities, and the analytic subject is replaced with a predictable object of study. The term “human relations,” drawn from industrial psychology and management theory, illustrates the reduction of intersubjectivity to functional compatibility. The final phrase—“human engineering”—is particularly damning. It names a position not of engagement with the human as split by language, but of exclusion from it, treating the human as a manipulable object, a system to optimize. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, this is the opposite of its ethical position, which sustains the subject as divided, desiring, and irreducible to function. The analyst’s position is not that of the engineer, but of the one who listens to what fails in every system.

“It is therefore to the distance required to sustain such a position that one can attribute the eclipse, in psychoanalysis, of the most vital terms of its experience: the unconscious, sexuality, whose very mention seems soon destined to vanish.”

The “distance” refers to the symbolic and cultural separation that enables the transformation of psychoanalysis into a form aligned with social normalization and behavioral adjustment. This transformation requires a detachment from the core Freudian terms—“the unconscious, sexuality”—which are now increasingly absent or euphemized in dominant clinical and institutional discourse. Their “eclipse” is not accidental; it is the structural result of a shift from desire and repression to adaptation and function. The unconscious, structured like a language, and sexuality, as the axis of division and jouissance, are not just thematics—they are the very coordinates that make psychoanalysis psychoanalytic. From a Lacanian stance, to lose these signifiers is to efface the subject of the unconscious, replacing it with the subject of science or statistics. The vanishing of these terms reflects not evolution, but foreclosure.

“We have no stake in the formalism and shopkeeper’s spirit, which the official documents of the group themselves report in order to denounce them.”

The “formalism” criticized here is a ritualized attachment to technique devoid of conceptual grounding, while the “shopkeeper’s spirit” refers to the commodification of analysis—practice reduced to economic exchange or bureaucratic regulation. Both are acknowledged even in official circles, yet the critique often stops at naming, without structural analysis. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, formalism is not simply excessive rigidity, but a defense against the real of the analytic act; the shopkeeper’s mentality is not just marketization but the reduction of desire to demand. The critique must go beyond denunciation to understand how these symptoms emerge within the very symbolic structure of the analytic community.

“The Pharisee and the shopkeeper interest us only for their shared essence, the source of the difficulties they both have with speech, and especially when it comes to the talking shop, of speaking the trade.”

The figure of the Pharisee—moralist, legalist—and the shopkeeper—calculating, transactional—are both invoked not as moral judgments but as structural figures who fail in relation to speech. Their shared “essence” lies in their misrelation to parole, to the field of spoken language that is constitutive of analytic work. The “talking shop” is a pointed pun: it refers not just to gossip or commerce, but to the analytic field itself—speech as the medium of psychoanalysis. These figures avoid or pervert that speech, either through moral rigidity or economic formalism. The inability to “speak the trade” is thus not technical ignorance but a foreclosure of the symbolic register in which the analytic function operates.

“For the incommunicability of motives, though it may sustain a magisterium, does not go hand in hand with mastery—at least the kind demanded by teaching. This has, moreover, been noticed, since the same causes have the same effects.”

A position of authority based on mystique or obscurity—the “incommunicability of motives”—can produce a semblance of mastery (magisterium), but not the transmission of knowledge. In psychoanalysis, teaching requires symbolic articulation, not opacity. The analyst who cannot or will not explain the concepts behind their technique fails in the ethical task of sustaining the field as discourse. The point is that opacity may confer authority, but not legitimacy. “The same causes have the same effects” gestures toward repetition: wherever speech is denied, wherever the symbolic is evacuated, the same symptoms of defensive rigidity and doctrinal decay will recur. For Lacanian practice, this is a call to maintain the speaking position, not to replace it with institutional aura.

“This is why the steadfast attachment repeatedly reaffirmed by many authors to traditional technique, after assessments of the trials conducted at the frontier zones listed above, does not come without ambiguity; it is reflected in the substitution of the term classical for that of orthodoxy to qualify this technique. One clings to the form, for lack of knowing to which meaning to devote oneself.”

The return to “traditional technique” in response to perceived excesses at the boundaries of analytic practice is noted not as fidelity, but as a defensive fallback. The substitution of “classical” for “orthodox” marks an attempt to soften the rigidity, to give the impression of cultural legitimacy while avoiding the charge of dogmatism. Yet this only masks the deeper issue: the loss of a relation to meaning. Clinging to form—rules, protocols, structures—is a classic defense against the anxiety provoked by the lack of symbolic anchoring. In Lacanian terms, this is the triumph of the imaginary over the symbolic: appearance replaces function, semblance replaces articulation.

“We affirm, for our part, that the technique cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be correctly applied, if the concepts that ground it are misrecognized.”

Technique is not autonomous; it is structurally dependent on the conceptual field that sustains it. To “misrecognize” these concepts is not an intellectual error but a subjective failure: a refusal to situate the analyst’s desire and function within the symbolic. The misrecognition (méconnaissance) at stake here is ideological and structural—it allows technique to appear neutral or self-justifying, when in fact it is always already inscribed within a discourse. From a Lacanian view, any technique that is detached from its conceptual scaffolding becomes either suggestion or ritual. There is no praxis without theory, because technique in psychoanalysis is the application of a logic of speech, not a set of operations.

“Our task will be to demonstrate that these concepts only take on their full meaning by orienting themselves within a field of language, by being ordered to the function of speech.”

Concepts such as transference, resistance, drive, or interpretation are not static definitions but dynamic positions within a linguistic structure. Their full meaning is revealed only when they are situated in relation to the function of parole—speech as the medium through which the unconscious is structured and made legible. The “field of language” is not a metaphor; it is the very ground of psychoanalytic experience. To “order them to the function of speech” is to return to the Freudian insight that the symptom speaks, and that the analyst’s role is to sustain the position from which that speech can be heard. This is the ethical and theoretical orientation that Lacanian psychoanalysis insists upon: technique is subordinate to speech, and the analyst is responsible for remaining within the field of the signifier.

“Point at which we note that, to handle any Freudian concept, reading Freud cannot be considered superfluous, even for those that are homonymous with common notions.”

This statement underscores the crucial distinction between Freud’s theoretical elaborations and the ordinary meanings of the words he employs. Freudian concepts—such as instinct, drive, repression, or transference—often share names with vernacular or scientific terms, but their psychoanalytic function radically displaces their common-sense or empirical usage. To assume that one can grasp these concepts without a direct engagement with Freud’s text is to overlook their structural complexity. For the Lacanian analyst, fidelity to Freud is not doctrinal but structural: the Freudian concept is not a referential term but a signifier embedded in a symbolic network, and only reading Freud can reveal the discursive function it plays.

“As demonstrated by the mishap that the season recalls to our memory—a theory of the instincts, a revisiting of Freud by an author little alert to the part, expressly called mythical by Freud, that it contains.”

A recent theoretical misstep is evoked: a superficial re-reading of Freud’s theory of instincts that fails to recognize Freud’s own indication of its mythical dimension. Freud himself referred to his metapsychological elaborations, particularly around the drives, as “myths”—not in the sense of fiction, but as conceptual constructions intended to articulate unconscious processes that resist direct representation. The critic in question misses this point, treating Freud’s conceptual scaffolding as literal, as though it were a naturalistic psychology. The Lacanian position affirms that psychoanalytic theory cannot be reduced to biologism or natural science; its constructs are models of the real, not empirical observations.

“Clearly, he cannot be so, since he approaches it through a second-hand account, constantly taken as equivalent to the Freudian text and cited without anything to alert the reader, relying—perhaps not without reason—on the reader’s good taste to distinguish it, but thereby proving that nothing justifies this preference except the difference in style by which a work remains or does not remain part of the œuvre.”

The critique intensifies: the author does not engage Freud directly but through secondary interpretations, which are cited as though they were Freud’s own work. This practice not only muddles the theoretical line but relies on the stylistic sensibility of the reader to discern the discrepancy—a move that offloads interpretive labor onto taste rather than structural understanding. The implication is that psychoanalysis cannot be preserved through aesthetic or literary distinction alone; what defines a work as analytic is not its elegance but its position in the chain of signifiers established by Freud’s discourse. To substitute paraphrase for primary text is to sever the transmission of the analytic act.

“Hence, through reductions into deductions, and inductions into hypotheses, the author concludes with the strict tautology of his false premises: namely, that the instincts in question are reducible to the reflex arc.”

The methodological collapse is laid bare: by reducing Freud’s conceptual complexity into the simplified logic of deduction and induction, the theorist arrives at a conclusion that merely repeats his starting assumption—that instincts are fundamentally physiological reflexes. This is not a critique of faulty reasoning but of a structural misunderstanding. The analytic concept of the drive (Trieb) cannot be reduced to the reflex arc without erasing its paradoxical structure: a pressure without object, a satisfaction found in detour, a circuit of jouissance. From a Lacanian standpoint, this misreading forecloses the real of the drive, turning it into a mechanism rather than a site of subjective division.

“Like the stack of plates whose collapse is slowly distilled in the classic performance, leaving only two mismatched shards in the artist’s hands, shattered by the crash, the complex construction that goes from the discovery of libido migrations in erogenous zones to the metapsychological passage from a generalized pleasure principle to the death drive, becomes the binomial of a passive erotic instinct modeled on the activity of lice-pickers, beloved of the poet, and a destructive instinct simply identified with motricity.”

The image of the collapsing stack of plates is theatrical and precise: it stages the gradual disintegration of Freud’s theoretical edifice when mishandled. What once spanned a highly differentiated system—from the libidinal organization of the body to the speculative logic of the death drive—is now flattened into a crude dualism: one instinct of passive pleasure, likened absurdly to grooming (a reference perhaps to Baudelaire’s “Bénédiction”), and another equated with mere movement or aggression. This is a caricature of Freud’s system, not its condensation. For Lacanian theory, such flattening not only destroys the complexity of metapsychology, it obscures the role of language in structuring both pleasure and destructiveness as functions of the symbolic, not biology.

“A result that deserves honorable mention for the art—intentional or not—of rigorously drawing the consequences of a misunderstanding.”

There is a dark irony in acknowledging the consistency of the misreading: the author draws rigorous conclusions, but from false premises. The result is internally coherent but structurally flawed. For the Lacanian analyst, this irony is a key concept: a misunderstanding (méconnaissance) that is consistent can still produce effects—but they are effects of ideology, not truth. The analyst’s task is not to correct the mistake from above, but to interpret the logic that allows such an error to sustain itself as knowledge.

I

EMPTY SPEECH AND FULL SPEECH

IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC REALIZATION OF THE SUBJECT

The title signals a theoretical hinge. “Empty speech” (parole vide) and “full speech” (parole pleine) are not moral evaluations but structural categories. Empty speech refers to speech that reproduces social codes, defends the ego, or masks desire. Full speech is that which engages the subject in their division, in relation to the Other, and thereby produces a shift in subjectivity. The “realization of the subject” does not mean self-expression but the process by which the subject is constituted through speech. For the Lacanian, this distinction is essential: speech is not judged by content but by its structural function—whether it repeats the imaginary or traverses it.

“‘Grant in my mouth true and stable speech and make of me a hidden tongue.’ (The Inner Consolation, Chapter XLV: on how one should not believe everyone and on the easy stumbling of words).”

This citation evokes a paradox: the wish for “true and stable speech” coincides with a desire to be a “hidden tongue.” The analytic subject does not speak from mastery of truth but from division, from the unconscious. The prayer for stability acknowledges the instability of speech, especially where it reveals desire. The “hidden tongue” is the speech of the unconscious—enigmatic, overdetermined, resistant to transparency. For a Lacanian, this line condenses the stakes of analytic speech: to speak truly is not to speak clearly, but to allow the truth to emerge where speech fails to coincide with itself.

“‘Keep on talking.’ (Motto of causalist thinking).”

This second epigraph shifts tone dramatically. “Keep on talking” is the cynical imperative of a discourse that sees speech as noise to be endured while causality—scientific, behaviorist, or diagnostic—is silently pursued. It reflects a non-analytic attitude: one that does not listen to speech as a site of truth but treats it as incidental, mere data to process. This is the motto of those who ignore the subject of the unconscious, waiting for observable patterns instead of intervening in speech. The juxtaposition of the two epigraphs is strategic: the first aligns with the psychoanalytic ethic of speech as revelatory, the second with its repression in the name of objectivity. For Lacanian analysis, it is precisely between these poles—speech as plea and speech as dismissed noise—that the analytic act must locate itself.

“Whether it aims to be a healing process, a formative one, or an exploratory one, psychoanalysis has only one medium: the patient’s speech.”

This sentence reinstates the fundamental axiom of psychoanalysis: regardless of the analyst’s orientation—be it therapeutic, pedagogical, or investigative—psychoanalysis operates through one singular channel: speech. The patient’s speech is not a vehicle for expressing a hidden content already formulated elsewhere; rather, it is the very locus where the subject is constituted. In Lacanian terms, the unconscious is structured like a language, and speech is the medium through which the subject’s desire is articulated, even when veiled or distorted. To treat speech as a medium among others—behavior, affect, cognitive content—is to step outside of the analytic frame.

“The obviousness of the fact does not excuse its neglect.”

That speech is the vehicle of analysis may appear self-evident, yet this very self-evidence facilitates its disavowal. In institutional practice, theoretical discourse, and clinical application, speech is often reduced to content or paraphrased into psychological constructs. For Lacanian analysis, this is a form of repression: the truth of the subject is not “behind” the speech but in it—as a signifying structure. To neglect speech is to retreat from the function of the analyst as one who listens to the unconscious, not to meaning.

“Yet every speech calls for a response.”

This is the structural principle of intersubjectivity. Speech is not an isolated emission; it is constituted as an address. Even a monologue presupposes an interlocutor—real or imagined. In psychoanalysis, the analyst occupies this structural position of the Other: the one to whom speech is addressed, even if not explicitly. The call for a response defines speech as not merely expressive but performative. In Lacanian terms, every énonciation is embedded in a network of response and recognition. To fail to recognize this is to mishear the subject’s speech.

“We will show that there is no speech without a response, even if it encounters only silence, provided there is a listener, and that this is the heart of its function in analysis.”

This elaboration makes clear that response need not be verbal. Even silence, when received by a listening Other, constitutes a response in the symbolic. It is the presence of the Other—the one who listens—that retroactively constitutes the utterance as speech. In the analytic setting, the analyst’s silence is not absence but structure: it marks the analyst’s position in the field of the Other. The function of analysis is grounded in this dynamic—where speech, in addressing the Other, reveals the division of the subject. The truth of speech is not in what is said, but in what the speaking assumes and exposes in its structure of address.

“But if the psychoanalyst ignores that this is how speech functions, he will only feel its call more strongly, and if what is heard at first is emptiness, it is within himself that he will experience it, and beyond speech that he will seek a reality to fill this void.”

When the analyst fails to situate speech within this symbolic logic, he risks falling into an imaginary identification with the speech’s apparent failure. The “emptiness” of the patient’s words—pauses, banalities, repetitions—evokes a corresponding void in the analyst, experienced as frustration, boredom, or anxiety. The temptation is then to compensate for this lack by searching beyond speech—for motives, behaviors, hidden realities. This move is structurally perverse: it evacuates the speech act’s function and installs the analyst as the one who knows, thus disrupting the transference structure. In Lacanian terms, this is a retreat from the position of the subject supposed to know into that of the master or the empirical psychologist.

“Thus he comes to analyze the subject’s behavior in order to find what he does not say. But to elicit the confession, he must speak to him about it. He then rediscovers speech—but made suspect of having responded only to the failure of his silence, in the echo perceived of his own nothingness.”

The analyst, having abandoned speech, turns to behavior as evidence—but to interpret behavior, he must reintroduce speech. However, now this speech is compromised: it is no longer the speech of the listening analyst, but of one who speaks out of the failure to sustain silence, out of anxiety. The analyst’s intervention is thus overdetermined by his own subjective position, not by the structure of the patient’s speech. What appears as clinical interpretation is in fact a defense against the analyst’s confrontation with the void within his own listening. This is a false return to speech, contaminated by the imaginary and by the analyst’s unmetabolized transference.

“But what, then, was this appeal from the subject beyond the void of his speech? A call to truth in its principle, through which the calls of more humble needs will waver.”

The speech of the analysand, even in its apparent emptiness, carries an appeal—a call to truth. This is not a truth of facts or biography, but a truth of the subject, emerging through the cracks and lapses of discourse. The “more humble needs”—requests for reassurance, understanding, or adaptation—are destabilized in the presence of this deeper appeal. The subject’s unconscious desire exceeds what they consciously articulate. For Lacan, the truth is not what the subject knows but what appears when speech falters. The analyst must remain open to this function of speech—not as a vehicle of content, but as the site where the subject divides in their very act of speaking.

“But first and immediately, a proper call of the void, in the ambiguous gaping of a seduction attempted on the other by means in which the subject indulges himself and where he will engage the monument of his narcissism.”

The initial address in speech is often staged through seduction: the subject speaks not to reveal but to capture the Other, to be mirrored, recognized, or desired. This seduction occurs at the level of narcissism—the imaginary relation in which the subject seeks to affirm the ego rather than confront the division. The “monument” of narcissism is built through these speech acts, structured around a void the subject cannot name. This is not deception but structural ambiguity: every speech act is double, addressed both to the Other as truth and to the Other as image. The analyst must hear both layers—the seductive appeal and the call to truth that destabilizes it.

“‘There it is, introspection!’ exclaims the man well aware of its dangers. He is certainly not the last to have tasted its charms before exhausting its profit. Too bad he no longer has time to waste on it. For you would hear beautiful and profound things, if he came to lie on your couch.”

This ironic portrait sketches the subject who disavows analysis while simultaneously enacting its structure. The figure mocks introspection, dismissing it as indulgent or unproductive, yet speaks from within the very logic of speech that analysis explores. His disdain masks fascination, and his dismissal conceals desire. He exemplifies the hysterical structure: a subject who demands knowledge from the Other while denying its effects on himself. The reference to lying on the couch signals the missed encounter with transference—where these “beautiful and profound things” might finally be heard, not as conscious reflections but as formations of the unconscious structured through speech.

“It is strange that an analyst, for whom this character is one of the first encounters of his experience, should still bring up introspection in psychoanalysis.”

The “character” referred to is the one sketched in the previous section—a subject who speaks fluently, narcissistically, seductively, yet resists engaging with the unconscious structure of his discourse. That an analyst would return to the notion of introspection is paradoxical, even contradictory, since one of the earliest insights clinical experience offers is the radical insufficiency of introspection. It belongs to the imaginary register, a reflection of the ego upon itself, which sustains the illusion of mastery and self-transparency. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, introspection belongs not to the analytic field but to the pre-analytic fantasy of a unified subject who knows himself. The unconscious is not accessed by inward gaze but through the detour of speech and the mediation of the Other.

“For if this man holds to his wager, those beautiful things he had in store will vanish, and if he forces himself to retrieve them, they prove rather short, while others appear, unexpected enough to seem like foolishness and to leave him speechless for a good while, like anyone else.”

Once the subject consents to the analytic process—to the wager of speaking without preconception—what he “had in store” vanishes. These prepared discourses, polished and resonant, are revealed to be deflections, egoic defenses. When he tries to recover them, they appear insufficient, “short,” revealing their imaginary status. What then emerges is the unexpected: speech that no longer serves the idealized image of self, but that stumbles, surprises, and exposes. These utterances may seem foolish, even absurd, because they no longer reinforce the coherent ego. This is precisely where analysis begins. In Lacanian terms, the subject finds himself divided, caught between what he meant to say and what is said. The emptiness, the silence, the pause—all index the real that interrupts the symbolic circuit.

“He then grasps the difference between the mirage of monologue, whose accommodating fancies animated his boastfulness, and the forced labor of that discourse with no escape, which the psychologist—not without humor—and the therapist—not without cunning—have adorned with the name ‘free association.'”

This distinction marks a fundamental structural shift. The mirage of monologue refers to speech under the illusion of control, where the subject remains identified with his ego. In this mode, speech flatters, justifies, explains, without engaging the unconscious. In contrast, free association is not freedom in the imaginary sense, but subjection to the chain of signifiers—a discourse with no escape—where the ego cannot master what emerges. The psychologist or therapist may label this “free,” but the irony is sharp: it is a form of forced labor, not because of external coercion, but because the subject is structurally caught in the logic of the signifier. In Lacan’s terms, free association is what puts the subject in relation to his own division. It’s not free expression, but structural exposure.

“For it is indeed a labor, and so much a labor that it has been said it requires an apprenticeship, even to the point of seeing in that apprenticeship the formative value of this work. But taken this way, what would it form other than a skilled worker?”

To treat free association as a skill to be learned—an apprenticeship—misunderstands its analytic function. If this labor were simply a technique, then the analytic process would be reduced to a form of training, producing a subject well-adapted to producing acceptable or therapeutically useful speech. The result would be a skilled worker, someone who performs within the expected norms of speech, but who bypasses the ethical moment of subjective truth. Lacanian analysis insists that what is formed is not a better ego, but a subject who assumes the division structuring him. The “labor” is not productive in a utilitarian sense; it’s a labor of truth, of traversing the fantasy and encountering lack.

“From there, what of this labor? Let us examine its conditions, its fruit, in the hope of better discerning its aim and its benefit.”

This invites a structural inquiry into the nature of analytic speech as labor. What are its conditions—what symbolic arrangement makes it possible? What are its effects, not in terms of adaptation or catharsis, but in terms of subjective transformation? And crucially, what is its aim? For Freud, the goal of analysis was to bring the unconscious into speech; for Lacan, it is not to reconcile the ego with itself but to confront the division that speech both reveals and sustains. The benefit is not comfort but a new relation to truth—subjective destitution, where the subject is no longer the master of their speech, but responsible for what speaks in them.

“One recognizes along the way the relevance of the term durcharbeiten, which the English working through translates, and which has driven our translators to despair, even though they had at their disposal the exercise in exhaustion forever stamped in our language by the blow of a master stylist: ‘A hundred times on the loom, begin again…’—but how does the work progress here?”

Durcharbeiten—translated as “working through”—carries in German the connotation of persistent, difficult engagement, not mechanical repetition but transformative reworking. Its translation has proven problematic because it implies a process both continuous and incomplete, where progress is measured not in achievement but in symbolic movement. The allusion to the line “A hundred times on the loom, begin again…” (from Boileau) evokes the experience of repetition with difference—the analytic revisiting of signifiers, dreams, speech acts, each time under new light, under the transference, under interpretation. The question “how does the work progress here?” is not rhetorical. It invites a rethinking of analytic time—not chronological, but logical, subjective time, where the “work” is not toward synthesis but toward traversing the coordinates of desire. The analyst does not guide progress; they sustain the frame where this endless weaving can take place.

“Theory reminds us of the triad: frustration, aggressiveness, regression.”

This reference is to a well-established causal model in post-Freudian theory, particularly in ego psychology, where the triad of frustration → aggressiveness → regression serves as a common interpretive framework. It offers an intuitive sequence: when the subject is denied satisfaction (frustration), it leads to hostility (aggressiveness), which in turn causes a retreat to earlier psychic positions (regression). But from a Lacanian point of view, this chain is overly linear, psychologically naïve, and based on a mistaken assumption that affect and behavior are the primary indicators of psychic causality. It bypasses the primacy of the signifier and the structural logic of the unconscious, replacing it with a mechanistic or adaptive schema. What appears as theoretical clarity is often a mask for theoretical flattening.

“It is an explanation with such an understandable appearance that it might well exempt us from understanding.”

The seductive simplicity of this triadic model functions ideologically. Precisely because it appears “understandable,” it discourages further interrogation. It seems to explain everything, and thus explains nothing. From a Lacanian lens, this is the problem of received ideas: their intuitive graspability conceals their role as master signifiers—signifiers without dialectical movement, which block the chain of signification rather than open it. True understanding in analysis arises not from self-evidence but from surprise, contradiction, and structural displacement.

“Intuition is quick, but a self-evident truth should be all the more suspect to us as it becomes a received idea.”

Intuition bypasses the symbolic. It is immediate, unmediated, and thus imaginary. When an idea becomes so commonly accepted that it feels natural—when it becomes a received idea—it often functions to foreclose the unconscious. Psychoanalysis must distrust the obvious. Lacanian theory insists that truth is not revealed in immediacy but in the gaps, slips, and ruptures in discourse. The more an explanation seems “self-evident,” the more rigorously it must be interrogated as a possible symptom of disavowal or of resistance to confronting the real.

“Should analysis happen to reveal its weakness, one ought not to make do with a recourse to affectivity.”

When the explanatory triad fails, the fallback position is often affectivity—the presumption that emotion itself can serve as an explanatory principle. But this recourse is a screen, not an interpretation. It substitutes feelings for structure and reduces the subject to reactions. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, affects are not primary but effects of discourse, and thus must be interpreted, not used to close down meaning. To invoke affect as the ultimate ground of experience is to short-circuit the symbolic analysis of desire, fantasy, and the Other.

“A taboo word signaling dialectical incapacity, which, along with the verb ‘to intellectualize,’ whose pejorative sense turns that incapacity into merit, will remain in the history of language as the stigmas of our obtuseness regarding psychology…”

The word “affectivity” functions here as a taboo, marking the point where discourse gives up on structural explanation and collapses into vagueness. Similarly, the term “intellectualize” is often used pejoratively in clinical settings to dismiss speech that resists emotional engagement—as though thought were opposed to truth. But for Lacan, this reflects a profound misrecognition: the unconscious is not affective in itself, but structured by signifiers. The dismissal of thinking as “intellectualization” is a refusal of the symbolic, and this refusal itself must be interpreted as a defense. Language itself records this refusal in the way certain words come to signal impasses in our grasp of subjectivity.

“Let us ask instead: where does this frustration come from?”

This question redirects us toward structural inquiry. Rather than accepting frustration as a given or a reaction to an external cause, it asks for its origin within the subject’s own discourse. For Lacanian analysis, frustration is not caused by silence or withholding per se, but is located in the relation of the subject to the signifier, to the Other, and to lack. This shift reframes frustration not as an emotional state but as an effect of symbolic alienation.

“Is it from the silence of the analyst?”

This rhetorical hypothesis reflects a common belief: that the analyst’s silence is the cause of patient frustration. But this formulation misses the point. The silence of the analyst is not neutral; it functions within a symbolic frame and often returns to the analysand as a mirror of their own lack. It is not the silence that frustrates but the meaning attributed to it by the subject—structured by fantasy and transference. The analytic silence reveals the subject’s dependency on the Other’s supposed knowledge, their expectation that the analyst will fill the void.

“A response, even and especially an approving one, to empty speech often proves by its effects to be far more frustrating than silence.”

This inversion is crucial: when the analyst responds affirmatively to empty speech—speech that sustains the ego, avoids the unconscious, and reaffirms the subject’s imaginary identity—it intensifies frustration. Why? Because such a response reifies the subject’s misrecognition. Approval of empty speech mimics understanding while evacuating interpretation. It validates the ego, not the divided subject. Silence, by contrast, can maintain the tension of desire, can leave space for the subject’s division to emerge. Thus, what frustrates is not the absence of response but the affirmation of illusion.

“Is it not rather a frustration inherent to the subject’s very discourse?”

This reframes frustration as structural, not reactive. The subject’s speech, when truly engaged with the analytic process, exposes the failure of representation—the fact that no signifier can say the whole truth of the subject. This is the structural lack at the heart of speech. The subject’s own words undo the fantasy of coherence. For Lacan, the subject is barred, and it is through speech that this barring becomes legible. The frustration is not added to discourse from outside—it emerges within discourse itself as a confrontation with its limits.

“Does this discourse not engage him in a dispossession ever greater of that being of himself, which, through sincere portrayals that let his image fade, through denials that fail to extract its essence, through crutches and defenses that do not prevent his statue from wavering, through narcissistic embraces exhausted in animating it with his breath, he ends up recognizing has never been anything but an imaginary work—and that this work disappoints in him all certainty?”

This long sentence traces the arc of subjective destitution. The analysand, through speech, gradually loses the consistency of the ego image he once believed in. Sincere portrayals, denials, defenses, narcissistic self-construction—all fail to sustain the unity of the ego under analytic scrutiny. What is revealed is that this “being” the subject sought to articulate has always been imaginary: a construction in the mirror, a fiction sustained by the fantasy of wholeness. The disappointment is not emotional but ontological: what is lost is the illusion of certainty, of being whole, of being able to say “I am” without division.

“For in this labor to reconstruct it for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that had led him to construct it as another, and which always destined it to be stolen from him by another.”

In trying to recount his being to the analyst—his Other—the subject unwittingly replays the fundamental alienation of subjectivity itself: that the self is always constructed for another, in the field of the Other’s gaze, through the Other’s language. This alienation means the subject is never self-possessed; his identity is always mediated by the signifier, and thus by the Other. What was “his” was never his to begin with—it was borrowed, imposed, echoed. The subject realizes that his image of self has always belonged to the Other, and that it was destined to be stolen, not by betrayal, but by the very structure of language. This is the Lacanian real: the subject’s essential loss, revealed not through trauma but through the unfolding of speech.

“This ego, whose strength our theorists now define by the capacity to withstand frustration, is frustration in its essence³.”

The theoretical framing of the ego as resilient—capable of enduring frustration—is inverted here. Rather than being a stable container of affect, the ego is itself founded in frustration. This is not a moral judgment but a structural insight: in Lacanian theory, the ego is an imaginary construct, a product of misrecognition originating in the mirror stage. Its very coherence is predicated on a lack that it attempts to cover over. To say that the ego is “frustration in its essence” is to point to its function as a compensatory formation—one that arises to fill a void that can never be filled, and is therefore always marked by tension, by an unacknowledged split.

“It is frustration not of a desire of the subject, but of an object where his desire is alienated, and the more it is elaborated, the more deeply the subject’s alienation from his jouissance is entrenched.”

This frustration is not about the subject failing to obtain an object; it concerns an object where desire is already alienated. The object is not merely missing—it is structured as lost from the outset, through the process of signification that constitutes the subject’s desire in relation to the Other. As the ego becomes more refined—more developed through identifications, elaborated fantasies, and defensive formations—the subject is further removed from jouissance. This jouissance is not pleasure but that which exceeds the pleasure principle, a real that resists symbolization. Elaboration does not bring the subject closer to enjoyment but installs more barriers between the subject and its lost cause.

“Frustration of the second degree, then, and such that, even if the subject brings its form in his discourse back to the passive image whereby he makes himself object in the mirror parade, he could not be satisfied by it, since even in attaining in this image his most perfect resemblance, it would still be the other’s jouissance that he would make recognizable there.”

The subject’s return to the mirror image—where he passively presents himself as an object—is itself a repetition of the original alienation. Even the most perfect resemblance achieved in this image is not satisfying because what the subject aims to attain in this image is not his own being, but the jouissance of the Other. The subject becomes the object of the Other’s gaze, constructing himself as that which pleases, seduces, or captivates. But the satisfaction here is not his own—it is the fantasized enjoyment of the Other. This is a central Lacanian motif: the subject’s desire is always structured in relation to the desire of the Other, and thus his own image, even when ideal, remains the locus of alienation.

“That is why there is no adequate response to this discourse, for the subject will take as contempt any word that engages in his misrecognition.”

This imaginary discourse, centered on the ego’s image, is resistant to intervention. Any analytic response that touches on the structural misrecognition underlying the subject’s speech—by pointing out a contradiction, exposing a fantasy, or indicating a defense—will be experienced not as help but as contempt. This is because such interventions strike at the very identifications the subject uses to sustain coherence. In Lacanian terms, an interpretation that reveals the split subject threatens the narcissistic consistency of the ego. The subject cannot hear it as a revelation of truth; he hears it as an attack. This is a structural reaction, not a personal one.

“The aggressiveness the subject experiences here has nothing to do with the animal aggressiveness of frustrated desire.”

This aggression is not instinctual, not biological—it is not the animal reacting to blocked satisfaction. It belongs entirely to the human field of the symbolic and the imaginary. The difference is crucial: animal aggression is situational, reactive. The aggression in question here is structured, and emerges from the symbolic impasse that the subject encounters in his relation to the Other. This aggression is not directed at a concrete obstacle but at the structural void, the inassimilable gap in the subject’s being. It arises when the subject’s imaginary support collapses and he is exposed to the real of his division.

“This reference, so often settled for, masks another one, less pleasant for all and each: the aggressiveness of the slave who responds to the frustration of his labor with a desire for death.”

Rather than the biological metaphor, a more profound analogy is invoked: the slave, whose work is alienated and who finds no recognition in the product of his labor. His desire for death is not a suicidal impulse in the psychological sense, but a structural revolt against a symbolic order in which he has no place as a subject. In Lacanian terms, this is not a moral or political image but a structural one: the subject, when reduced to object, can respond with a form of aggression that targets the symbolic itself. It is an aggression without aim, born of absolute dispossession.

“One then understands how this aggressiveness may respond to any intervention that, by denouncing the imaginary intentions of the discourse, dismantles the object the subject constructed to satisfy them.”

This aggression is triggered when the analyst’s intervention touches the fantasy, that is, the structure the subject has built to stabilize his relation to the Other’s desire. When this imaginary construction—whether a self-image, a symptom, or a scene—is dismantled, the subject experiences this not as liberation but as a threat. The fantasy is not a delusion in the pathological sense but a structuring support for desire. Its deconstruction—what analysis must do—can provoke intense resistance and aggression, because it opens up the subject’s confrontation with lack, with castration, with the absence of a unifying guarantee.

“This is indeed what is called the analysis of resistances, whose dangerous side immediately becomes apparent.”

The analysis of resistances refers to the moments when the subject’s defenses are interpreted or confronted directly. These moments are not merely delicate—they are structurally charged. What is called “resistance” is not simply a reluctance to progress; it is the subject’s defense against the real, against the encounter with the unconscious as that which deconstructs the fantasy of mastery. The danger lies in the fact that analytic interpretation, if it comes too early or too bluntly, may provoke an aggression that is not transference-bound, but directed at the analyst as a figure of castration.

“It is already indicated by the existence of the naïve one who has never seen anything manifest except the aggressive meaning of his subjects’ fantasies⁴.”

Here, the figure of the naïve analyst is criticized: one who believes that all fantasies can be reduced to manifest aggression. This flattening of fantasy into content overlooks its structural function: fantasy is not a scene to be decoded but a frame that sustains desire. The analyst who sees only aggression misses the deeper workings of the subject’s position in relation to the Other and risks short-circuiting the transference, reducing the analytic process to confrontation. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the task is not to expose fantasy but to traverse it—a far more subtle, and more ethically charged, procedure. The fantasy must be approached not as pathology to be corrected but as a structuring fiction, to be inhabited and destabilized in the movement of speech.

“It is the same one who, hesitating not at all to argue for a ‘causalist’ analysis aimed at transforming the subject in his present through learned explanations of his past, betrays quite clearly, even in his tone, the anxiety he wishes to spare himself—of having to think that the freedom of his patient might be suspended on that of his intervention.”

This sentence targets the figure of the analyst who advocates a causalist approach—one grounded in the notion that explaining the past in terms of causality can produce therapeutic transformation in the present. Such a model presumes a linear determinism between past events and present symptoms, and treats the analyst as a kind of explanatory technician whose knowledge about the past is instrumental in reshaping the subject. Lacanian psychoanalysis resists this model on both structural and ethical grounds. The real issue lies in the analyst’s disavowed anxiety: that his intervention is not neutral, and that the patient’s freedom is contingent on what the analyst says or refrains from saying. The analyst’s avoidance of this responsibility—his desire to remain outside the field of subjective implication—is betrayed not in theory but in his tone. From the Lacanian perspective, this is a refusal to assume the position of the subject-supposed-to-know, the transference position that carries with it the weight of the analyst’s word and its symbolic consequences.

“That the detour he chooses could at some point be beneficial for the subject has no greater significance than a stimulating joke and will not detain us any longer.”

The so-called therapeutic detour—the explanatory narrative—may indeed produce effects for the patient, but these effects are incidental, like the amusement or insight from a clever anecdote. In other words, the utility of a causalist detour does not constitute analytic work. Lacanian psychoanalysis insists on distinguishing between what produces effects and what touches the structure of the subject. A joke may displace, amuse, or even clarify—but it does not engage the subject in his divided relation to the signifier. As such, the causalist approach may stimulate movement on the surface, but does not operate within the structure of speech, where desire is produced and where the unconscious speaks.

“Let us rather target this hic et nunc in which some believe they must enclose the operation of analysis.”

The turn to the “here and now” (hic et nunc) has become a modern psychotherapeutic cliché, often used to focus the session on present dynamics, feelings, or behaviors—especially in interpersonal or relational models. But for Lacanian psychoanalysis, this emphasis risks becoming a closure of temporality. The unconscious does not speak in the now; it speaks in the deferred time of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action, retroactivity). To enclose the analytic operation within the present moment risks amputating the diachronic and symbolic unfolding of speech. This restriction makes the session into an imaginary encounter, flattening the subject’s structural relation to time, the Other, and desire.

“It may indeed be useful, provided that the imaginary intention the analyst discovers there is not detached by him from the symbolic relation in which it is expressed.”

The hic et nunc can be analytically productive only if the analyst does not isolate it from the symbolic order. The imaginary intention—the subject’s emotional posture, facial expression, or relational nuance—must not be treated as a self-evident reality. It must be read within the symbolic articulation of the patient’s discourse. Otherwise, the analyst risks interpreting the subject’s behavior, affects, or gestures as direct truths, bypassing the mediation of language. From a Lacanian viewpoint, all meaning is generated through the signifier; any gesture or moment in the now must be interpreted within a chain of signification, not as a standalone phenomenon.

“Nothing should be read there concerning the subject’s ego that cannot be reassumed by him in the form of ‘I,’ that is, in the first person.”

This is an ethical and structural safeguard: no interpretation about the ego, posture, or present behavior is valid unless it can be reappropriated by the subject—not as an external judgment, but as something he himself can articulate. For Lacan, the analytic aim is not to interpret about the subject, but to bring him to speak in his own name, to take up the signifiers that determine him and to subjectivize them. The “I” is not the ego but the site of enunciation, and speech becomes analytic only when the subject enters this position, even if what he says contradicts his prior knowledge of himself.

“‘I was only this in order to become what I can be’: if such were not the permanent point of the assumption the subject makes of his mirages, how could one grasp any progress here?”

This paraphrase evokes the dialectic of identification and subjectivation. The subject must recognize that his previous identifications—his imaginary constructions—were provisional supports, not essences. The mirages of the ego are necessary fictions, but progress in analysis occurs when the subject can assume them as such: “I was only this,” meaning, “I identified with this image, but I am not reducible to it.” To say “in order to become what I can be” is not to affirm a true self beneath appearances, but to enter the process of desire, where the subject becomes through his relation to lack. Progress is grasped when the subject no longer clings to imaginary consistency but assumes the division that structures him.

“The analyst therefore cannot without risk hunt down the subject in the intimacy of his gesture, or even of his statics, unless to reintegrate them as mute parts in his narcissistic discourse—and this has been noted with great sensitivity, even by young practitioners.”

To interpret gestures, silences, or physical postures directly—without reinscribing them into the subject’s speech—is to objectify the subject from the outside. This is the “hunt” the analyst must avoid: reading the subject from a master’s position, which turns him into an object of knowledge. If such elements—gestures or statics—are to be included in analysis, they must be articulated as signifiers in the subject’s narcissistic chain, where he himself uses them to maintain his image or coherence. Otherwise, the analyst risks short-circuiting transference and reinforcing objectification. Even beginning analysts have recognized the violence of such missteps.

“The danger does not lie in the subject’s negative reaction, but rather in his being captured by an objectification, no less imaginary than before, of his statics, or even of his statue, in a renewed status of his alienation.”

The true danger is not that the subject resists or rejects interpretation—it is that he incorporates the analyst’s objectifying gaze into his own imaginary. He becomes frozen in a new statue, now sculpted by the analyst’s assumptions, yet still alienated. The subject remains trapped in an external image, unable to assume speech as his own. This renewed alienation is structurally identical to the mirror stage, where the ego forms around an image that seems to promise unity but in fact installs misrecognition. The analyst’s task is to dismantle—not reinforce—this process by maintaining the subject’s relation to lack.

“On the contrary, the art of the analyst must be to suspend the subject’s certainties until the last mirages are consumed.”

Analytic work is not about supplying knowledge or constructing new identities; it is about suspending the ego’s certainties, allowing the imaginary supports of the subject’s being to burn away. This suspension is not cruelty but ethics: it creates the space in which the subject can encounter his desire, beyond the defensive screen of coherent narratives and self-images. The analyst does not destroy the mirages; he lets them dissolve in discourse, precisely by not affirming them. The art here is in the timing and positioning of interpretation—always aimed at sustaining the process of subjectivization, not producing new identifications.

“And it is in discourse that their resolution must be marked.”

The resolution of these mirages—the fading of egoic illusions—cannot be imposed from without; it must occur within the subject’s own speech. Discourse is the place where the unconscious emerges, where the symbolic order operates, where the subject is divided and realized as such. No gesture, silence, or affect has analytic value unless it is spoken, unless it enters the chain of signifiers. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, only in discourse can the subject be constituted, alienated, and eventually come to traverse his fantasy. Resolution is not revelation but transformation in speech, the moment when the subject hears himself differently and assumes responsibility for what has spoken in him.

“However empty this discourse may appear, it is only so if one takes it at face value: that which justifies Mallarmé’s sentence when he compares common use of language to the exchange of a currency whose obverse and reverse show only effaced figures, and which is passed from hand to hand ‘in silence.’”

What may seem like empty or banal discourse from the analysand is only so if judged according to its manifest content or surface intelligibility. The reference to Mallarmé’s metaphor—language as a worn coin with illegible figures passed silently from person to person—highlights the way language becomes emptied of meaning in everyday exchange, functioning as a mere signifier of communication without reflecting on its symbolic structure. In Lacanian terms, this illustrates how speech often circulates as signification without signifying, with its symbolic density reduced to automatic functioning. Yet even here, Lacan reads the metaphor not as a lament, but as a clue: even worn-out language still participates in the symbolic order—it still “counts,” not because of what it says, but because it occurs in a structured relation.

“This metaphor is enough to remind us that speech, even at the extreme of its wear, retains its value as a tessera.”

A tessera was a token or sign of recognition in ancient Rome—something that had meaning not in itself, but in relation to another. This comparison affirms that speech in analysis cannot be evaluated on a semantic basis alone; its analytic value lies in its structural function, in its relational positioning. Even the most seemingly empty speech—routine, banal, or opaque—still bears the trace of address, of division, of desire. From a Lacanian perspective, any speech act carries the potential to function as a signifier, and thus as an element of the unconscious, provided it is caught in the analytic frame.

“Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies what is evident, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is intended to deceive, it speculates on faith in testimony.”

This tripartite structure reflects how discourse exceeds intention and content. Even when it “communicates nothing,” it enacts a symbolic operation—the fact of communication is established simply by speaking. When it denies the evident, it still reinforces the truth that speech has structural force and that truth is located in the function of speech, not in correspondence. And even deception presupposes faith in the signifier; lying depends on the shared belief that language refers to something true. For Lacanian theory, this is crucial: the unconscious does not lie, because it speaks through the structure of the signifier, beyond conscious manipulation. Discourse always betrays the subject, regardless of intent.

“Moreover, the psychoanalyst knows better than anyone that the question is to hear to which ‘part’ of the discourse the significant term is entrusted, and this is precisely how he operates in the best case: taking the account of a daily story as an apologue that, to the discerning listener, delivers its greeting; a long prosopopoeia as a direct interjection; or conversely, a mere slip as a very complex declaration, even the sigh of a silence as the full lyrical development it supplants.”

The analyst listens not to the content of discourse but to its structure, to the place where the signifier is lodged—even and especially when it is dissimulated. The reference to apologue, prosopopoeia, interjection, and slip indicates the polyvalence of speech in the analytic setting. A casual story may be an allegorical confession; a grand speech may conceal a single repressed cry. A slip—a lapsus—can articulate an entire fantasy; a sigh may speak where language fails. The analyst hears not the voice but the subject of enunciation, which is always partially eclipsed in what is said. The best-case operation of the analyst is to extract the truth not from what is said, but from the gap, the displacement, the break in the chain of speech—precisely where the real is encountered.

“Thus it is a felicitous punctuation that gives meaning to the subject’s discourse.”

Here Lacan affirms that meaning in analysis arises not through total speech, but through cutting, through punctuation. Interpretation is not additive—it is intervention through scansion. A properly placed silence, a pause, a cut, can reconfigure the chain of signifiers and precipitate a subjective shift. In Lacanian technique, interpretation may be less about content and more about where one intervenes, because meaning is retroactive—produced by the structure of before and after that the analyst helps frame. Punctuation is not a grammatical tool; it is a technical operation in the symbolic.

“This is why the suspension of the session, which current technique treats as a purely time-based pause and as such indifferent to the fabric of the discourse, plays the role of a scansion that has all the value of an intervention to precipitate conclusive moments.”

The suspension of the session—often treated in conventional technique as a neutral time boundary (e.g., the 45- or 50-minute hour)—is reinterpreted as a structural scansion. In Lacanian practice, the session’s end can be variable and may occur mid-sentence, mid-thought, or immediately after a slip or significant signifier. Such a cut functions as an intervention, often more powerfully than any explicit interpretation. It forces the subject to confront their own speech, without analytic closure. This is what Lacan names the “act” of the analyst—not speech that adds meaning, but scansion that restructures it. The traditional temporal model fails to recognize this symbolic timing and treats the session as a container, rather than an event.

“And this suggests that this element should be freed from its routine framework to be subjected to all technically relevant purposes.”

The final call here is for the liberation of analytic technique from ritualized practice. The suspension of the session should not be governed by time but by analytic logic—by the timing of interventions, the pacing of transference, the moment when speech breaks or crystallizes. Lacanian technique replaces the routine with the structure, the fixed with the symbolic. The implication is that any formal element in analysis—session length, silence, pacing—must be rethought in light of its function in the symbolic order. The session becomes not a repetition of form, but a precise tool to produce effects in speech, in subjectivity, and in the unfolding of desire.

“It is thus that regression may take place, which is nothing other than the actualization in discourse of the fantasmatic relations reconstituted by an ego at each stage of the decomposition of its structure.”

Regression is not treated here as a literal return to earlier developmental stages—as it is often understood in classical metapsychology—but as a discursive phenomenon. What is termed regression is, structurally, the re-articulation in speech of phantasmatic relations—those unconscious scenarios through which the subject positions themselves in relation to the Other and to the object of desire. These scenes emerge in the analytic setting not through behavior but through signifiers, inflections, repetitions, and the staging of speech. The ego, as an imaginary construct, is decomposed in the analytic process, and at each point, the subject may resort to fantasy formations to stabilize the emerging lack. Regression, therefore, is not a retreat to an earlier psychic reality, but a repetition of structure in speech, under the pressure of symbolic destabilization.

“For in the end, this regression is not real; it manifests itself in language only through inflections, turns of phrase, ‘such light stumblings’ that they could never at the extreme go beyond the artifice of baby talk in the adult.”

This reaffirms that regression is not a real return to infancy, nor a behavioral reenactment, but a symbolic effect. It appears in subtle modulations—inflections, stylistic slips, infantile tropes—that punctuate the subject’s discourse. The reference to baby talk is not descriptive but structural: it signals how the subject may adopt a speech position that expresses dependency, seduction, helplessness, or demand, in a form that mimics the child’s address to the Other. This is a defense, an imaginary ploy to elicit a response, not a regression to a real developmental stage. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not a place or period, but a network of signifiers, and regression is read through the subject’s relation to this network, not through developmental norms.

“To impute to it the reality of an actual relationship to the object amounts to projecting the subject into an alienating illusion that only reflects an alibi of the psychoanalyst.”

Treating regression as a real relation to an object—e.g., claiming the analysand is “relating to the analyst as a mother” in some ontological sense—confuses the symbolic with the imaginary. It effectively reifies the fantasy, turning it into a lived reality, and in doing so, colludes with the subject’s defense. But more than that, it becomes an alibi for the analyst, who avoids confronting the structural function of fantasy and instead engages in imaginary empathy or developmental narrative. This deflection of the analytic task—understanding how the subject’s speech stages their desire in relation to the Other—is a misrecognition on the analyst’s part. It allows the analyst to avoid interpreting and instead to “understand” in the mode of suggestion or adaptation.

“This is why nothing could more mislead the psychoanalyst than seeking to guide himself by a supposed felt contact with the subject’s reality.”

The warning is directed at analysts who rely on empathy, intuitive resonance, or a sense of “being in touch” with the analysand’s experience. This “felt contact” presumes a shared reality between analyst and analysand, and bypasses the radical alterity of the subject as divided by the unconscious. The very idea of such a contact contradicts the structure of the analytic situation, which is based not on shared experience, but on the subject’s speech and its interpretation. In Lacanian terms, the subject’s “reality” is already structured through fantasy; to imagine access to it through feeling is to confuse the imaginary for the symbolic, and to position the analyst not as cause of desire, but as mirror.

“This old chestnut of intuitionist, or even phenomenological, psychology has in contemporary usage taken on a very symptomatic extension, reflecting the rarefaction of the effects of speech in the present social context.”

The turn to intuitionism or phenomenology in analytic training and practice is not new, but its recent prominence signals a symptom of the present: a diminished belief in the efficacy of speech. In a social world increasingly dominated by imaginary identification, performativity, and pseudo-communication, the subject’s belief in the transformative power of speech weakens. Consequently, psychoanalytic discourse is displaced by therapeutic techniques that favor presence, empathy, and authenticity. This cultural context renders speech as ineffective, and thus the analyst compensates by adopting intuitive modes, attempting to feel their way through analysis. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, this is an ethical failure—a sign that the analyst has given up the field of the symbolic.

“But its obsessive value becomes blatant when promoted within a relationship that, by its very rules, excludes any real contact.”

The analytic frame—based on abstinence, asymmetry, and the primacy of speech—structurally excludes real contact. The analyst is not a partner, not a friend, not an empathetic interlocutor, but a support for the subject’s speech. To claim emotional resonance or “shared reality” within a relation so carefully structured to prevent it is not only contradictory, it becomes obsessional—a compulsion to fill in the void that speech opens. This insistence on “real contact” reveals the desire of the analyst to close the gap, to bypass the Other’s radical absence, and to reestablish an imaginary dyad where transference is short-circuited.

“Young analysts who might still be overawed by what this recourse implies of impenetrable gifts will find no better way to temper it than to refer to the success of the supervisions they themselves undergo.”

This addresses the idealization of the analyst’s “gift”—intuition, empathy, clinical flair—especially by novice analysts who may feel inadequate before this image. Supervision offers a demystification of the analytic process. It exposes the mechanisms at play in a controlled, reflective space, showing that what appears as a “gift” is in fact a function of discourse, not of the individual’s personality. Lacanian supervision trains the analyst not to “feel into” the patient, but to hear the structure, to track the signifiers, and to interpret in relation to desire and lack, not emotional insight.

“From the point of view of contact with the real, the very possibility of these supervisions would become a problem.”

If psychoanalytic work were really based on “real contact,” supervision itself would be impossible. The supervisor is not present in the session and cannot “feel” what the analyst felt. Yet supervision often proves highly effective—precisely because it works through discourse, through the reconstruction of speech and its interpretation. This contradiction exposes the fallacy of the contact model: it demonstrates that the real is not touched by affective resonance but is approached through the signifier. Lacanian psychoanalysis insists that the real is what resists symbolization, not what is felt.

“Quite the contrary, the supervisor displays there a second sight, as the saying goes, which renders the experience at least as instructive for him as for the supervisee.”

The supervisor’s “second sight” is not mystical but structural: an ability to hear the analytic situation from the outside, without being caught in the transference. This allows the supervisor to point out displacements, repetitions, signifiers—what the analyst, entangled in the imaginary of the session, may miss. This sight is made possible by the analyst’s speech about the session, not by access to the analysand’s emotions. Supervision thus becomes a site of analysis itself, one in which the desire of the analyst is interpreted, and where the analytic act can be re-situated in the symbolic.

“And this is all the more so insofar as the latter displays fewer of those gifts which some deem all the more incommunicable the more embarrassed they are by their own technical secrets.”

The so-called “gifts” of intuition or talent are often revered because they appear incommunicable. But this mystique often masks a lack of theoretical clarity—a refusal to name the structural mechanisms at work. Those who rely on “gift” are often hiding the embarrassment of not being able to articulate their technique. Paradoxically, the less the supervisee relies on intuitive gifts, the more analytic their work becomes, because it is grounded not in personal flair but in symbolic structure. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is not a craft of gifted sensitivity, but a discourse—one that must be read, taught, and transmitted in the register of the signifier.

“The reason for this enigma is that the supervisee plays the role of a filter, or even of a refractor, of the subject’s discourse, and thus presents to the supervisor a ready-made stereography already outlining the three or four registers in which he can read the score formed by that discourse.”

The enigma referred to here concerns the paradox of supervision being instructive for the supervisor as much as the supervisee. The reason is located in the structure of the supervisory discourse: the supervisee acts not as a transparent channel but as a refractor—meaning, he reshapes, distorts, or stylizes the analytic material, consciously or not. What the supervisor receives is already a constructed representation of the analysand’s speech, filtered through the supervisee’s ego, defenses, technical vocabulary, and transference. This refracted report often aligns with certain theoretical registers—developmental, symbolic, imaginary, behavioral—by which the supervisee pre-frames the material. This “stereography” presents the case in such a way that the discourse is already partially interpreted, reducing the raw speech of the analysand to a codified narrative, often structured by the supervisee’s own fantasy and theoretical positioning.

“If the supervisee could be placed by the supervisor in a subjective position different from that implied by the sinister term ‘control’ (advantageously replaced, though only in English, by ‘supervision’), the best benefit he would draw from this exercise would be to learn to place himself in the secondary subjective position into which the situation immediately places the supervisor.”

The term “control”—used in French for supervision—carries connotations of surveillance, mastery, or correction. In contrast, “supervision” implies an over-seeing, a second gaze, perhaps more aligned with reflective practice than enforcement. Lacan suggests that the supervisee’s true gain in the process lies in learning to adopt the structure of the supervisor’s position, which is itself a position decentered from mastery or emotional identification. This “secondary subjective position” refers to the stance the analyst must take: not one of knowledge about the subject, but one who listens for what escapes the ego’s grasp—what reveals itself in the gaps of discourse, in the transference, in the symbolic order. If the supervisee can occupy that position toward his own practice, supervision becomes structurally analytic itself.

“There he would find the authentic path to attain what the classical formula of the analyst’s diffuse, even distracted, attention only very approximately expresses.”

The reference is to Freud’s concept of evenly-hovering attention, the analyst’s stance of listening without intentional focus or hypothesis. Lacan critiques this as insufficiently precise. The “diffuse” quality attributed to analytic listening suggests passivity, but in fact, what the analyst must cultivate is a particular structuring of attention, one that is oriented toward the symbolic. The authentic path for the analyst is not to become distracted or emotionally neutral but to learn how to listen structurally, to hear beyond meaning, to track the function of signifiers. This requires the analyst to inhabit a subjective position split from mastery, which is precisely what can be learned through supervision when correctly oriented.

“For the essential thing is to know what this attention targets: assuredly not, as all our work aims to demonstrate, an object beyond the subject’s speech, as some force themselves never to lose sight of.”

The analyst’s attention is often misdirected toward an object beyond the subject’s speech—a hidden cause, trauma, affect, or developmental moment presumed to lie behind what the analysand says. Lacan rejects this orientation as fundamentally non-analytic, because it treats speech as secondary to some psychological content rather than as the site where the unconscious emerges. Analysis does not uncover some real referent behind discourse; it operates entirely within the field of speech itself, which is structured by the signifier and mediated by the Other. The pursuit of a concealed object bypasses the real function of language in constituting the subject and displaces analysis into an imaginary or cognitive mode.

“If that were the path of analysis, it would undoubtedly have to resort to other means, or it would be the only example of a method that forbids itself the means to its own end.”

Were analysis to follow the logic of uncovering a thing-behind-the-speech, it would need tools other than language—observation, testing, perhaps even suggestion. But analysis is defined by its exclusive reliance on speech. To treat speech merely as a cover for something else renders analytic technique paradoxical, as if its own method—listening—were not sufficient to reach its goal. Lacanian theory insists that the unconscious is not hidden behind speech but is present in speech, in its slips, repetitions, equivocations, and failures. The analyst’s task is not to go beyond discourse but to stay within it, attuned to its internal structure and ruptures.

“The only object accessible to the analyst is the imaginary relation that binds him to the subject as ego, and for lack of being able to eliminate it, he can make use of it to regulate the flow of his ears, in the way that physiology, in accord with the Gospel, shows it is normal to do: ears for not hearing, in other words, for detecting what must be heard.”

The only object the analyst directly encounters is the imaginary relationship established between the analysand and their ego, and between the analysand and the analyst—essentially the transferential mirror. This relation is inescapable, and while it introduces distortion, it also serves a function. The analyst must be aware of it and use it not to interpret content, but to monitor how speech circulates—what is said too fluently, what is avoided, what is repeated. The biblical allusion—“ears to hear, and ears not to hear”—underscores that the analyst does not hear everything indiscriminately. Instead, he listens with exclusion, filtering for the signifier, the rupture, the displacement—not for affect, coherence, or truth in the ordinary sense. The analyst listens for what must be heard, meaning the emergence of the subject divided by the signifier.

“For he has no others—no third ear, nor fourth—for a transaudition one might wish to be a direct hearing of the unconscious by the unconscious.”

The analyst is not gifted with magical faculties—no “third ear,” no mystical ability to directly perceive the unconscious. This dismisses the idea of an intuitive analytic perception often associated with so-called seasoned clinicians. There is no such thing as an unconscious “hearing” the unconscious directly. The only access is through speech, mediated by the symbolic order and structured through the position the analyst takes. The fantasy of “transaudition”—an unmediated resonance between analyst and analysand—is another form of imaginary identification, where the structure of analysis is replaced by a dyadic fusion. Lacanian ethics opposes this at every level.

“We will say what must be thought of this supposed communication.”

This leads toward the further elaboration of the illusion of direct communication. Lacan signals here that he will deconstruct the fantasy that analysis is a privileged dialogue or a mutual understanding between two beings. What is called communication in analysis is always disrupted by the signifier, structured by the unconscious, and determined by positions within the discourse. There is no two-way flow of understanding; there is instead a structural misrecognition at work in transference, and the analyst must occupy the place not of comprehension, but of disruption, of maintaining the subject’s relation to lack. The “supposed communication” is another screen that must be stripped away in the work of analysis.

“We approached the function of speech in analysis through its most ungrateful angle, that of empty speech, where the subject seems to speak in vain of someone who, though they might bear an uncanny resemblance, will never join in the assumption of his desire.”

The “ungrateful angle” refers to empty speech (parole vide), which characterizes much of what passes in the analytic session—where the subject speaks, but the speech lacks subjective engagement with desire. This form of discourse can include social chatter, autobiographical narrative, or symptom description devoid of transference implication. The subject speaks of himself or about himself, but not as himself. The figure spoken about may resemble the subject structurally—it is often the ego—but is split off from the subject of enunciation, who is divided and unconscious. The core issue is that this speech does not involve the assumption of desire, meaning it fails to take up the subject’s position within a symbolic relation to the Other. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire is not a substance to be uncovered, but a structural position to be assumed in speech.

“There we showed the source of the increasing devaluation to which speech has been subjected in theory and technique, and we had to raise gradually, like a heavy millstone overturned upon it, what can serve only as a flywheel for the movement of analysis: namely, the individual psychophysiological factors which, in reality, remain excluded from its dialectic.”

This critiques a drift in psychoanalytic theory and practice: the progressive devaluation of speech, especially as analytic technique turns toward psychobiological or adaptive frameworks. The “heavy millstone” refers to the weight of psychophysiological explanations—that is, efforts to ground analysis in biology, neurology, or cognitive-affective models. These elements, though often invoked as explanatory supports, do not participate in the dialectic of speech that defines psychoanalytic praxis. They are inert with respect to the movement of the subject in the field of the Other. By attempting to use these factors as the motor of analysis, one enters the fiction of movement—a simulation of therapeutic progress detached from the symbolic structure that grounds the analytic act.

“To give analysis the goal of modifying their inherent inertia is to condemn oneself to the fiction of movement, in which a certain tendency of technique seems indeed to find satisfaction.”

Assigning psychoanalysis the task of altering individual psychophysiological inertia—habits, traits, drives, personality patterns—is to fundamentally misplace its aim. It assumes that the cure lies in modification of the subject as a thing, rather than in subjectivization of speech and desire. The fiction of movement arises when analysts believe they are producing change, when in fact they are only manipulating the ego’s adaptations. Certain contemporary techniques may be satisfied with this outcome—behavioral improvement, ego-strengthening, or insight—but Lacanian psychoanalysis aims at something different: a shift in the subject’s relation to the signifier, a traversal of fantasy, not an adjustment of function.

“If we now turn our gaze to the other extreme of the psychoanalytic experience—in its history, in its casework, in the process of the cure—we will find, opposed to the analysis of the hic et nunc, the value of anamnesis as index and as lever of therapeutic progress; opposed to obsessive intrasubjectivity hysterical intersubjectivity; and opposed to the analysis of resistance, symbolic interpretation. Here begins the realization of full speech.”

The pivot moves us from empty speech toward the other pole of analytic experience: full speech (parole pleine), where the subject speaks in a way that assumes their division, addresses the Other, and locates themselves in their desire. Lacan sets up three oppositions to clarify this movement:

1. Anamnesis vs. the hic et nunc: True analytic recollection (anamnesis) is not simple memory retrieval, but the re-symbolization of past signifiers in the present structure of speech. It is not a linear narrative of history, but a retroactive reconstruction that transforms the subject’s position. This stands against the flattening of time in the here-and-now techniques, which focus on immediate experience, often ignoring the unconscious logic of Nachträglichkeit.
2. Hysterical intersubjectivity vs. obsessive intrasubjectivity: The obsessional subject retreats into isolated thought, trying to master the Other’s desire by internalizing and rationalizing it. In contrast, the hysteric stages her desire in the field of the Other, constantly asking, “What am I for the Other?” Full speech occurs when the subject speaks not from mastery, but from lack, as in the hysteric’s enunciation.
3. Symbolic interpretation vs. analysis of resistance: Rather than focusing on resistance as a behavioral obstacle to be overcome, symbolic interpretation addresses the structure of speech, reading the symptom and fantasy as signifying formations. This marks the field where analytic interpretation operates through the signifier, not suggestion or confrontation.

“Let us examine the relation it constitutes.”

This signals the transition to an elaboration of what full speech institutes: a relation not grounded in imaginary empathy or empirical observation, but in symbolic positioning. The relation formed in analysis is not a personal one, but a discursive structure, ordered by the transference, the signifier, and the Other’s place. In this field, speech is no longer communication, but enactment of desire and division.

“Let us recall that the method instituted by Breuer and Freud was, shortly after its birth, named by one of Breuer’s patients, Anna O., the ‘talking cure.'”

This historical reminder situates the analytic experience in its originary association with speech. The term “talking cure”, coined by Anna O., does not mean simply talking as catharsis, but talking as a structure through which symptoms are linked to repressed signifiers. From its inception, psychoanalysis was grounded in the power of speech to affect the body, not through persuasion or instruction, but through the return of the repressed in the symbolic. Anna O.’s term remains ironic and accurate: what appears as simple talking is in fact a radical confrontation with the unconscious structured in language.

“Let us recall that it was the experience initiated with this hysteric that led them to the discovery of the so-called traumatic pathogenic event.”

The story of hysteria, central to psychoanalysis, is not just about trauma in the empirical sense but about the way a speech event retroactively constitutes a traumatic signifier. The “traumatic event” is not something inherently traumatic in itself; it becomes pathogenic through its inscription in the subject’s discourse, through its failed symbolization, and through the way it returns in the symptom. The hysteric, especially in the early case of Anna O., presents a speech that forces the Other to account for the truth of desire. What Breuer and Freud identified was not merely a repressed memory, but the way the symptom structures an unanswered question to the Other—a demand inscribed in the body as symptom, which finds its resolution only in speech addressed within the analytic relation.

“If this event was recognized as the cause of the symptom, it was because the putting of one into words (in the patient’s ‘stories’) determined the lifting of the other.”

The so-called traumatic pathogenic event in early psychoanalysis gained its status as cause only through its narration. What alleviated the symptom was not the factual recovery of an event, but the act of putting it into speech—the articulation of the experience within a narrative structure. The “stories” the patient tells do not reveal a pre-existing truth; they produce an effect through symbolization. The therapeutic shift occurs at the level of discourse. From a Lacanian standpoint, this reinforces the idea that the unconscious is not a repository of facts but a network of signifiers, and that speech itself, not memory in the empirical sense, is the vector of transformation.

“Here the term ‘becoming conscious,’ borrowed from the psychological theory immediately provided to explain the fact, retains a prestige that deserves the mistrust we hold as a sound rule toward explanations that serve as self-evident truths.”

The expression “becoming conscious” (Bewusstwerden) was quickly adopted to explain this curative effect. However, Lacan warns that this notion carries a misleading prestige. It implies a linear theory of mind, where unconscious content simply becomes conscious, and healing follows. But such formulations function as self-evident truths, which psychoanalysis must precisely resist. They flatten the structure of the unconscious, reducing the analytic process to a cognitive or enlightening act, rather than seeing it as a dialectical movement involving the subject’s position in speech. For Lacan, “becoming conscious” is not the mechanism of the cure; rather, it is the effect of a symbolic operation.

“The psychological prejudices of the time opposed any recognition in verbalization as such of another reality than its flatus vocis.”

In the late 19th century, dominant psychological models—positivist and empiricist—regarded language as a secondary representation, mere “breath of voice” (flatus vocis), lacking substance or efficacy of its own. Such prejudices could not grasp that speech itself, in its materiality as signifier, could constitute a real intervention. Lacanian theory directly contests this view: speech is not just a vehicle of meaning but a structuring act. What matters in analysis is not what words refer to, but how they function—how they insert the subject into a chain of signification that transforms their relation to desire and the Other.

“Yet it remains that in the hypnotic state it is dissociated from becoming conscious, and that this alone would suffice to call for a revision of this conception of its effects.”

In hypnosis, the lifting of the symptom often occurred without the subject becoming consciously aware of the traumatic content, revealing a disjunction between therapeutic effect and consciousness. This fact should have already undermined the idea that becoming conscious was the mechanism of cure. Instead, it shows that something structural in speech—even if not conscious—can produce change. This reinforces the Lacanian position: the unconscious speaks, and what matters is not the awareness of content but the subject’s position in relation to the signifier. The effect of speech exists independently of conscious knowledge, as it operates within the symbolic.

“But how is it that the stalwarts of behaviorist Aufhebung do not offer here an example, claiming that they need not know whether the subject recalled anything at all? He has only recounted the event.”

Here Lacan critiques the behaviorist tendency to treat subjective experience as irrelevant. In behaviorist terms, whether the subject remembers, feels, or understands is beside the point—the important thing is the observable effect. This leads to a paradox: even behaviorists acknowledge that narration of the event has an effect, yet they refuse to engage with what that implies about language and subjectivity. By minimizing the subjective dimension of speech, behaviorism elides the structural function of verbalization, and treats the symptom’s disappearance as a mechanical result, not as an outcome of symbolic realignment.

“We will say, for our part, that he verbalized it—or, to develop this term whose resonances in French evoke a different Pandora than the one of the box in which perhaps it should be confined—he passed it into the verb, or more precisely, into the epos wherein he relates to the present hour the origins of his person.”

Against this flattening, Lacan emphasizes the subject verbalized the event—he passed it into the verb, into discourse, thereby transforming it. The French term verbaliser carries echoes of unleashing—not unlike Pandora, who released chaos by opening the box. But this transformation is not chaotic: it’s structured as an epos—a narrative of origins. This epic discourse is not mere story-telling, but a subjective constitution through speech. The subject, by narrating the event, inserts it into a symbolic timeline, locating his emergence as a speaking being. The past becomes retrospectively structured by the subject’s present position in discourse.

“This in a language that allows his discourse to be heard by his contemporaries, and still more that presupposes their present discourse.”

The narration is never isolated—it presupposes an audience and a shared symbolic code. The subject speaks in a language already in use by others; his speech is structured by the Other’s discourse. His articulation of trauma is not self-generated, but staged within the field of intersubjectivity. This aligns with Lacan’s view that speech is never private: the unconscious is structured like a language, and what the subject says is always already situated in a network of signifiers that precede him. The hearing of the discourse by contemporaries is not empirical, but structural: the subject addresses the Other as witness, even in silence.

“Thus, the recitation of the epos may include a discourse of former times in its archaic or even foreign language, and may even continue into the present tense with the full animation of the actor, but it is in the manner of indirect discourse, set off in quotation marks within the thread of the narrative and, if it is performed, it is on a stage implying the presence not only of the chorus but of the spectators.”

This passage frames analytic speech as performance—not in the theatrical sense of falseness, but in the structural sense of staged address. The epos is layered: it may involve archaic forms, foreign signifiers, or fragments of childhood language. These discontinuities express the temporal stratification of the unconscious. The use of indirect discourse—framed speech, embedded in narrative—evokes the quotational structure of memory and symptom. Even when the subject speaks “in the present tense,” it is as a subject within a scene, performing before the Other (spectators, chorus), within a symbolic staging. The analytic session is thus a kind of dramatization of the unconscious, where speech is not natural but framed, transferred, structured. The “stage” is the transference, and the spectators are not the analyst as person, but the position of the Other as locus of the signifier.

“Hypnotic recollection is undoubtedly a reproduction of the past, but above all a spoken representation and, as such, one that implies all sorts of presences.”

What occurs in hypnotic recollection is not simply a cognitive retrieval of past events, but a spoken staging—a discursive re-presentation, embedded in the presence of an Other. As a representation, it carries performative and transferential weight: speech brings into the room not only the content of the memory but the presence of multiple others—imagined, remembered, fantasized. These “presences” include the past interlocutors in the scene, the analyst as current listener, and the unconscious as a structuring Other. For Lacan, speech is never solitary; it inherently implies an address. Therefore, even in hypnosis, where the subject may seem passively absorbed, what emerges is still framed by the symbolic function of speech.

“It relates to waking recollection—curiously referred to in analysis as ‘the material’—as the drama producing before the assembly of citizens the origin myths of the City relates to history, which is certainly made of materials, but in which a nation today learns to read the symbols of a destiny in progress.”

This analogy clarifies the difference between memory as historical content (“the material”) and memory as speech act. The analyst hears the material of the session—memories, dreams, events—as if they were historical facts. But Lacan insists that these are productions, akin to dramatic myths performed before the citizens of the City—an allusion to Greek tragedy and the foundational narratives that give symbolic cohesion to a social body. These myths are not false, but perform truth through structure and repetition. In psychoanalysis, the subject similarly performs a myth of origins, not to recount facts but to articulate a position in the symbolic. The past is not reconstructed as it was, but as a symbolic destiny, read retroactively from the present.

“One may say, in Heideggerian language, that both constitute the subject as gewesend, that is, as one who has thus been.”

The Heideggerian term gewesend designates the subject not as one who was, but as one who has-been in a particular way—a being temporally constituted by its relation to the past. Lacan appropriates this to indicate that the subject in psychoanalysis is not the sum of his past experiences, but one who emerges through their symbolic articulation. The subject is not discovered in the past but retroactively constituted by the speech that relates to it. This is an ontological status: the subject is nothing other than the effect of its signifiers, which tie together past events not as facts but as necessary coordinates of a symbolic structure.

“But within the internal unity of this temporalization, the being marks the convergence of the having-beens. That is to say, other encounters being assumed from any one of these past moments, there would have emerged another being which would have made that moment to have been otherwise.”

Subjectivity is not anchored in a linear chronology. Rather, it arises from the convergence of multiple “having-beens”—points in the past that are symbolically charged, repeated, and reinterpreted in the present. These nodes of memory are not fixed; each is contingent on how the subject re-encounters them. If another signifier had been attached at the time, if a different encounter with the Other had occurred, then both the event and the subject’s relation to it would have changed. This reflects Lacan’s logic of retroactive causality (nachträglichkeit): the subject’s past is not simply remembered, but resignified in speech, and thereby transforms its meaning and its impact on being.

“The ambiguity of the hysterical revelation of the past does not lie so much in the wavering of its content between the imaginary and the real, for it situates itself in both.”

Hysterical discourse does not merely confuse what is real with what is imaginary; rather, it inhabits both registers simultaneously. The ambiguity is not epistemological but structural: the subject speaks of a past that is neither entirely factual nor entirely fantasized. In Lacanian terms, hysteria is defined by a question posed to the Other’s desire, and the discourse around trauma stages a scene of demand, often via the symptom. What is “revealed” in hysteria is not a truth about the past but a truth of subjectivity, constituted in the gap between what was lived and what is said.

“Nor is it because it is deceitful. It is because it presents us with the birth of truth in speech, and in that it confronts us with the reality of that which is neither true nor false.”

The hysteric does not lie. What appears ambiguous or even inconsistent is not deception but the production of truth—truth not as correspondence, but as subjective positioning in discourse. This truth is born in speech, emerging precisely in those moments that cannot be judged by binary logic. Lacan emphasizes that psychoanalytic truth belongs to a register beyond true and false: it is that which makes a hole in knowledge, that which is spoken without being known. This is why analysis is not about validating facts but allowing the subject to encounter truth in its structural dimension—truth that is always partial, divided, and linked to desire.

“At least, this is the most troubling aspect of its problem.”

What is troubling in hysteria is not its unreliability but its capacity to show how truth arises within the structure of speech without resting on certainty or referential stability. This truth—produced, not found—shakes the foundations of classical epistemology. It reveals the real of speech, which cannot be absorbed by knowledge systems. The problem of hysteria thus confronts the analyst with the core of the analytic act: how to listen to a speech that tells the truth without knowing it.

“For the truth of this revelation is the present speech that testifies to it in actual reality and which grounds it in the name of that reality.”

The only reality that grounds the truth of the hysteric’s discourse is the speech act itself. It is the act of speaking, not the content, that testifies. Lacan insists here that speech is performative: it does not only report but produces reality. The subject grounds their “past” not in what was, but in how they speak it now, addressing it in the present of the session. This speech enacts the subject’s division, and it is in this enacted speech—this saying (dire)—that the truth of the unconscious is located.

“Now, in this reality, only speech bears witness to that portion of the powers of the past which was set aside at each crossroads where the event made its choice.”

Reality, for the subject of the unconscious, is that which is structured through speech. And it is only through speech that the “remainder” of past events—the repressed, the excluded, the unchosen—returns. At every decisive moment in the subject’s history, something was left aside, repressed, foreclosed. Speech in analysis is what reopens these moments, not by retrieving them as facts, but by producing them as symptoms, slips, dreams, repetitions. The past, structured by choice and loss, only becomes meaningful as the subject bears witness to its effects in language. This witnessing is not recollection but symbolic articulation, which Lacan defines as the foundation of analytic truth.

“This is why the condition of continuity in anamnesis, by which Freud measures the integrity of healing, has nothing to do with the Bergsonian myth of a restoration of duration in which the authenticity of each moment would be destroyed if it failed to summarize the modulation of all preceding moments.”

Freud’s criterion of continuity in anamnesis—the analytic recollection of the subject’s history—must not be confused with Bergsonian duration, which is conceived as a flowing continuum in which every present moment carries the full affective weight of the past. Lacan critiques this intuitionist myth, which implies a homogeneous, lived time (durée), where each present moment is authentic only insofar as it organically integrates all previous temporal modulations. This Bergsonian model promotes an imaginary continuity of subjectivity, which is incompatible with the Lacanian (and Freudian) understanding of subject formation through discontinuity, repression, and symbolic cuts. Anamnesis, for Freud, is not about re-experiencing lived moments in a seamless flow; it is about the structural retroactivity by which meaning is produced.

“For Freud, it is neither a matter of biological memory, nor of its intuitionist mystification, nor of the paramnesia of the symptom, but of recollection, that is to say, of history, resting on the sole edge of the certainties of date, the scale on which conjectures about the past make the promises of the future oscillate.”

Freud distinguishes analytic memory from biological memory (as functionally stored data), from intuitive memory (as direct access to a living past), and from paramnesia (false memory or distortion). What matters instead is recollection as history—a symbolic construction that proceeds not from fact but from signifiers structured along a timeline. This “scale of dates” is not empirical chronology but a symbolic ordering that allows restructuring of the subject’s relation to his past. It is this symbolic frame that lets the subject produce meaning not just retroactively but also prospectively—linking past contingencies to future signifying positions, allowing desire and destiny to take shape.

“Let us be categorical: psychoanalytic anamnesis is not about reality, but about truth, because it is the effect of full speech to reorder past contingencies by giving them the meaning of necessities to come, such as are constituted by the narrow margin of freedom through which the subject makes them present.”

The distinction between reality and truth is essential here. Anamnesis in analysis does not aim to recover what really happened; it aims to produce a truth effect through full speech (parole pleine), where the subject assumes their desire and speaks from their division. The truth that emerges is not referential but structural: speech reorders contingencies—events that were arbitrary, chaotic, or traumatic—by retroactively inserting them into a logical chain of subjective significance. This reordering produces the illusion of necessity, which is not deterministic but organized by the subject’s desire, which operates through a narrow margin of freedom—the freedom to take up the signifiers that structure one’s fate.

“The meanderings of the investigation that Freud conducts in the case presentation of ‘the Wolf Man’ confirm these remarks by taking on their full meaning.”

The clinical case of the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff) is emblematic of this retroactive construction. The analysis does not proceed linearly or deductively, but through “meanderings”, interpretive detours, and shifts in signification that mirror the subject’s own symbolic restructuring. Freud’s method here reveals how truth is not found but produced, and how memory becomes meaningful only nachträglich—after the fact—through the logic of transference and interpretation. The Wolf Man’s case becomes a touchstone for understanding how contingent experiences become organized into a structure of meaning through the analytic process.

“Freud demands total objectification of the evidence so long as it is a question of dating the primal scene, but he assumes without further ado all the resubjectivations of the event that seem to him necessary to explain its effects at each turning point where the subject restructures himself—that is, as many restructurings of the event that are carried out, as he expresses it, nachträglich, after the fact⁵.”

Freud oscillates between scientific rigor—insisting on chronological objectivity in dating the primal scene—and interpretive flexibility, accepting multiple subjective restructurings of the same event across time. Each reactivation of the primal scene involves a resignification that transforms both the scene and the subject’s position in relation to it. The key term here is nachträglich (afterwardness or deferred action), which captures how the meaning of an earlier event is constituted only through later experiences, not through direct memory. Lacanian theory affirms this structure: it is not the primal event that is primary, but the signifier that organizes it, often long after the event itself.

“Moreover, with a boldness that borders on nonchalance, he declares it legitimate to elide in the analysis of the processes the time intervals during which the event remains latent in the subject⁶.”

Freud, with a striking ease, accepts that latent periods—times when the subject does not consciously reflect on the event—can be skipped in the analytic narrative. These gaps are not problematic; they are essential to how the unconscious operates. For Lacan, this confirms that the unconscious is discontinuous, structured not by linear time but by the logic of signifiers, which may resurface without any conscious mediation. The symptom does not require a continuous chain of memory to be understood; it requires interpretation of how meaning is condensed, displaced, and returned in speech.

“That is to say, he cancels the times for understanding in favor of the moments of concluding, which precipitate the subject’s reflection toward the meaning to be decided regarding the original event.”

This final sentence shifts from a temporality of understanding (linked to ego reflection and delay) to one of conclusion—a decisive moment in the symbolic, where the subject encounters a point of truth in speech. Lacan distinguishes temps pour comprendre from moment de conclure to emphasize that insight is not achieved gradually but through a cut in discourse, a scansion that precipitates a shift in the subject’s relation to their desire. What matters is not what the subject understands, but when and how he speaks—and the structural place of that speech in the symbolic order. The “meaning to be decided” is not a preexisting truth to be uncovered, but a truth constituted in the act of enunciation.

“Let us note that time for understanding and moment of concluding are functions that we have defined in a purely logical theorem and which are familiar to our students, having proven highly useful in the dialectical analysis by which we guide them through the process of psychoanalysis.”

The reference here is to Lacan’s elaboration of logical time, formalized in his 1945 text Le temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée. In this schema, time for understanding (temps pour comprendre) refers to the suspended moment in which the subject attempts to decipher the situation, while moment of concluding (moment de conclure) names the cut—the decisive act that exceeds pure reflection. These functions are not psychological phases but logical operators within a dialectical structure. Lacan applies them to the analytic process to underline how subjectivity does not unfold through linear introspection but through structural temporality, where decisions and identifications occur through scansion, in discontinuous leaps. They help analysts and students alike track the dynamics of transference, resistance, and interpretation, all of which are shaped not by understanding but by the logic of speech acts.

“It is indeed this assumption by the subject of his history, insofar as it is constituted by speech addressed to the other, that forms the foundation of the new method to which Freud gave the name psychoanalysis—not in 1904, as was once taught by an authority who, having cast off the cloak of prudent silence, revealed that day that he knew of Freud only the titles of his works, but indeed in 1896⁷.”

Psychoanalysis is founded not on recollection as memory, but on the subject’s assumption of their history through speech addressed to the Other. This assumption is not an admission of fact but an enunciation that takes up the position of the divided subject. The precise historical correction (1896, not 1904) is not just pedantic—it affirms that from the outset Freud’s project involved speech, subjectivity, and symbolic causality, not just technique or therapeutic aims. The polemical jab at an unnamed “authority” underscores Lacan’s concern with the misrecognition of Freud’s radical break: psychoanalysis is not a variation of psychology or medicine, but a new discourse, grounded in the symbolic order and the speaking subject.

“No more than Freud do we deny, in this analysis of the meaning of his method, the psychophysiological discontinuity manifested by the states in which the hysterical symptom occurs, nor that it can be treated by methods—hypnosis, even narcosis—that reproduce the discontinuity of these states.”

Lacan acknowledges the clinical reality of psychophysiological discontinuity in hysteria—manifested in phenomena like anesthesia, paralyses, or dissociative states. Similarly, he concedes that such states can be manipulated through hypnosis or narcosis, as Freud once practiced. But this empirical reality does not define the analytic field. These methods, while effective at removing symptoms, do not touch the unconscious structured by speech. Their success lies in suggestion, not interpretation. Lacan highlights the crucial shift: psychoanalysis does not aim to correct the functioning of the ego or nervous system, but to produce the subject’s relation to truth through speech.

“Simply, and as expressly as he forbade himself from a certain point on to resort to them, we exclude any reliance on these states, both to explain the symptom and to cure it.”

Lacan aligns himself with Freud’s renunciation of hypnosis as a means of analytic work. Once Freud encountered the limits of suggestion—particularly its failure to promote subjective responsibility—he turned definitively to free association and the talking cure. Similarly, Lacan rejects any method that bypasses the symbolic mediation of speech. To rely on altered states is to remain within an imaginary or physiological register, avoiding the dialectical process through which the subject is divided by the signifier. For both Freud and Lacan, true analytic work begins when speech is no longer circumvented, but engaged as the structuring medium of the unconscious.

“For if the originality of the method lies in the means it renounces, it is because the means it reserves for itself suffice to constitute a domain whose boundaries define the relativity of its operations.”

Psychoanalysis is defined as much by what it refuses as by what it embraces. Its originality lies in its abstention from suggestion, behavioral manipulation, or physiological intervention. The means it retains—speech, listening, interpretation—are sufficient to constitute a field with its own laws, that is, the analytic discourse. This field is not universal; it is relative to the structure it creates: transference, the unconscious as structured like a language, and the subject as divided. Psychoanalysis functions within these structural constraints, and its efficacy derives not from general principles of therapy, but from the logical consistency of its own symbolic operations.

“Its means are those of speech insofar as it confers meaning on the functions of the individual; its domain is that of concrete discourse insofar as it is the field of the subject’s trans-individual reality; its operations are those of history insofar as it constitutes the emergence of truth in the real.”

The means of psychoanalysis are speech, not as communication but as symbolic action. Through speech, the functions of the individual—symptoms, defenses, fantasies—are invested with meaning that emerges from the subject’s relation to the Other. Its domain is not internal psychic content but “concrete discourse”, meaning the structured speech addressed to the Other, which places the subject in a trans-individual field, shaped by language, law, and culture. The operations of psychoanalysis are historical in the Lacanian sense: not a chronology of events, but a symbolic reconstruction through which truth emerges in the real—the rupture, the symptom, the point where language fails, yet inscribes the subject.

“Firstly, indeed, when the subject enters into analysis, he accepts a position more constitutive in itself than all the directives by which he may more or less allow himself to be misled: that of interlocution, and we see no inconvenience in this remark leaving the listener nonplussed.”

From the moment the subject enters analysis, regardless of what he understands or intends, he is placed into the structural position of a speaker in interlocution. This position is more fundamental than any instruction, technique, or suggestion; it is the analytic frame itself that positions the analysand as a subject who speaks to an Other. Lacan deliberately foregrounds the function of address as constitutive of subjectivity within the analytic experience. Even if the listener is confused or left uncertain by this remark, this confusion is itself meaningful, because it demonstrates how discourse operates beyond intention, structured by the very act of being heard.

“For it gives us the opportunity to insist that the subject’s allocution involves an addressee⁸—in other words, that the speaker⁹ constitutes himself therein as intersubjectivity.”

Every speech act in analysis is an allocution, not mere expression, but addressed speech—and this address is not incidental but structural. The subject, by speaking, necessarily posits an Other, even if that Other is silent. This is why Lacan asserts that the speaker constitutes himself as intersubjectivity: subjectivity is not interiority or self-possession, but a function of being placed in a symbolic relation with an addressee. Even when the analysand believes he is talking to himself, the act of speech presupposes the Other’s presence. In Lacanian terms, this is the position of enunciation, which is distinct from the ego’s intention and where the unconscious speaks.

“Secondly, it is on the foundation of this interlocution, insofar as it includes the interlocutor’s response, that meaning is delivered for us from what Freud requires as the restitution of continuity in the subject’s motivations.”

The restoration of continuity in the subject’s motivations, a central demand in analytic work according to Freud, is not achieved by reconstructing events or by introspective clarity. It occurs through interlocution, which includes the function of response, even if the analyst remains largely silent. Meaning is not intrinsic to speech content; it emerges through the symbolic structure of the exchange—through the position of the Other, and through the subject’s orientation toward being heard. This continuity is not psychological coherence, but structural retroactivity, produced through speech acts within transference.

“The operational examination of this objective indeed shows us that it is fulfilled only in the intersubjective continuity of the discourse in which the subject’s history is constituted.”

When examined at the level of its operations, this continuity is shown to reside not in the subject’s isolated memory, but in the discourse that binds the subject to the Other. The subject’s history is not recalled but constituted in and through discourse, within a transference relation. The term intersubjective continuity refers not to emotional rapport but to the symbolic chain—the sequence of signifiers wherein the subject’s unconscious position emerges. In this process, continuity is less a matter of factual sequencing than a function of symbolic articulation, where gaps, lapses, and repetitions reveal the subject’s division.

“Thus the subject may rant about his history under the effect of any one of those drugs that numb consciousness and that have in our time received the name ‘truth serums,’ where the certainty of misinterpretation betrays the inherent irony of language.”

Chemical interventions, such as so-called truth serums, which lower inhibitions and prompt the subject to speak freely, are often seen as revealing the “truth” of the subject’s unconscious. Lacan categorically dismisses this. The speech produced under such pharmacological effects is structurally meaningless in analytic terms because it lacks the relation to the Other necessary to constitute subjective truth. Even if the content is biographical, the absence of symbolic positioning, of transferential address, ensures that what is produced is rhetorical noise, not the unconscious. The “certainty of misinterpretation” arises because the subject speaks outside the structure of discourse, revealing the irony of language: that meaning does not come from speaking alone, but from how and to whom one speaks.

“But even the retransmission of his recorded speech, even if performed by the mouth of his doctor, cannot, delivered to him in that alienated form, produce the same effects as psychoanalytic interlocution.”

Even if a session were recorded and replayed—even by the analyst—it would fail to reproduce the conditions under which analytic speech functions. The effect of speech is not reducible to its semantic content or its sound. What matters is the act of enunciation within a structured position of address to the Other. Repetition of the words in alienated form, detached from their moment of production and the scene of transference, nullifies their analytic efficacy. This reiterates that analysis functions not through communication, but through speech as symbolic action—that is, speech that locates the subject within the structure of desire and lack.

“Thus, it is in the position of a third term that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious becomes clear in its true foundation and can be simply formulated in these terms:”

Lacan introduces the third term—a structural position that goes beyond the dyad of patient and analyst. This third position is the unconscious itself, which emerges in the symbolic field of the analytic relation. Freud’s discovery becomes clear only when we understand that it is not the content of the unconscious that matters, but its structural function as that which interrupts, displaces, and distorts speech. This third term is not another person, but a register, a place from which truth erupts in the subject’s discourse—not directly, but through slips, failures, and misrecognitions. It marks the real of discourse.

“The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse, insofar as it is trans-individual, which is lacking to the subject’s disposal in order to reestablish the continuity of his conscious discourse.”

Lacan offers a concise structural definition: the unconscious is a part of discourse—not a storehouse of hidden contents, but a missing fragment, the remainder in the symbolic chain. It is “concrete discourse”, not abstract language, meaning speech as it is spoken, situated, and addressed. It is trans-individual, because it belongs not to the individual psyche but to the field of the Other’s language. The unconscious is not a foreign body within the psyche, but the structural gap that renders the subject divided—what is lacking to the subject in his attempt to produce a consistent narrative. It is this lack, this cut in the symbolic, that disrupts continuity and signals the return of truth in the real, precisely where the subject cannot say it.

“Thus disappears the paradox presented by the notion of the unconscious if one relates it to an individual reality.”

The so-called paradox of the unconscious—that thought could exist outside of awareness—arises only when the unconscious is conceived within the framework of individual psychology, as a private, internal mental space. This is a misunderstanding grounded in an ego-centered epistemology. Once the unconscious is re-situated within the symbolic order—as Lacan does—the paradox disappears, because the unconscious is no longer a thing located within the subject, but rather a function of discourse that exceeds the subject’s control. This repositioning eliminates the need to resolve a contradiction that was itself structurally misconstrued.

“For reducing it to unconscious tendency only resolves the paradox by eluding the experience which clearly shows that the unconscious participates in the functions of the idea, indeed of thought.”

To reduce the unconscious to “tendency”—as instinct, drive, or behavioral impulse—is to elide what Freud persistently maintained: that the unconscious has structure, and specifically the structure of thought. The unconscious is not merely a container of repressed affect but is operative at the level of representation, substitution, and contradiction. Freud’s clinical experience showed that the unconscious thinks, but in a logic of its own—primary process, condensation, displacement. Lacan restores this by emphasizing that the unconscious is structured like a language, and as such, it functions ideationally, not biologically.

“As Freud clearly insists, when, unable to avoid in unconscious thought the conjunction of contradictory terms, he provides it the viaticum of this invocation: sit venia verbo [may the word be pardoned – a Latin phrase invoking license for linguistic impropriety].”

Freud’s invocation of sit venia verbo occurs when he acknowledges the apparent logical absurdity of the unconscious: it tolerates contradictions, it joins what analytic logic would separate. Rather than dismiss the phenomenon, Freud seeks permission from language itself to name a form of thought that defies Aristotelian logic. Lacan seizes on this gesture to emphasize that Freud did not resolve the paradox but affirmed it, accepting that unconscious discourse follows another grammar. The phrase itself becomes emblematic of the epistemological humility required to speak of unconscious processes: it’s not that they are illogical, but that they follow a logic other than that of conscious reason.

“And rightly do we follow him in indeed placing the blame on the verb—but on that verb realized in discourse, which, like a ferret, runs from mouth to mouth, to give the act of the subject who receives its message the meaning that makes this act an act of his history and gives it its truth.”

The verb—understood here as the enunciated word in its discursive function—is not merely grammatical but symbolic. The unconscious speaks through the verb, and not through isolated images or drives. It emerges in discourse, slipping through lapses, slips of the tongue, or unintended phrases—like a ferret, agile and elusive, that moves from one subject to another. This animal metaphor reinforces the idea that the unconscious circulates between speaker and listener, not privately but trans-subjectively. When the subject receives this verbal return, it retroactively assigns meaning to their act, inserting it into their symbolic history, thereby constituting truth as an effect of the signifier.

“From then on, the objection of contradictio in terminis raised against unconscious thought by a psychology poorly separated from logic, collapses with the very distinction of the psychoanalytic domain insofar as it reveals the reality of discourse in its autonomy—and the eppur si muove! of the psychoanalyst joins Galileo’s in its impact, which is not that of the experience of fact, but that of the experimentum mentis.”

The classical logical objection to unconscious thought—its internal contradiction—is shown here to be rooted in a psychology still too indebted to formal logic. Psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by asserting the autonomy of discourse, meaning that language itself functions beyond conscious intent, and the unconscious is its manifestation. The reference to Galileo’s “eppur si muove!” (“and yet it moves!”) positions the analyst as a modern heretic, affirming the existence and efficacy of unconscious discourse in the face of prevailing rationalist paradigms. This is not a matter of empiricism, but of what Lacan calls an experimentum mentis—a mental experiment, a structural, logical articulation that reveals how the unconscious operates through speech.

“The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank or occupied by a lie: it is the censored chapter.”

The unconscious is not a hidden reservoir of instinct but a structural absence—a hole in the subject’s narrative, where something should be but is not, or is distorted by repression. The censored chapter is what the subject cannot say, and thus, where the truth of the subject lies in its absence. This blank is not simply forgotten content but the product of repression, and it returns through symptoms, dreams, and slips. The unconscious is what the subject does not know they know, and what is excluded from conscious discourse precisely because it touches on desire.

“But truth can be recovered; most often it is already written elsewhere. Namely:”

Truth in analysis is not invented but recovered, and it is already inscribed, albeit in displaced, encrypted forms. This is the work of interpretation—to trace the reinscription of the censored material across various formations of the unconscious. The subject’s truth resurfaces, and its recovery is not an act of discovery, but of reading the signifiers where it was already written. This signals a semiotic epistemology: the truth of the subject is deferred, displaced, but legible—in symptoms, in memories, in language.

“– in monuments: and this is my body, that is to say, the hysterical core of the neurosis where the hysterical symptom displays the structure of a language and is deciphered as an inscription which, once recovered, can without serious loss be destroyed;”

The body as monument refers to the conversion symptom in hysteria. The symptom is not a sign of organic dysfunction but a signifier, an inscription of repressed truth onto the body. It is readable, structured like a language, and available to deciphering by the analyst. Once interpreted—once its symbolic coordinates are restored—the symptom can be “destroyed”, not physically, but in its necessity. Its persistence depends on misrecognition; once the truth is spoken, the symptom’s function collapses. The metaphor of the monument underscores that the symptom is a construction, a memorial to a forgotten truth, not a brute fact.

“– in archival documents as well: and these are the memories of my childhood, just as impenetrable when I do not know their origin;”

The archive symbolizes repressed memory, particularly childhood memories, which often seem opaque or enigmatic precisely because they are cut off from their original context. These memories are not false, but their meaning is obscured by the operation of repression and retroactive fantasy. They are not directly accessible and cannot be understood in isolation; only through analysis, where they are reinscribed into discourse, can their origin and function be recovered. They become legible when connected to the signifying chain that determines the subject’s unconscious position. The archive, like the symptom and the monument, is a place where truth is stored in disguise, awaiting its reactivation through speech.

“– in semantic evolution: and this corresponds to the stock and meanings of the vocabulary particular to me, as well as to the style of my life and my character;”

The unconscious truth of the subject is also inscribed in the semantic field of their own language—their vocabulary, idioms, verbal habits, and stylistic peculiarities. Lacan points to semantic evolution as a register where subjective truth is sedimented. Each subject, in their use of language, bears traces of symbolic investments—the terms they overuse, the neologisms they invent, the clichés they cling to—forming a kind of lexical symptom. These speech patterns are not random but structure their style of life and character. What is called “character” here is not personality in the psychological sense, but a subjective positioning in relation to the signifier. Through analysis, this vocabulary can be decoded, not for its referents, but for its symptomatic logic—how it covers over or reveals unconscious formations.

“– in traditions too, even in legends which, in a heroized form, carry my story;”

The unconscious is not merely personal; it is also inscribed in collective myths and symbolic traditions. The subject’s history is often projected, refigured, or staged in the form of legend—tales, fantasies, and heroic narratives that seem external but in which the subject unconsciously locates their own destiny. Lacan stresses that the subject of the unconscious is interpellated by the symbolic order, which includes cultural traditions and transgenerational structures. In psychoanalytic work, these heroizing forms must be interpreted not as compensatory fictions, but as symbolic mediations of desire and lack. The subject often misrecognizes themselves in these stories, but they nonetheless serve as scenes of self-representation through which unconscious truth emerges.

“– in the traces, finally, inevitably left by the distortions required to stitch the adulterated chapter into the chapters that frame it, and whose sense my exegesis will reestablish.”

When repressed material is woven into the subject’s life narrative, it does not go unnoticed; it leaves “traces”—inconsistencies, contradictions, and structural distortions. These signifying anomalies betray the presence of an adulterated chapter, one censored or rewritten. These traces demand exegesis—a close, interpretive reading—much like textual analysis in philology or theology. The analyst, like an exegete, must reconstruct the logic of repression and displacement, restoring to the chain of discourse the truth dislocated by censorship. The metaphor of stitching underscores that the symptom is the seam, and it is in these distortions that the unconscious speaks most forcefully.

“The student who should have the idea—rare enough, to be sure, that our teaching makes it a point to spread it—that to understand Freud, reading Freud is preferable to reading Mr. Fenichel, will come to realize upon undertaking it, that what we have just expressed is so little original, even in tone, that not a single metaphor appears here which Freud’s work does not repeat with the regularity of a motif through which its very weave shines forth.”

Lacan delivers a polemical reminder: to read Freud is to read Freud—not his commentators or systematizers. This is a direct critique of Otto Fenichel, whose work sought to normalize and codify Freudian thought, reducing it to a technical manual of stages and mechanisms. Lacan opposes this empiricist flattening, insisting that Freud’s metaphors are not decorative but structural, and their recurrence is significant. Freud’s writing is not a veil over clinical content but is itself a clinical act, a discursive construction that conveys the movement of the unconscious. The metaphors Lacan uses are not imported—they are native to Freud’s own articulation, repeated with a function, forming a network of motifs that express the symbolic fabric of subjectivity.

“He will more easily grasp, at every moment in his practice, that, like the negation which its repetition cancels, these metaphors lose their metaphorical dimension, and he will recognize that this is so because he operates within the proper domain of metaphor, which is none other than the synonym of symbolic displacement at play in the symptom.”

The metaphor loses its metaphorical function when repeated enough within analytic practice—it becomes operative, structural, rather than illustrative. This occurs not because metaphor is emptied of meaning, but because the analyst comes to work within the very field of metaphor—understood here in its Lacanian sense as symbolic substitution. Metaphor, in Lacan’s topology, is a mechanism of the unconscious, wherein one signifier replaces another, producing the condensations and displacements of symptoms. The student who grasps this sees that psychoanalytic work is not about interpreting metaphorically, but about locating the metaphorization that structures the subject’s discourse, especially in symptoms. The symptom is itself a metaphor, one whose terms must be deciphered through the signifier.

“He will then better judge the imaginary displacement that motivates the work of Mr. Fenichel by measuring the difference in consistency and technical effectiveness between referring to so-called organic stages of individual development and the search for particular events in a subject’s history.”

Fenichel’s approach is criticized here for replacing symbolic reading with imaginary and developmental schemas—the reference to organic stages (oral, anal, phallic) reflects a model of ontogeny which imagines psychic development as a biological unfolding. Lacan opposes this naturalized model to a structural one: the symbolic ordering of signifiers, where meaning arises through specific events and signifying chains, not through fixed phases. The search for particular events does not mean empirical excavation, but the analytic uncovering of how the subject positions themselves within their own history—a history retroactively constituted in and through discourse. The contrast is between technical consistency grounded in the symbolic, and imaginary coherence that lacks dialectical effectiveness.

“It is exactly the difference that separates authentic historical research from the supposed laws of history, of which it may be said that each era finds its philosopher to propagate them according to the prevailing values.”

This final analogy frames Lacan’s distinction between Fenichel’s developmental law-making and Freud’s clinical historicity in terms of historiography. Authentic history works from the archival, the singular, the event, whereas pseudo-history operates with abstract laws that simply reflect the ideological values of the present. The analyst who insists on rigid phases and universal schemas is like the historian who projects contemporary values onto the past, rather than letting the structural specificity of the documents speak. The metaphor reinforces Lacan’s thesis that psychoanalysis is not a science of universal mechanisms, but a practice of symbolic interpretation, where each subject’s truth emerges from their unique position in the symbolic order.

“This is not to say that there is nothing to retain from the various meanings uncovered in the general course of history along that path that leads from Bossuet (Jacques-Bénigne) to Toynbee (Arnold), and is punctuated by the constructions of Auguste Comte and Karl Marx.”

Lacan acknowledges that while psychoanalysis must remain cautious about borrowing models from historical philosophy, one cannot entirely dismiss the contributions of classical historiography. The reference to figures like Bossuet, Comte, Marx, and Toynbee traces a lineage of thought where historical meaning is construed as a system or direction—whether providential (Bossuet), positivist (Comte), materialist (Marx), or civilizational (Toynbee). These thinkers sought to impose global structures on history, mapping its movement through law, dialectic, or cultural evolution. Lacan grants that these schemas uncover certain layers of meaning, but only within a symbolic or ideal framework, not as operational models for psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity.

“It is well known that they are as little suited to orienting research into the recent past as they are to reasonably anticipating the events of tomorrow.”

The critique intensifies by asserting that such historical theories—grand or deterministic—are of little practical value in engaging with contemporary phenomena or future developments. This is particularly relevant for psychoanalysis, which deals with the singular subject, not the abstract collective. Like prophecy disguised as science, these models often fail to account for the discontinuities and contingencies that structure both personal and historical events. The analyst cannot predict a subject’s trajectory based on universal schemas any more than a historian can deduce tomorrow from Comte’s or Marx’s system.

“Besides, they are modest enough to defer their certainties to the day after tomorrow, and not too prudish either to admit the revisions that allow them to predict what happened yesterday.”

With irony, Lacan points out that these historical theories are retrospectively flexible: they can revise themselves to fit past events while constantly postponing any verifiable prediction. Their explanatory power emerges only after the fact, and even then, is subject to reinterpretation based on ideological need. This post hoc rationalization underscores the difference between historical systems as symbolic ideals versus the analytic act, which treats meaning as emergent in the present of speech and tied to the subject’s singular structure, not to retrospective coherence.

“If their role is thus minimal for scientific progress, their interest lies elsewhere: in their considerable role as ideals. For it leads us to distinguish what might be called the primary and secondary functions of historicization.”

Lacan pivots to define the value of these historical systems not in their explanatory force but in their function as symbolic ideals. As ideological structures, they shape how people imagine their place in time. This leads to a distinction between primary and secondary historicization: the former being the subject’s immediate symbolization of events as they occur, the latter their retrospective integration into a coherent narrative. This split mirrors Freud’s Nachträglichkeit (deferred action), and supports Lacan’s argument that history, like analysis, is a structure of meaning, not a linear unfolding.

“To affirm of psychoanalysis as of history that as sciences they are sciences of the particular does not mean that the facts with which they deal are purely accidental, if not fictitious, and that their ultimate value is reduced to the raw aspect of trauma.”

Psychoanalysis, like historiography, engages with singularities, but that does not mean it deals only in arbitrary anecdotes or fictional reconstructions. Lacan refutes any assumption that psychoanalysis is simply a working-through of traumatic fragments, suggesting instead that both analysis and history are concerned with the structured emergence of meaning in particular cases. The subject’s life is not a sum of raw traumas; rather, these events are symbolized, woven into a narrative framework. The value of the analytic work is not in cataloguing experiences but in reading how they function within the subject’s symbolic structure.

“Events are generated within a primary historicization, in other words, history is already being made on the stage where it will one day be played once written, both in the internal forum and in the external one.”

This concept of primary historicization echoes Lacan’s broader theory of symbolic inscription. Events are not merely lived and then remembered; they are immediately placed within a symbolic framework, both in the inner world of the subject and in the external field of the Other. The analytic session, like history, deals with events retroactively constructed as meaningful only when inscribed in discourse. The “stage” implies that all historicization is already theatrical: a structuration of the real through symbolic mediation, which the subject will later “play” as their life story.

“At a given time, a riot in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine is experienced by its actors as a victory or defeat of Parliament or the Court; at another time, as a victory or defeat of the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.”

This historical example illustrates how meaning is not intrinsic to events but produced within ideological frames. The same riot can signify radically different things depending on the symbolic order within which it is interpreted. In psychoanalysis, this demonstrates how the same symptom—the same “event” in a subject’s discourse—can be re-signified depending on the subject’s relation to the Other’s discourse. It is not the content but the structural position of the subject that determines meaning. This example also reflects the psychoanalytic insight that memory is always mediated by the signifier.

“And although it is always ‘the people,’ to speak as Retz, who pay the price, it is not at all the same historical event—we mean that they do not leave the same kind of memory in the minds of men.”

Cardinal de Retz’s aphorism reinforces that despite the material continuity of suffering, the meaning of events changes based on the symbolic frame in which they are interpreted. The “people” are a structural placeholder for a recurring position of loss or sacrifice, yet the historical inscription of their suffering shifts. Likewise, in psychoanalysis, the trauma or symptom may appear constant, but its subjective meaning is mutable, dependent on how the subject takes up their story in speech. What matters is not the event itself but the signifying network into which it is inserted—and the place from which the subject speaks it.

“Namely, with the disappearance of the reality of Parliament and the Court, the first event will revert to its traumatic value, susceptible to a progressive and genuine erasure, if its meaning is not expressly revived.”

Historical events, once severed from their original symbolic frame—such as the political institutions (Parliament, Court) that once gave them meaning—may lose their discursive inscription, reverting to the status of trauma. Without a living symbolic context that revives and rearticulates their meaning, the event becomes mute, lapsing into the real as a traumatic trace. This parallels the psychoanalytic notion of the uninscribed event that, lacking symbolization, becomes lodged as a symptom or repressed fragment, vulnerable to erasure or meaningless repetition unless interpreted. The traumatic effect persists precisely when symbolic reworking is absent.

“Whereas the memory of the second will remain vivid even under censorship—just as the amnesia of repression is one of the liveliest forms of memory—as long as there are people who submit their revolt to the order of the struggle for the political advent of the proletariat, that is, people for whom the key words of dialectical materialism carry meaning.”

In contrast, an event invested with enduring symbolic meaning—such as proletarian revolt framed within dialectical materialism—continues to function even under repression, much like the return of the repressed. This is because the structure of meaning persists through the discourse of the Other. Memory, here, is not individual recollection but symbolic transmission, and censorship does not abolish it; it may even intensify its return, much like repression in analysis leads to symptomatic formations. The example reflects how master signifiers (“proletariat,” “struggle”) allow certain events to remain subjectivized, while others fall into traumatic silence. The vividness of a repressed memory does not depend on conscious access, but on the symbolic network in which it remains anchored.

“It would thus be saying too much to claim that we are now transferring these remarks to the field of psychoanalysis, since they are already there, and the disentangling they produce between the technique of deciphering the unconscious and the theory of instincts, even of drives, goes without saying.”

This transition is not a metaphorical shift from history to psychoanalysis; the logic described is already psychoanalytic. The example functions within the same structure that governs the unconscious. The deciphering of unconscious formations is not about drives as biological realities but about meaning, symbolic articulation, and the history the subject constructs through speech. The disentanglement Lacan points to is between a technique oriented by the signifier and one distorted by biological instinct theories. This distinction underlies the Lacanian critique of ego psychology and instinct-based models, which occlude the symbolic function of the unconscious.

“What we help the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history—that is to say, we assist him in perfecting the current historicization of the facts that have already determined, in his existence, a certain number of historical ‘turning points.'”

The analytic task is to help the subject construct their unconscious as history—not as a factual chronicle, but as a symbolic order of meaning. This involves retroactively historicizing key subjective events—“turning points”—which are often constituted as such only through analysis. These points are not defined by their objective content but by their function within the subject’s signifying structure. The unconscious, as Lacan consistently teaches, is not a place but a temporal logic, and it is through speech that these moments are inscribed, displaced, and reinterpreted.

“But if they played that role, it is already as historical facts, that is, as recognized in a certain meaning or censored within a certain order.”

Events gain the status of turning points only if they are already symbolized—either as acknowledged meanings or as censored fragments. Whether spoken or repressed, they are always caught in a symbolic structure, which gives them their status as historical facts. This supports the psychoanalytic view that there is no pre-symbolic trauma that remains untouched; what counts is how the event is located within the subject’s speech and discourse, which either gives it meaning or displaces it into symptomatic formations. Censorship, repression, and interpretation are not external to these events—they are what makes them events for the subject.

“Thus, any fixation on a so-called instinctual stage is above all a historical stigma: a page of shame to be forgotten or erased, or a page of glory that obligates.”

So-called instinctual stages—oral, anal, phallic—are not fixed biological stages but symbolically inscribed scenes that the subject retroactively constitutes as moments of guilt, shame, or identification. Lacan refers to these as “historical stigmas,” meaning they are marks in the subject’s discourse that function as symbolic residues, not natural phases. Whether the subject seeks to erase, deny, or glorify them, their structure is always overdetermined by language and fantasy. The eroticization or moralization of these stages belongs to the imaginary and symbolic order, not to biology.

“But what is forgotten returns in actions, and erasure contradicts what is spoken elsewhere, just as obligation perpetuates in the symbol the very mirage in which the subject was caught.”

Repression is not disappearance. What is forgotten returns, and this return is often acted out—through symptoms, failures, or repetitive behaviors. Forgetting or erasing does not eliminate symbolic contradictions; it merely displaces them, often creating symptomatic incoherence with what is spoken elsewhere. The “obligation” to uphold a repressed ideal—an identification or moral imperative—may perpetuate the phantasmatic trap from which the subject cannot extract themselves. This obligation functions as a symbolic command, sustained by the subject’s unconscious allegiance to the Other’s desire, reinforcing the imaginary capture of the ego in a mirage—a specular image that structures but deceives. The work of analysis aims to traverse this fantasy, enabling the subject to recognize their position in the symbolic matrix and thereby dislodge the repetitions of the real.

“To put it briefly, instinctual stages are already, when they are lived, organized in subjectivity.”

The so-called instinctual stages—oral, anal, phallic—do not exist as raw biological experiences. From the moment they are “lived,” they are already inscribed within subjectivity, that is, already mediated by the symbolic order, organized in and through language and the desire of the Other. The child does not experience bodily functions as natural instincts, but as signifiers caught in a web of intersubjective relations. Thus, even the earliest bodily experience is structured like a discourse, not biologically determined but symbolically overdetermined. The notion of “stage” is already a historicization, a narrative construction that emerges from how the subject enters language.

“And to be clear, the subjectivity of the child who records as victories and defeats the saga of sphincter training, deriving jouissance from the imaginary sexualization of his cloacal orifices, turning excremental expulsions into aggression, retentions into seduction, and relaxations into symbols—that subjectivity is not fundamentally different from the subjectivity of the psychoanalyst who tries to reconstruct, in order to understand them, the forms of love he calls pregenital.”

The child’s experience of so-called “sphincter training” is not reducible to a behavioral or developmental episode; it is already invested with jouissance, structured by imaginary and symbolic identifications, and organized through victories and defeats, mimicking the dialectical logic of desire. Excrement becomes not just a biological waste product but a symbolic object, manipulated in the field of demand, seduction, and aggression—precisely as a way of staging the relation to the Other’s desire. Importantly, Lacan stresses the continuity of subjectivity: the analyst who attempts to reconstruct these dynamics in the clinic is subject to the same symbolic mechanisms. The analyst’s reading of pregenital love is not from a place of superiority but is embedded in the same intersubjective structure as that of the analysand.

“In other words, the anal stage is no less purely historical when it is lived than when it is rethought, nor is it less purely founded in intersubjectivity.”

Even at the moment it is experienced, the so-called anal stage is already a historical construction: it is structured by the Other’s demand, by language, and by the symbolic positions the subject assumes. It is not a biological phase but a subjective event, which means that its reality lies not in a physiological unfolding but in the structure of intersubjective meaning. Retrospective analysis does not invent its historical status—it only makes explicit what was already determined by the symbolic from the beginning. This assertion dismantles all naturalistic or developmentalist interpretations of psychosexuality that claim a pre-symbolic grounding.

“On the contrary, its homologation as a stage of so-called instinctual maturation leads even the best minds directly into error, to the point of seeing in it the reproduction in ontogenesis of a stage of the animal phylum that must be sought among ascarids, or even jellyfish—a speculation which, though clever under the pen of a Balint, leads elsewhere to the most inconsistent fantasies, even to the madness that seeks in the protist the imaginary schema of bodily intrusion whose fear would govern female sexuality.”

To reduce these stages to biological homologues—as if human psychological development mirrored evolutionary stages—is to miss the structure of subjectivity entirely. This critique targets any phylogenetic analogy, such as those suggested by Michael Balint or others, who try to explain psychic formations through biological regressions. Comparing the anal stage to worm-like organisms (ascarids) or jellyfish implies a myth of organic causality, wherein the subject is rooted in a biological body rather than constituted in language and desire. These are imaginary constructions that pathologize sexuality, particularly female sexuality, by projecting archaic images onto it—an ideological fantasy masquerading as theory.

“Why then not look for the image of the ego in the shrimp, on the pretext that both recover their shell after each molt?”

This sarcastic question pushes the critique to the limit: if one accepts such naturalistic analogies, then one could absurdly locate the ego’s developmental dynamics in the molting behavior of crustaceans. The ego, as a function of the imaginary, does indeed involve images of consistency and enclosure, but to literalize this by linking it to shrimp is to collapse the symbolic into the biological—a category error that psychoanalysis cannot afford. The absurdity here underscores how speculative biology, when applied to the psyche, leads to theoretical incoherence.

“A man named Jaworski, in the years 1910–1920, constructed a rather impressive system in which ‘the biological plan’ extended to the very limits of culture, and which precisely assigned to the order of crustaceans its historical counterpart, if memory serves, in some belated Middle Ages, under the banner of a common flowering of armor—leaving no form of animal unpaired with its human equivalent, not excluding mollusks and bedbugs.”

This historical footnote ridicules the biologizing tendencies that seek to map human subjectivity or cultural epochs onto animal taxonomies. The system devised by Jaworski, extending a biological metaphor into cultural history, exemplifies the risk of sliding from symbolic structure to zoological analogy. Matching mollusks with human dispositions, or crustaceans with medieval social forms, demonstrates the fascination with natural images at the expense of understanding how human desire, language, and social organization are structured by the symbolic. For Lacan, the only meaningful homologies are between signifiers, not species. What analysis must track is not organic forms but the logic of displacement, substitution, and representation that governs the unconscious.

“Analogy is not metaphor, and the use philosophers of nature have made of it requires the genius of a Goethe, whose very example is not encouraging.”

Lacan distinguishes sharply between analogy and metaphor, a difference central to psychoanalytic method. Analogy—as used by natural philosophers like Goethe—operates by asserting resemblances between domains (e.g., leaf and organ, animal and man), seeking correspondences that are often based on external form or function. In contrast, metaphor, as Lacan employs it, is a linguistic mechanism, a substitution within a signifying chain that generates new meaning through displacement. Even in the case of a thinker as conceptually rich as Goethe, analogical reasoning leads away from the symbolic structure of language toward an imaginary unity. For psychoanalysis, this approach is both seductive and misleading.

“None is more repugnant to the spirit of our discipline, and it is in expressly distancing himself from it that Freud opened the path proper to dream interpretation, and with it, to the notion of analytic symbolism.”

Freud’s dream interpretation marks a break from naturalistic or analogical systems, inaugurating a symbolic logic proper to the unconscious. This path is grounded not in universal analogies but in the contingency of signifiers—the mechanisms of condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy). Analytic symbolism is thus not based on fixed correspondences (e.g., sword equals phallus), but on how each subject’s symptom and dream symbolize desire through the structure of language. Freud’s symbolic work is not mythographic; it is structural and differential, and his distancing from analogy is what allows the unconscious to be treated as a language.

“This notion, we say, strictly contradicts analogical thinking, which a dubious tradition leads some, even among us, to still regard as compatible.”

Analytic symbolism, precisely because it is founded on signifying structure, is incompatible with analogy. Yet there persists a residual tradition, even within psychoanalysis, that treats symbolic interpretation as if it were a catalog of fixed correspondences—a regression to Jungian or pre-Freudian symbolic models, where universal meanings are assigned to images or objects. Lacan is denouncing the tendency to reify the symbol, as though it were tied to a shared mythological substrate, rather than to the subject’s position in the symbolic order. This is not a semantic quibble, but a theoretical rupture: analogy belongs to imaginary resonance, metaphor to symbolic substitution.

“That is why excess in the ridiculous should be used for its eye-opening value, because in exposing the absurdity of a theory, it will bring attention back to dangers that are anything but theoretical.”

Lacan invites us to take seriously the ridiculous extremes of certain psychoanalytic misuses—not to dismiss them, but to expose the structural flaw they reveal. When theoretical constructs devolve into absurd analogies or mythical justifications, this absurdity performs a function: it forces us to recognize the drift away from the symbolic grounding of the discipline. The danger is not merely theoretical because these distortions affect clinical practice, legitimizing therapeutic approaches that detach the subject from the unconscious structured as language, and instead offer ideological normalization.

“This mythology of instinctual maturation, built from selected pieces of Freud’s work, indeed gives rise to subjective problems whose vapor, condensed into ideals of the clouds, in turn irrigates the original myth with its showers.”

Theories of instinctual development, selectively drawn from Freud and reified into myth, create a circular logic: a fantasmatic system where clinical problems are interpreted through a developmental ideal (e.g., the “genital stage”), which then confirms the very myth that generated the ideal. Lacan exposes the pseudo-religious quality of these narratives: nebulous ideals are formed, and their condensation gives new rhetorical legitimacy to a biologically staged myth of maturation. The process functions like a mythological weather system—self-reinforcing and detached from the real dynamics of desire and speech.

“The finest pens distill their ink into equations intended to satisfy the demands of mysterious genital love, and they sign their attempt with an admission of non liquet.”

Even brilliant thinkers, when trapped in this mythic model, produce impressive formulations—”equations”—that nonetheless fail to define or locate the object of genital love, which remains obscure, idealized, and ungraspable. The Latin phrase non liquet (it is not clear) ironically underscores this: despite elaborate theory, nothing has been resolved, the object remains elusive. This exposes the limit of theorizing sexuality when cut off from its symbolic and imaginary conditions. Lacan is skeptical of any analytic discourse that fetishizes the genital stage as a telos, while foreclosing the structural impasses of desire.

“No one, however, seems shaken by the unease it causes, and rather one finds in it an opportunity to encourage all the Münchhausens of psychoanalytic normalization to pull themselves up by the hair in the hope of reaching the heaven of full realization of the genital object—or indeed of the object, full stop.”

The metaphor of Baron Münchhausen—who claimed to have pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair—parodies the efforts of psychoanalytic normalization: analysts who attempt to resolve the subject’s impasse by invoking an idealized endpoint, like the full realization of the genital object. This teleological fantasy reduces analysis to adaptation or developmental success, rather than confronting the impossible object (objet a) around which desire is structured. Lacan ridicules this idea of reaching “the object, full stop”, since for psychoanalysis, the object is always lost, always a gap, not a substance to be achieved. The genital stage as final goal is thus an ideological fantasy masquerading as theory.

“If we, psychoanalysts, are well placed to know the power of words, that is no reason to channel it toward the insoluble, nor to ‘bind heavy and unbearable burdens to lay them on men’s shoulders,’ as Christ’s curse on the Pharisees puts it in the Gospel according to Matthew.”

Psychoanalysts understand the power of speech, but this does not justify using it to fabricate ideals that become moral burdens—obligations imposed on the subject in the name of adaptation or maturity. Lacan recalls Christ’s condemnation of the Pharisees, who imposed impossible laws while offering no means of redemption. This biblical reference parallels the normalizing analytic discourse that posits unreachable developmental ideals, burdening the analysand with a mythical lack while ignoring the structural lack intrinsic to subjectivity. The task of psychoanalysis is not to bind the subject to norms, but to uncover the logic of desire and lack that shapes their experience—without resorting to mystifications of completeness.

“Thus the poverty of the terms by which we attempt to encompass a spiritual problem may well disappoint discerning minds, should they refer back to those that, even in their confusion, structured the ancient quarrels around Nature and Grace.”

Lacan addresses the poverty of contemporary psychoanalytic language when it attempts to engage with what might be called spiritual or existential questions—issues concerning subjective meaning, ethics, love, and truth. He contrasts this modern impoverishment with the rich theological vocabulary of past debates, especially the profound and structured scholastic conflicts over Nature and Grace in Christian thought. These debates, though confused at times, at least presupposed a rigorous symbolic structure, where concepts like salvation, grace, and law were linked to language and authority. In contrast, psychoanalytic discourse often struggles to articulate these dimensions without slipping into clinical reductionism or vague humanism, especially when it leans on psychological or sociological jargon.

“It may well also leave them concerned about the quality of the psychological and sociological effects to be expected from their use.”

This linguistic reduction has consequences: when psychoanalysis relies on imprecise or secularized language, the effects on the subject may be muted or misdirected. The symbolic power of discourse is diminished when analysts adopt sociological categories (norms, adaptation, deviation) or psychological platitudes (trauma, stages, coping). These frameworks fail to account for the structural dimension of desire, and risk normalizing rather than interpreting symptoms. The concern here is that meaning is flattened, and psychoanalysis loses its transformative power, which lies in its capacity to address the subject as divided, not as a self to be adjusted or rehabilitated.

“And one will wish that a better understanding of the functions of the logos may dispel the mysteries of our fantastical charismas.”

Lacan returns to logos, in its dual sense: both speech (language structured by the symbolic) and reason (logical articulation). A deeper grasp of how logos structures the subject—how speech produces subjectivity and organizes desire—might demystify the “fantastical charismas” that emerge when psychoanalysis falls into the imaginary register. These charismas might take the form of idealized notions of the analyst, false therapeutic authority, or quasi-spiritual imagery about love and wholeness. A rigorous understanding of speech as symbolic function counters these seductions, realigning psychoanalysis with its proper field: not suggestion or power, but interpretation and the structure of the signifier.

“To hold to a clearer tradition, perhaps we might hear the famous maxim where La Rochefoucauld tells us that ‘there are people who would never have been in love, had they never heard of love,’ not in the romantic sense of an entirely imaginary ‘realization’ of love that would turn it into a bitter objection, but as an authentic recognition of what love owes to the symbol and of what speech conveys of love.”

La Rochefoucauld’s maxim, which may seem cynical on the surface, is reinterpreted here through a Lacanian lens. It is not about dismissing love as illusion, but about recognizing that love is not a natural instinct, but something instituted through language. One falls in love only by entering a symbolic order in which love has a name, a place, a set of signifiers. Love is structurally dependent on speech, on the subject’s relation to the Other’s desire, and it is instituted by discourse. This is not a romantic idealism, nor a bitter skepticism, but an acknowledgment that love is a function of the signifier, just as desire is structured by lack. The quote thus serves as a bridge to re-anchor psychoanalytic concepts like love in the symbolic, rather than the imaginary of emotional authenticity or the biological of instinctual need.

“In any case, one need only turn to the work of Freud to measure the secondary and hypothetical rank in which he places the theory of instincts.”

Freud’s theory of instincts, though often invoked in analytic discourse, is consistently treated by Freud himself as provisional—a hypothetical scaffolding, secondary to the clinical material derived from the subject’s speech. Lacan emphasizes that for Freud, the unconscious is not reducible to biological drives; rather, it is constructed through symbolic formations, and the instinct theory was a theoretical compromise to bridge psychoanalysis with prevailing scientific models. Freud’s own work demonstrates that symbolic logic and subjective conflict take precedence over any biological determinism.

“In his eyes, it could not for a moment stand up to the smallest particular fact of a story, he insists, and the genital narcissism he invokes when summarizing the case of the Wolf Man shows clearly the contempt in which he holds the constructed order of libidinal stages.”

Freud privileges the singularity of the case, the narrative detail of the subject’s speech, over the general framework of stages (oral, anal, phallic, genital). In the Wolf Man case, when Freud refers to genital narcissism, it is not to affirm a stage of maturity, but to expose a regressive identification structured by the subject’s fantasy and relation to the signifier. The so-called stages are not developmental truths, but constructs retroactively imposed, and Freud’s handling of them reveals his critical distance. Lacan underlines that Freud treats the libidinal stages not as facts, but as interpretative tools, always subordinate to speech and symbolic position.

“What’s more, he only mentions instinctual conflict to immediately turn away from it, and to recognize in the symbolic isolation of the ‘I am not castrated,’ where the subject asserts himself, the compulsive form in which his heterosexual choice remains fixed, against the homosexualizing capture endured by the ego, reduced to the imaginary matrix of the primal scene.”

In the same case, the central subjective conflict is not between drives, but between symbolic positions. The child’s assertion “I am not castrated” marks a symbolic misrecognition, a point of subjective fixation where the ego defends itself through denial, while the unconscious remains captured by the homosexual fantasy embedded in the primal scene. The ego’s identification with the passivized position in the scene constitutes an imaginary capture, whereas the subject’s symbolic defense—”I am not castrated”—functions as a compulsion that masks a deeper division. This passage highlights that the subject’s position is not defined by instinctual content but by their relation to castration and the signifier.

“Such is, in truth, the subjective conflict, where it is only a matter of the vicissitudes of subjectivity, such that the ‘I’ wins and loses against the ‘me’ depending on the religious catechism or the indoctrinating Enlightenment, and whose effects Freud had the subject realize before enabling us to understand them through the dialectic of the Oedipus complex.”

The split between “I” (je) and “me” (moi) marks the fundamental division of the subject, a division Lacan traces throughout his work. The ego (moi) is a specular construct, shaped by imaginary identifications and external ideals (from religious to Enlightenment doctrines), while the subject (je) emerges only through speech and symbolic identification. Freud allows the subject to experience this division, notably in how their speech betrays unconscious truths that subvert egoic coherence. The Oedipus complex formalizes this structure: it is not a myth of familial relations, but a dialectical logic in which the subject’s desire is structured through the Name-of-the-Father and the law of castration.

“It is in the analysis of such a case that one sees clearly that the realization of perfect love is not a fruit of nature but of grace—that is, of an intersubjective agreement imposing its harmony on the torn nature that sustains it.”

Love, in this formulation, is not an instinctual culmination but a symbolic construction—what Lacan here calls grace. It arises from the subject’s relation to the Other, from intersubjective mediation, not from any natural drive. Love is not a simple affect but a function of the signifier—a pact, or agreement, that symbolizes and stabilizes the subject’s division. The phrase “torn nature” refers to the conflicted ground of the subject, structured by lack and alienation. Only through symbolic harmonization, always precarious, does something like “perfect love” appear—not as essence, but as effect of speech.

“But what then is this subject of which you endlessly speak? exclaims at last an exasperated listener. Have we not already learned from Monsieur de La Palice the lesson that all that is experienced by the individual is subjective?”

The ironic reference to Monsieur de La Palice, known for tautological truths, mocks the common-sense conflation of subjectivity with individuality. Lacan’s notion of the subject is not the same as the individual or the ego. It is precisely the divided subject of the unconscious, constituted through lack, speech, and symbolic structure. The exasperated listener voices the misunderstanding that the subject is merely the conscious experiencer, when in fact, for psychoanalysis, the subject is defined by what escapes experience—by the unconscious formations, the slips, the symptomatic failures. Subjectivity is not an internal coherence but a structural split, and it is this subject—the one spoken by the signifier—that psychoanalysis addresses.

“—Naive mouth, whose praise shall occupy my final days, open once more to hear me. No need to close your eyes.”

This invocation of the “naive mouth”—a poetic apostrophe—suggests a return to the originary space of speech, one not yet encumbered by theoretical pretense or egoic defenses. This “mouth” may be that of the subject, the analysand, or even the analyst as listener and speaker. It is naive not in the sense of ignorance, but in its closeness to the unmediated emergence of truth, to that point where speech still trembles at the edge of the unconscious. There is no need to “close your eyes” because the truth being approached is not visual or contemplative—it is spoken, heard in discourse.

“The subject extends far beyond what the individual experiences ‘subjectively,’ precisely as far as the truth he can reach—and which may perhaps emerge from the very mouth you have just closed again.”

The subject, in Lacanian terms, is not reducible to subjective experience as commonly understood. The individual’s conscious feelings or perceptions do not exhaust the reach of subjectivity. The subject of the unconscious is instead that which is structured through language, through what may emerge inadvertently, belatedly, or symptomatically in speech. The mouth that “has just closed again” signals the frequent resistance to allowing the truth to surface—the silence of repression, or the refusal to speak what speech threatens to uncover. Yet it is precisely from that mouth that the subject’s truth—his divided position in language—may emerge.

“Yes, this truth of his history is not entirely in his journal, and yet its place is marked there, in the painful jolts he feels at knowing only its repetitions, even in pages whose disorder provides him little relief.”

The subject’s personal narrative—his diary, his attempts to represent himself—does not capture the truth of his desire, which is instead registered in repetition, in involuntary symptoms, in the Real that resists symbolization. The subject may write and write, yet remain alienated from what drives him, and his diary becomes a testament not to knowledge but to failure, as the repetition compulsion marks the return of the repressed. Lacan draws attention to the fact that the truth of the subject is not to be found in coherence, but in the disordered jolts—the symptomatic ruptures in the narrative.

“That the unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other is what appears more clearly here than anywhere in the studies Freud devoted to what he calls telepathy, insofar as it manifests within the context of the analytic experience.”

The unconscious is not internal; it is extimate—within, but produced through the Other’s discourse. Lacan reclaims Freud’s texts on telepathy as exemplary of this principle, not because he affirms parapsychology, but because such phenomena reveal that the unconscious is not confined to the ego. “Telepathy” in this context becomes a metaphor for how subjective speech resonates with the unconscious of the Other, particularly the analyst, in ways that are not causally explicable. The unconscious is thus shown to be intersubjective, housed in a symbolic network, not in the subject as biological individual.

“Coincidence of the subject’s remarks with facts of which he cannot be informed, but which always move within the connections of another experience in which the psychoanalyst is the interlocutor—coincidence also most often consisting in a purely verbal convergence, even a homonymy, or which, if it includes an act, involves the acting-out of an analysand’s patient or a child undergoing analysis by the analysand.”

Lacan elaborates how strange coincidences in analytic work—such as a subject unknowingly naming a fact in the analyst’s life, or referencing the discourse of someone else in their analytic network—demonstrate that meaning circulates in a wider symbolic field. These aren’t magical connections but signifying resonances: the subject speaks in ways that correspond to another’s discourse (the analyst’s, another analysand’s, etc.). These events often hinge on language itself—homonyms, puns, verbal echoes—indicating that the unconscious operates not through facts, but through the logic of the signifier. They remind us that the subject is caught in a network of discourses, not a self-enclosed narrative.

“Cases of resonance within communicating networks of discourse, whose exhaustive study would illuminate analogous facts presented by everyday life.”

These phenomena underscore that subjectivity is constituted through overlapping discourses—not just the analysand’s internal logic, but in relation to the symbolic chains of others. What appears anomalous is actually the functioning of language, where the signifier always implies the Other. If studied fully, such cases would show how even outside the clinic, the subject’s speech and behavior are shaped by displaced, echoed, or anticipated discourses. Lacan hints at a much broader field of psychoanalytic investigation, where the networks of signifiers that structure desire are not limited to one speaker.

“The omnipresence of human discourse may perhaps one day be embraced under the open sky of a total communication of its text.”

In this speculative moment, Lacan gestures to a future in which the totality of human discourse could be thought together—as if language, in its structural ubiquity, were mapped or embraced in its entirety. This is not a utopia of transparency or mutual understanding, but an acknowledgment that the symbolic order is everywhere—that no speech escapes the law of language, the grammar of the unconscious. The “open sky” evokes both openness and the impossibility of closure: language is totalizing but incomplete, infinite and yet governed by gaps and misrecognitions.

“This is not to say that there will be greater agreement. But this is the field that our experience polarizes within a relationship that is only apparently dyadic, for any attempt to structure it in merely dual terms is as theoretically inadequate as it is technically disastrous.”

Even if all discourse were accounted for, it would not guarantee agreement, because symbolic mediation is inherently fractured. In the analytic situation, the relation between analyst and analysand appears dyadic, but it is always triadic, structured by the big Other—the symbolic law, language, and desire that exceed both speaker and listener. Treating the analytic encounter as a simple two-person relationship—a dialogical exchange—misses the structural mediation of the signifier. The analytic field is structured by what is not present, by the unconscious and its law, and to ignore this is to misread both theory and clinical technique.

II SYMBOL AND LANGUAGE AS STRUCTURE AND LIMIT OF THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

The new section title declares Lacan’s intention to formalize what has been illustrated thus far: that language is not simply a medium but a structure that determines the field of psychoanalysis. The symbol does not merely represent; it orders, limits, and produces the subject. This title sets the ground for articulating how the symbolic order is both constitutive and bounding—the very frame within which analytic work occurs.

“Τὴν ἀρχὴν ὅτι καὶ λαλῶ ὑμῖν.” (Gospel according to Saint John, viii, 25.)

This Greek citation from John—“What I have been telling you from the beginning”—evokes the primacy of speech. In the Gospel context, it is Christ affirming that his identity has always been spoken, aligning with the Lacanian claim that the subject is constituted in and through speech. This epigraph sets the tone: the symbolic precedes the subject, and what matters is not truth as essence, but truth as what is said, again emphasizing that psychoanalysis begins in language.

“‘Do crosswords.’ (Advice to a young psychoanalyst.)”

This ironic, even humorous, piece of advice functions on multiple levels. Crosswords rely on language play, ambiguity, double meanings, slips, substitutions—precisely the operations of the unconscious as structured like a language. The analyst must train in deciphering the signifier, understanding its layers, gaps, and displacements. Doing crosswords is thus not trivial: it’s a model for analytic listening, where what is said must be decoded through its formal structure, not its surface message. This advice captures the rigor and cunning demanded by the work of interpretation.

“To resume the thread of our discourse, let us repeat that it is by reducing the history of the particular subject that analysis touches on relational Gestalten, which it extrapolates into a regular development; but that neither genetic psychology nor differential psychology—which may be enlightened by it—falls within its domain, as they require observational and experimental conditions that share with those of analysis only homonymy.”

The analytic act traces the history of the subject, not in the sense of compiling a factual biography, but by isolating signifying structures—configurations of desire, repetition, fantasy—that Lacan here calls “relational Gestalten.” These are not empirical types or schemas but structural forms that emerge from the symbolic field of speech. Analysis may seem to yield general patterns—regularities extrapolated from singular cases—but it remains fundamentally distinct from disciplines like genetic psychology (which studies developmental stages) or differential psychology (which analyzes inter-individual traits), because these rely on experimental, observational methodologies. Their similarity to analysis is merely homonymic—they deal with “subjects,” “psychic functions,” or “development,” but they do so under a different epistemological regime, foreign to the logic of the signifier. Psychoanalysis does not observe; it interprets. It does not compare; it listens for the truth of the subject as structured by language.

“Let us go even further: what detaches itself as raw psychology from common experience (which only the professional of ideas confuses with sensory experience)—namely, in some suspension of everyday concern, the astonishment that arises from what pairs beings in a disparity exceeding that of the grotesques of a Leonardo or a Goya—or the surprise provoked by the sheer density of a skin against the caress of a palm animated by discovery, not yet dulled by desire—this, one may say, is abolished in an experience resistant to such whims, unyielding to such mysteries.”

Here Lacan addresses the phenomenological register of “raw psychology,” which arises not from scientific protocols but from a suspension of the quotidian that allows an aesthetic or existential astonishment—an encounter with the singular, the surreal, the viscerally unfamiliar, like the grotesques of Goya or the textures of embodied experience. This pre-theoretical psychology, with its capacity for poetic sensitivity, is contrasted with the resistant sobriety of psychoanalysis. The analytic situation does not indulge in romantic phenomenology; it is structured by the insistence of the signifier, by the Other’s demand, and by the symbolic coordinates of desire. The analyst is not guided by mystery or astonishment, but by the logic of discourse, which is precisely what subdues these aesthetic whims. Lacan does not disparage this domain—he signals that it may offer something valuable—but he affirms that analysis, as such, must operate elsewhere.

“A psychoanalysis normally proceeds to its end without revealing much of what the patient holds as specific to his sensitivity to blows and colors, to the swiftness of his reflexes or the weaknesses of his flesh, to his power of retention or invention, or even to the liveliness of his tastes.”

The analytic process rarely touches the surface of sensorial uniqueness or what one might associate with an individual’s natural temperament or physiological profile. The subject may have exceptional sensory experiences or distinctive corporeal features, but these do not enter the analytic field unless they are symbolized—taken up in the chain of signifiers. The unconscious is not concerned with the raw material of perception or neurophysiological functions unless these are woven into discourse. Psychoanalysis does not aim to map individual psychophysical differences, nor to account for intellectual or aesthetic preferences unless they appear as metonymic traces of desire or fantasy. What remains untouched are the somatic details not symbolized, precisely because analysis proceeds via language and not sensory or behavioral analysis.

“This paradox is only apparent and is due to no personal shortcoming, and if it can be explained by the negative conditions of our experience, it merely urges us all the more to question what is positive in that experience.”

The fact that analysis remains silent on so much of what is individual may appear paradoxical: how can a method devoted to the singularity of the subject leave untouched these so-called “personal” dimensions? Lacan clarifies that this is not a deficiency of the method, nor a failure of the analyst or analysand, but a consequence of the negative conditions that structure the analytic setting—primarily, its grounding in speech and the unconscious structured as a language. This observation leads to a renewed focus on what analysis actually produces: not knowledge of empirical difference, but access to truth—to what is positive in the psychoanalytic sense: the subject’s relation to the Other, to desire, to castration, and to the symbolic coordinates of their being. The paradox thus resolves itself in the very limit that defines the analytic field.

“For it cannot be resolved by the efforts of those who—like those philosophers Plato mocked for letting their appetite for the real lead them to embrace trees—take every episode where reality flickers and slips away as a lived reaction for which they show such a taste.”

Lacan targets those who, seduced by a phenomenological immediacy, mistake lived experience for truth—those who treat every emotional fluctuation or sensory affect as profound, imagining that the real can be apprehended in its pure, pre-symbolic form. His allusion to Plato’s critique, likely drawn from the Phaedrus, ridicules the kind of thinker who prefers the “truth” of nature or empirical experience over dialogue and reason—a misplaced appetite for the “real” as raw substance, rather than structured lack. These psychoanalysts follow a mirage of the Real, attempting to grasp it directly, without confronting its structural inaccessibility via the symbolic.

“These are the same people who, aiming for what lies beyond language, respond to the ‘prohibition on touching’ written into our rule with a sort of obsession.”

This refers to those analysts who, in pursuit of a preverbal or bodily ‘truth’, fetishize sensorial immediacy, especially within transference. The ethical prohibition in psychoanalysis—such as no physical contact—exists precisely to maintain the symbolic space necessary for interpretation. Yet these practitioners, Lacan notes ironically, transgress this symbolic function by becoming obsessed with its limit. Their focus on what is beyond speech—touch, smell, bodily gesture—becomes a way to bypass the unconscious structured as language, and therefore the very structure of the analytic setting.

“No doubt, in this approach, sniffing one another will become the pinnacle of transferential reaction.”

This hyperbolic image satirizes the regression of analytic technique into animalistic instinctuality, replacing interpretation with olfactory attunement—a parody of “deep” relational sensitivity. Lacan’s point is cutting: when analysis loses its anchoring in the symbolic, it descends into imaginary mimicry and biologized behaviorism, where bodily proximity replaces speech, and transferential effects are misread as instinctual truths. This grotesque inversion of analytic logic turns what should be a speech-based relation to the Other into an affective or sensual feedback loop.

“We are not exaggerating: a young psychoanalyst, in the course of his candidacy, may today salute in such olfactory discernment of his subject—obtained after two or three years of futile psychoanalysis—the long-awaited emergence of the object relation, and may receive the dignus est intrare of our votes as a guarantee of his capabilities.”

Lacan escalates his critique by pointing out that institutional psychoanalysis may even validate such misreadings—mistaking sensory rapport or bodily attunement for successful identification with the analytic object. The Latin phrase dignus est intrare (“he is worthy to enter”) mockingly imitates ritualistic initiation, suggesting that admission to training societies now rests on empty signs of pseudo-clinical success, rather than fidelity to analytic logic. A psychoanalyst may finish their own analysis without grasping its symbolic function, yet be legitimated institutionally—a sign, perhaps, of psychoanalysis already in crisis of degeneration.

“If psychoanalysis can become a science—for it is not yet one—and if it is not to degenerate in its technique—and perhaps that has already happened—we must recover the meaning of its experience.”

Lacan makes two bold claims: first, that psychoanalysis is not yet a science—because it lacks a fully formalized structure grounded in language; and second, that its clinical practice is already in decline, corrupted by misunderstandings of its foundations. The only remedy is a return to the meaning of the analytic experience, which lies not in affect, adaptation, or bodily knowledge, but in the subject’s relation to the signifier, to desire, and to truth as unveiled through speech. This recovery is not nostalgic but structural: analysis must be re-founded on its symbolic core.

“We could do no better for that purpose than to return to the work of Freud.”

Lacan reaffirms his method: a return to Freud, not in the sense of clinging to doctrine, but of retrieving what in Freud’s work remains radically misunderstood—the primacy of language, the function of desire, and the logic of the unconscious as speech. This return is not backward-looking but structurally oriented, aiming to re-anchor analysis in its origin, which was always already symbolic.

“It is not enough to call oneself a technician to feel authorized, from the fact that one does not understand Freud III, to reject him in the name of a Freud II one believes one understands; nor does one’s ignorance of Freud I excuse considering the five great case histories as a series of examples as poorly chosen as poorly presented, even if one marvels that the grain of truth they held managed to survive.”

Lacan denounces the technical reduction of Freud into phases—Freud I, II, III, often used to justify selective readings. “Freud I” refers to early Freud (trauma, seduction theory), “Freud II” to structural formulations (topographical and economic models), and “Freud III” to metapsychological complexities (death drive, repetition, Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Lacan warns against analysts who dismiss what they fail to understand, favoring a digestible Freud II while ignoring the foundational clinical texts—the five major case histories (Dora, Rat Man, Wolf Man, Little Hans, and Schreber). These texts are not flawed anecdotes but structural exempla, staging the dialectic of speech, fantasy, and desire. Their survival is not miraculous but testament to their structural power, even if misunderstood.

Lacan here reasserts that a faithful reading of Freud—not merely in content, but in form and structure—is essential to restore the analytic field to its symbolic integrity.

“Let us then go back to Freud’s work starting from the Traumdeutung, to recall that the dream has the structure of a sentence—or rather, to stick to its literal expression, of a rebus, that is to say, of a writing, of which the dream of the child would represent the primordial ideography, and which in the adult reproduces both the phonetic and symbolic use of significant elements, found as much in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt as in the characters still used in China.”

Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Traumdeutung) introduces the central thesis that the dream is not a chaotic psychic event but a structured, meaningful production. Lacan revisits Freud’s metaphor of the dream as a rebus—a pictographic representation that must be deciphered like writing, not interpreted through content alone. He stresses that the dream operates not only semantically but also phonetically and symbolically, like ancient writing systems where sound, image, and symbolic function are condensed. This positions the dream not within a personal inner world, but within the linguistic and cultural matrix from which signifiers derive their effect. The child’s dream, in this sense, shows a primitive ideographic function—before the ego, before grammar—while the adult’s dream combines symbolic resonance and phonetic ambiguity, echoing the logic of the signifier.

“Yet that is only the deciphering of the instrument. It is in the version of the text that the essential begins—the essential that Freud tells us is given in the elaboration of the dream, that is, in its rhetoric.”

Merely identifying the elements of the rebus—the signifiers that appear in the dream—is insufficient. The essential function of the dream lies in how those signifiers are organized, displaced, and condensed in the dream-work (Traumarbeit). Freud describes this not only as translation but as a process with its own logic and style. Lacan emphasizes this by calling it rhetoric—the way the unconscious expresses itself not through fixed meanings, but through figures of speech, through syntax and trope. Thus, interpretation is not decoding, but reading the structure and modulation of desire as it appears through rhetorical forms.

“Ellipsis and pleonasm, hyperbaton or syllepsis, regression, repetition, apposition: these are the syntactic displacements; metaphor, catachresis, antonomasia, allegory, metonymy and synecdoche: the semantic condensations—where Freud teaches us to read the ostentatious or demonstrative, dissimulative or persuasive, retaliatory or seductive intentions with which the subject modulates his dream discourse.”

Lacan aligns the dream-work with classical rhetorical operations—drawing out how Freud, though not always explicitly, treats the unconscious like a poet, deploying tropes and syntactic innovations to articulate desire indirectly. Each of these terms refers to ways language structures ambiguity, contradiction, or doubling. For instance, metaphor and metonymy are not stylistic flourishes but the two axes of unconscious formation: metaphor condenses desire through substitution, metonymy displaces it through contiguity. Lacan links Freud’s list of operations in dream formation to these classical rhetorical tools, showing that the dream’s logic is linguistic, not symbolic in the Jungian sense. The dream does not merely reveal wishes; it stages them, often with dramatic or defensive intention.

“Undoubtedly, he laid down as a rule that one must always seek therein the expression of a desire. But let us understand him well. If Freud admits as the motive of a dream that seems to contradict his thesis the very desire to contradict it in the subject whom he tried to convince of it¹⁰, how could he not admit the same motive for himself, since in reaching it, it is from the other that his law returns to him?”

Freud’s famous principle—that the dream is the disguised fulfillment of a wish—must not be taken as a simplification. When Freud encounters dreams that contradict his own theory, he does not abandon the principle but identifies within them the desire to refute the analyst, i.e., a wish to negate. Lacan takes this further: if Freud attributes such resistant desire to the analysand, then Freud himself must be seen as subject to the same dialectic—subject to the desire of the Other. The law of interpretation, the insistence on desire, returns to Freud from the analysand, revealing that no one escapes the structure of intersubjectivity. Even Freud’s theoretical position is not immune to the reflexive return of desire from the Other.

“In short, nowhere does it appear more clearly that man’s desire finds its meaning in the desire of the other—not so much because the other holds the keys to the desired object, but because the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other.”

Lacan brings into focus one of his most fundamental theses: desire is not aimed at objects, but at recognition. The Other—as locus of speech, law, and desire—does not provide the object of desire but instead structures it by recognizing or withholding recognition of the subject’s position. This is why the object a (the object-cause of desire) is never simply a thing to be possessed, but a function of the Other’s desire. The subject’s first desire is to be the object of the Other’s desire, to be acknowledged within the symbolic network. This is the very condition for subjectivity, and in dreams as in speech, it manifests in strategies of seduction, retaliation, persuasion, aimed at reclaiming a place in the Other’s field.

The logic of the dream, then, is not simply intra-psychic; it is fundamentally intersubjective. It plays out within the rhetorical structure of language, and the truth it expresses—disguised or not—is always bound up with the desire to be heard, to be understood, to be loved or recognized by the Other. The dream is a message, but as Freud and Lacan both show, it is a message addressed to the Other that the dreamer does not know how to read—which is precisely why it belongs to analysis.

“Who among us, moreover, does not know from experience that as soon as analysis enters the path of transference—and this for us is the sign that it truly has—each of the patient’s dreams is interpreted as provocation, veiled confession, or diversion, in relation to the analytic discourse, and that as the analysis progresses, these dreams are ever more reduced to the function of an element in the dialogue it realizes?”

Lacan reaffirms that the presence of transference is not a side effect of analysis but the very mark of its operation. When transference is activated, dreams no longer appear as isolated, cryptic productions. Instead, they reveal their place within the ongoing analytic dialogue, structured by the subject’s relation to the Other embodied by the analyst. These dreams take on the tone of strategic utterances—they function as provocations, confessions, or evasions, each maneuvering the analyst’s place within the symbolic frame. This integration into the dialogic structure means that dreams become less autonomous and more overtly structured by the subject’s address to the analyst, reflecting their shifting position in relation to desire, resistance, and interpretation. The dream is thus no longer an enigma to be decoded but an intervention in the analytic scene, a message within transference.

“As for the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, another field consecrated by another of Freud’s works, it is clear that every slip is a successful discourse, even quite elegantly formed, and that in the lapsus, it is the gag that spins around the word—just the right quarter turn for the attentive listener to find therein his cue.”

Lacan evokes Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life to illustrate that the slip of the tongue—far from being a mechanical error—is a highly structured, even witty formation. The slip is not a failure of speech but a successful act of the unconscious, where the subject says what they do not intend to say yet cannot help but say. Lacan emphasizes that these slips possess a kind of comic precision, like a gag, where the twist on the signifier—”just the right quarter turn”—produces a displacement that the attentive analyst must catch. The analyst’s ear is thus tuned not to semantic coherence, but to signifying slippage—to what emerges involuntarily and obliquely, where truth speaks through error.

“Let us go straight to the point where the book opens onto chance and the beliefs it engenders, and specifically to the facts where it aims to demonstrate the subjective effectiveness of associations with numbers left to the randomness of an unmotivated choice, or even to the drawing of lots.”

Lacan refers to Freud’s discussion of chance phenomena—seemingly random occurrences like the selection of a number or an accidental gesture—that are later found to bear subjective meaning. These examples from Freud challenge the distinction between objective randomness and subjective necessity. Freud shows that even when the subject believes themselves to be making a neutral or arbitrary choice, the unconscious injects structure, revealing desire and symptom in the most banal decisions. This subjective overdetermination of chance is fundamental for Lacan, as it demonstrates that the unconscious operates in the field of the Other, even in choices presumed to be motiveless.

“Nowhere are the dominant structures of the psychoanalytic field more clearly revealed than in such a success.”

In these moments—where chance is shown to be structured by desire—we see the core of the psychoanalytic field laid bare. The symbolic order, far from being imposed consciously, inscribes itself across the subject’s speech, gestures, omissions, and mistakes. When a number chosen at random reveals a personal truth, or when a slip reveals repressed intent, the structure of the unconscious becomes visible: structured like a language, always speaking, even through apparent silence or error. These successes are not mystical but formal, rooted in the function of the signifier and the subject’s insertion into the symbolic.

“And the passing reference to unknown intellectual mechanisms here becomes nothing more than a distressed excuse for the total confidence placed in symbols, which begins to waver when satisfied beyond all bounds.”

Freud occasionally gestures toward “unknown mechanisms” to temper his confidence in the power of the symbolic. Lacan reads this as a rhetorical hedge, a sign that even Freud confronted the unsettling power of his own discoveries: that the symbolic truly overdetermines all psychic reality, even to the point of exceeding the bounds of intention or comprehension. This is not a shortcoming but a recognition of how thoroughly the subject is caught in the signifying chain. When the symbolic order provides too perfect an explanation, the temptation is to retreat into vague psychological categories—but Lacan insists this retreat is only anxious resistance to the structural truth of the unconscious.

Psychoanalysis, then, must not dilute its symbolic radicality by seeking refuge in mysterious cognitive functions or unformulated mechanisms. The meaning that emerges through slips, dreams, and chance is not mysterious—it is structured, linguistic, and entirely grounded in the Other’s discourse. To listen analytically is to trace the movement of this discourse across the subject, wherever it may appear.

“For if Freud, in order to admit a symptom into psychoanalytic psychopathology—whether it is neurotic or not—requires at the very least a minimal overdetermination consisting of a double meaning, a symbol of a bygone conflict beyond its function in a present conflict no less symbolic, and if he taught us to follow in the text of free associations the upward branching of this symbolic lineage, to locate, at the points where verbal forms intersect again, the knots of its structure—then it is already entirely clear that the symptom is resolved wholly in a language analysis, because it is itself structured like a language, it is a language from which speech must be delivered.”

The Freudian symptom, whether found in neurosis, perversion, or other formations, always requires what Freud termed overdetermination—not a single causal origin but a network of meanings, intersecting through symbolic residues of past and present conflicts. Lacan emphasizes that Freud insisted on double inscription: a symptom is not just a reaction to current conflict, but also a symbolic echo of a prior repressed event, mediated by the signifier. The path to its resolution lies in free association, which is not random but a structured discourse that reveals the nodal points—“knots” or intersections—of signifying chains. The symptom thus appears as a formation in language, and psychoanalysis becomes not a cathartic purge or a behavioral reconditioning, but a linguistic deciphering: the subject must be separated from the language of the symptom, must be made to speak beyond it, thereby loosening its grip. The phrase “speech must be delivered” contains both meanings: the subject must speak, and must be liberated from the symptom’s imprisoning signification.

“It is to the one who has not delved into the nature of language that the experience of number association may immediately reveal what is essential to grasp here: namely, the combinatory power that arranges its ambiguities—and thereby the true mechanism of the unconscious.”

Lacan references those drawn in by Freud’s examples involving numbers, particularly in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, to argue that even the most skeptical or non-linguistically trained observer can see the formal operation of the signifier at work. In seemingly trivial acts—associating numbers, splitting digits, making unconscious choices—what emerges is not random content but combinatory structure. This symbolic logic is not grounded in meaning but in structure: in how elements relate, combine, and transform. The unconscious, for Lacan, does not operate via meaning alone, but through formal mechanisms like condensation and displacement, which are functions of language—not of imagery or emotion. Number associations, with their arbitrary-yet-revealing formations, illustrate how ambiguity is structured, not chaotic.

“Indeed, if numbers obtained by segmenting the digits of a chosen number, by marrying them through all operations of arithmetic, or even by the repeated division of the original number by one of its split components, prove to be symbolizing above all in the subject’s own history, it is because they were already latent in the choice from which they originated—and if, therefore, the idea that these are the very digits that determined the subject’s destiny is rejected as superstitious, one is compelled to admit that it is in the order of existence of their combinations, that is, in the concrete language they represent, that resides all that analysis reveals to the subject as his unconscious.”

Lacan expands this into a detailed demonstration of how signification arises from structure, not substance. The manipulations of numbers—splitting, combining, dividing—echo the mechanisms of the unconscious: condensation, displacement, repetition. The point is not that numbers themselves carry mystical power (a belief Lacan distances from), but that their manipulation reveals how the subject’s choices are already structured by the unconscious. The signifier chooses the subject, not the other way around. What appears as arbitrary choice is retroactively revealed to have resonance with the subject’s symbolic history, exposing that the unconscious is not within the subject but between signifiers—in the order of their combinations. It is not numerology, but combinatorics that matters: how signs function together, creating a network of difference and repetition in which meaning and desire emerge.

“We shall see that philologists and ethnographers reveal enough about the combinatory precision shown in entirely unconscious systems that constitute language, for the proposition advanced here to be in no way surprising to them.”

Lacan appeals to the disciplines of philology and ethnography, which, like structural linguistics, have long acknowledged that language is not a natural expression of thought, but a complex symbolic system, often shaped by rules unknown to its speakers. The unconscious, too, is structured like these systems: it has grammar, syntax, tropes, and limits. The kind of symbolic operations revealed in dream-work, slips, and number associations is of a piece with the systems of signification studied by scholars of dead languages and foreign cultures. These fields already know that meaning is not transparent and that systems can encode truth without conscious intention. Lacan’s proposition—that the unconscious is structured like a language—is thus not speculative mysticism but a scientific claim, aligned with the most rigorous structural studies of signification available in the humanities.

“But if anyone among us still wished to doubt its validity, we would once again appeal to the testimony of the one who, having discovered the unconscious, is not without claim to be believed as to its place: he will not let us down.”

Lacan directs the hesitant reader back to Freud—not out of mere reverence, but because Freud’s work continues to serve as the foundational epistemological authority on the unconscious. Freud not only introduced the concept, but also identified its topological, structural, and rhetorical dimensions. To deny the symbolic character of the unconscious would be to overlook Freud’s most rigorous formulations. Thus, for Lacan, Freud is not just the discoverer of a concept but the first to formulate its logic within the framework of language, even if not always fully aware of the implications of his own theoretical innovations.

“For as neglected as it may be by our interest—and with good reason—Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious remains the most indisputable work, because the most transparent, in which the effect of the unconscious is demonstrated to us down to the finest detail; and the face it reveals is that of wit itself, in the ambiguity conferred on it by language, where the other face of its regal power is the punchline, by which its entire order is instantly annihilated—a punchline, indeed, where its creative activity reveals its absolute gratuity, where its dominion over the real is expressed in the defiance of nonsense, where humor, in the mischievous grace of free spirit, symbolizes a truth that does not speak its last word.”

Lacan draws attention to Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, a text often marginalized in favor of Freud’s “major” works, but which Lacan insists is crucial because it most clearly exposes the mechanisms of the unconscious. Through wit, Freud reveals how the unconscious works not only through displacement and condensation, but through linguistic condensation, timing, ambiguity, and inversion—the very structures of language as rhetorical play. The punchline is not just the conclusion of a joke; it is a moment of rupture, a sudden shift where meaning is released or withdrawn, where sense and nonsense collide, leaving only a flash of truth veiled in laughter. The unconscious emerges not in solemn confession, but in the cut of the signifier, where structure gives way momentarily to surprise. This gratuitous quality—its refusal of utility—confirms the unconscious’s autonomy from intention and its power over truth and semblance.

“One must follow in the admirably pressing turns of the lines of this book the stroll Freud takes us on through this garden chosen from the most bitter love.”

Lacan praises the stylistic and conceptual richness of Freud’s work, likening it to a deliberate promenade through a terrain where wit and loss, desire and disappointment, are deeply entwined. Freud’s path through jokes and witticisms is no mere catalog of puns—it is a journey through the displaced figures of love and lack, illustrating how desire, constrained by censorship, finds relief and expression in humor. The “garden” is a literary metaphor for a cultivated yet wild space, cultivated by Freud’s theory, wild in that it remains subject to the unconscious’s irreducible logic.

“Here, everything is substance, everything is pearl. The spirit that lives in exile within the creation of which it is the invisible support knows that at any moment it is master of its annihilation.”

Every joke, every pun, every absurdity presented in Freud’s study is not to be dismissed as ephemera; for Lacan, each is a “pearl”, a concentrated condensation of truth in symbolic form. The “spirit in exile” refers to the subject of the unconscious—split, alienated, and yet always sustaining the symbolic field in which it speaks. This subject is constantly at risk of being obliterated by the signifier—every act of speech, every joke, contains within it the potential for self-cancellation, for revealing its own void, its own castration. Yet this is not tragic but emancipatory, since it shows that subjectivity is not fixed, but always in play, governed by the function of language.

“Lofty or treacherous forms, dandyish or gentle figures of this hidden royalty—there is not one, even among the most despised, whose secret brilliance Freud does not know how to make shine.”

Lacan praises Freud’s ability to find dignity in even the most base or ignoble expressions of unconscious wit. Every joke, even the vulgar or spiteful, reveals a structure, a hidden logic of displacement or reversal that is worthy of interpretation. These “treacherous” or “dandyish” forms are not to be dismissed as stylistic quirks; they are masks worn by the unconscious, each bearing the mark of desire. Freud’s talent lies in being able to unmask these figures without destroying them, showing that even the lowest joke carries a spark of the symbolic.

“Tales of the matchmaker running through the ghettos of Moravia, the disreputable figure of Eros, like him the son of lack and sorrow, discreetly serving the appetite of the boor, and suddenly mocking him with a dazzling, nonsensical retort: ‘He who lets truth escape like that,’ comments Freud, ‘is in truth happy to throw off the mask.’”

Lacan selects a specific image from Freud’s joke material—a Moravian matchmaker, a figure both comical and tragic, embodying the intersection of erotic desire and symbolic function. Eros, “the son of lack and sorrow” (a reference to the Platonic myth of Eros in Symposium, born of Poros and Penia), serves as a metaphor for the unconscious drive—mediating between the symbolic and the Real, often appearing in guises that mock or surprise. The boor—the naive or crude subject—becomes the butt of a joke that reveals his own position in desire, even as he fails to grasp it. Freud’s comment on the figure who “lets truth escape” underlines the unconscious act as truth in disguise: the subject sheds the mask of the ego, even if unwittingly, in the punchline or slip. That is where psychoanalytic truth emerges—not as stated, but as evaded. The truth is not confessed; it is let slip.

Through this tribute to Freud’s treatment of jokes, Lacan affirms that the unconscious speaks not only in symptoms and dreams, but in laughter, and that this laughter is not trivial but structural—an act where truth, language, and desire converge, always elusively, always with a remainder.

“It is truth indeed that, in his mouth, there casts off the mask—but so that spirit may take on one more deceptive: sophistry that is nothing but stratagem, logic that is only a decoy, comedy that serves only to dazzle.”

Lacan evokes Freud’s portrayal of wit and joking to emphasize how truth, when spoken through the unconscious, does not emerge as straightforward clarity but as displacement, paradox, and illusion. The mask is shed, but only for another to be donned—a more cunning, elaborate veil. Sophistry, decoy logic, and dazzling comedy are not failures of the unconscious; they are its very mode of operation. The truth of the unconscious is not given directly but presented in detour, in rhetorical excess, and in the misdirection of style. What appears as nonsense or theatricality often discloses more than clarity could, precisely because the truth of the subject is not what it says but what escapes from saying.

“Spirit is always elsewhere. ‘Spirit indeed bears such subjective conditionality…: only that which I accept as such is spirit,’ continues Freud, who knows whereof he speaks.”

Here Lacan highlights the elusiveness of Geist, or spirit, and its subjective dependency. Freud’s comment (from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious) reflects that what is perceived as wit or spirit depends entirely on the reception of the other. A joke, like the unconscious itself, needs an addressee, and its effect is never intrinsic but structured by symbolic recognition. Spirit thus belongs neither to the object nor to the speaker, but circulates within intersubjective space—between subjects, in the place where speech is accepted or rejected, laughed at or ignored. This is why Lacan insists that the unconscious is not interior but always elsewhere—in the field of the Other.

“Nowhere is the individual’s intention more clearly surpassed by the subject’s discovery—nowhere is the distinction we make between the two more clearly understood—since not only must there have been something alien to me in my discovery for me to take pleasure in it, but it must remain so if it is to strike.”

This sentence elaborates the fundamental Lacanian distinction between the individual (ego) and the subject (of the unconscious). The subject’s discovery—as in the sudden realization embedded in a joke or slip—surpasses any conscious intention. Pleasure, especially in wit, comes precisely from the fact that what emerges is not fully mine—it comes from elsewhere. This alien element is the return of the repressed, the autonomy of the signifier, which always exceeds the speaker. For a joke to succeed, it must hit not through intention but through the unexpected convergence of meaning, orchestrated by language itself. The subject is therefore spoken by this effect, rather than its master.

“This is deeply related to the necessity, so well denounced by Freud, of the third listener at least supposed, and to the fact that the joke does not lose its power when relayed in indirect speech.”

The “third listener” is Lacan’s way of formalizing what Freud noted: a joke requires a public, or at least an imagined witness, to realize its effect. The Other must be present or presupposed, even if only structurally. This third place is the site of symbolic confirmation, and its necessity underscores the intersubjective nature of the unconscious. That a joke retains its effect in indirect discourse proves it is not reducible to personal delivery—it resides in structure, not intent. The effect is mediated by language, not the ego, and reveals how speech is always addressed beyond the speaker, to an Other that structures its meaning.

“In short, this manifests the intimate conjunction of intersubjectivity and the unconscious in the resources of language, and their explosion in the play of supreme liveliness.”

The unconscious, in Lacan’s reading, exists only in relation to the Other, which is constituted in and through language. The joke is exemplary because it materializes this relation: it activates the symbolic field, interpellates the Other, and demonstrates how the unconscious is not private but staged. The “explosion” of liveliness in wit is not a byproduct but the emergence of truth through language, made possible by intersubjective structure. It’s a moment where the symbolic opens a breach in the imaginary, displacing the ego to let truth as subjectivity erupt.

“A single cause for the downfall of spirit: the flatness of truth once it is explained.”

This line is a condensed critique of didacticism and rationalist reduction. Once the truth of the unconscious is flattened into knowledge, its vitality dies. Spirit—the living function of the signifier in motion—cannot be captured in transparent explanation. The psychoanalytic truth is not to be spelled out, but inferred, punctuated, spoken around. As with a joke, explaining it kills it. The real at stake is only preserved through the opacity of symbolic mediation.

“Now this concerns our problem directly. The current disdain for research on the language of symbols—as can be read from merely the tables of contents of our publications before and after the 1920s—corresponds in our discipline to nothing less than a change of object, whose tendency to align itself with the flattest level of communication, in order to fit the new objectives proposed for technique, may very well account for the rather gloomy assessment of its results drawn by the most lucid among us¹¹.”

Here Lacan draws a direct link between the decline of interest in symbolic structure and the deterioration of psychoanalytic outcomes. The 1920s mark, for him, a turning point: a shift away from symbolic interpretation toward adaptationist, ego-psychological, or communication-based models. This shift reduces the analytic object—formerly structured desire in the symbolic—to a functional, interpersonal problem, flattening language to information and truth to transparency. The cost is the loss of psychoanalysis as a theory of the subject and a practice grounded in the unconscious as discourse. The “gloomy assessment” by lucid analysts refers to those who sense that psychoanalysis has lost its edge, not because of science’s advance, but because it has lost its symbolic rigor—and with it, its capacity to touch truth.

“How could speech, indeed, exhaust the meaning of speech, or better said, following the Oxford-style logical positivism, the meaning of meaning—except in the act that generates it?”

Lacan opens with a rhetorical question that challenges the very notion that meaning can be fully captured or contained by speech itself. Drawing on the analytic tradition of logical positivism—notably the Oxford school’s concern with language, reference, and truth conditions—he subverts its ambition to reduce meaning to empirical or propositional clarity. For Lacan, meaning cannot be abstracted from the act of enunciation. There is no static “meaning of meaning” to be found outside the symbolic act that generates it, because meaning is not referential but performative and relational. In psychoanalysis, speech is never merely informational—it does something, it locates the subject within the symbolic order, and it transforms the speaker.

“Thus Goethe’s reversal of presence at the origin—‘In the beginning was the action’—reverses again: it was truly the Word that was at the beginning, and we live in its creation, but it is the action of our spirit that continues this creation by renewing it constantly. And we cannot turn back to this action except by letting ourselves be pushed always further by it.”

Here Lacan references Goethe’s reinterpretation of the Gospel of John—substituting action for the Word (logos)—a Romantic attempt to ground origin in doing rather than saying. Lacan inverts this reversal: it is speech, not action, that grounds being, because the subject enters the world not through physical acts but through symbolic inscription—the law, the name, the signifier. The act that “continues creation” is not empirical behavior but the activity of symbolic articulation, the subject’s speech. To return to the origin of meaning is not to go backward into biological or psychological events, but to let oneself be propelled forward by the signifier, which is always ahead of the subject, structuring their path.

“We will only attempt it ourselves in knowing that this is its path…”

This marks Lacan’s methodological stance: to engage the unconscious not by seeking fixed meanings or psychogenetic roots, but by tracking the movement of the signifier, accepting that truth emerges through symbolic detour. Psychoanalytic praxis, then, is not about returning to some foundational trauma, but following the retroactive constitution of meaning through speech. The path is one of symbolic implication, not positivist explanation.

“No one is supposed to be ignorant of the law—this formula, transcribed from the humor of a Code of Justice, nevertheless expresses the truth on which our experience is founded and which it confirms.”

Lacan now turns to the symbolic dimension of law, anchoring it in the famous juridical principle—“nemo censetur ignorare legem”—typically used to deny a legal defense based on ignorance. Lacan notes that while it may appear cynical in legal contexts, in psychoanalysis it articulates a structural truth: the Law precedes the subject. Even before the subject enters language, the Law (in the Lacanian sense: prohibition, the Name-of-the-Father, symbolic structure) is already in place. Psychoanalytic experience confirms that subjectivity is constituted within a pre-existing symbolic order, which determines the subject’s position before they can consciously recognize it.

“Indeed, no man is ignorant of it, since the law of man is the law of language from the moment the first words of recognition presided over the first gifts, and the detestable Danaans, who come and go by sea, were needed for men to learn to fear treacherous words alongside gifts given in bad faith.”

Lacan links language and law through the foundational myth of gift exchange—a symbolic act that inaugurates social bonds and recognizes the Other. The law here is not juridical but symbolic reciprocity, where speech institutes trust, roles, and responsibility. The reference to the Danaans (Greeks who gave the Trojan Horse—“beware of Greeks bearing gifts”) serves as an allegory for the duplicity of the signifier: speech can deceive, just as it can bind. The gift, originally a gesture of social connection, becomes the site of treachery when language is severed from its symbolic guarantee.

“Until then, for the peaceful Argonauts binding together the islands of community by the ties of symbolic exchange, these gifts—their act and their objects, their elevation into signs and their very manufacture—are so intertwined with speech that they are referred to by its name¹².”

The contrast with the Argonauts invokes a mythic image of a symbolically cohesive society, where gifts and speech are inseparable, forming a unified semiotic economy. Gifts are not just material transfers—they are acts of language, and their naming, making, and giving are all woven into a shared symbolic order. In such a structure, objects become signifiers, and the act of giving is a speech act. Lacan emphasizes that law, subjectivity, and social reality emerge together through the intertwining of gift and language. The movement from peaceful Argonautic exchange to Danaan treachery allegorizes the risk inherent in symbolic systems: that speech can become severed from its guarantee, that the symbolic can falter, and that psychoanalysis must read where this rupture leaves its mark on the subject.

In this passage, Lacan traces how subjectivity is born through symbolic action, how law and speech are one, and how the truth of the subject resides not in inner experience but in the external symbolic order—and where that order breaks, symptoms appear.

“Is it through these gifts or through the passwords that accord with them in their salutary nonsense that language begins with the law?”

Lacan interrogates the origin of language’s binding force in relation to the symbolic pact, evoked earlier through the mythic imagery of the Argonauts and the Danaans. The question is rhetorical, though incisive: does language derive its authority (the Law) from the ritualized exchange of gifts, or from the empty phrases—“passwords”—that accompany them, which seem meaningless yet are constitutive of social order? The phrase “salutary nonsense” affirms that even the most vacuous-seeming expressions (greetings, formulas, ritualized speech) are structurally essential: they are speech acts that do not inform but bind, and it is through this binding function that language institutes Law as symbolic structure.

“For these gifts are already symbols, in that symbol means pact, and they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact they constitute as signified: as is clearly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—vessels meant to be empty, shields too heavy to carry, sheaves that will wither, spears planted in the ground—are by their very purpose useless, if not superfluous by their abundance.”

Here Lacan unfolds the logic of symbolic exchange: its value lies not in utility, but in signification. The Latin etymology of “symbol” (from symbolum, meaning a token of recognition or covenant) affirms that the symbolic object is not a tool but a trace of a social pact. These objects are signifiers not because of what they do, but because of what they stand in for—namely, the existence of the social bond. Lacan’s examples—empty vessels, ornamental shields, perishable bundles—emphasize their purposelessness, which is precisely what makes them signifiers. Their value is structural, not functional: they mediate a relation between subjects under the Law.

“Is this neutralization of the signifier the whole nature of language?”

This question presses further into the structuralist thesis: is the function of the signifier in language to neutralize use, to render material exchange irrelevant by establishing pure relation? If signification arises from emptiness and detachment from need, does this emptiness itself constitute language’s essence? Lacan invokes the paradox that language begins not by naming objects, but by instituting a field of relations. Hence the signifier operates not in the service of representation, but in the suspension of utility—a position utterly at odds with positivist linguistics or behavioral approaches.

“Taken at that level, one might find the beginning of it among sea swallows, for example, during courtship, materialized in the fish they pass from beak to beak, and in which the ethologists—if we must indeed follow them in recognizing in it an instrument for initiating group cohesion, something akin to a celebration—would be fully justified in seeing a symbol.”

Lacan momentarily entertains the ethological argument: perhaps one could detect proto-symbolic behavior in animals, such as the courtship of sea swallows passing fish, which some ethologists interpret as fostering group cohesion. However, Lacan’s tone is deliberately dry: “if we must indeed follow them” signals his skepticism. The gesture may resemble symbolic exchange, but it lacks the crucial register of the signifier: there is no entry into the symbolic order, no pact, no Law—only instinctual ritual. It is not the presence of repeated action or group effect that defines the symbolic, but the structural disjunction from utility and the institution of difference.

“You see we do not hesitate to search outside the human domain for the origins of symbolic behavior.”

Lacan concedes, in a measured irony, that speculation about the roots of symbolic activity in animal behavior is not forbidden. This is not a dismissal of comparative analysis, but a signal that one must not confuse analogy with structure. Just because one observes repeated behavior or communicative signals does not mean one has found the signifier. For Lacan, the symbolic order is not reducible to stimulus-response patterns or even complex forms of signal transmission; it requires difference, Law, and exclusion, which constitute the subject of the unconscious.

“But it is certainly not along the path of an elaboration of the sign, the one taken after so many others by Mr. Jules H. Massermann¹³, to which we shall pause briefly, not only because of the glib tone with which he traces his path, but because of the welcome it received from the editors of our official journal, who, in accordance with a tradition borrowed from employment agencies, never neglect anything that might provide our discipline with ‘good references.’”

Lacan turns to a direct critique of Massermann, whose approach—centered on a developmental and functionalist theory of the sign—epitomizes the American ego-psychological tendency to reduce the symbolic to a gradual evolution from biological behavior. The issue is not merely theoretical error, but a betrayal of psychoanalysis’s radical edge in favor of what he calls “good references”—credentials, institutional respectability, empirical appearance. By mocking the editorial practice as that of an employment agency, Lacan underscores how psychoanalytic discourse is being co-opted by bureaucratic and scientistic norms, sacrificing its conceptual rigor and its relation to the Real in exchange for recognition in the domain of positive sciences. His tone is acidic because the stakes are nothing less than the integrity of the Freudian field itself.

“Just imagine: a man who reproduced neurosis ex-per-i-men-tal-ly in a dog strapped to a table—and by what ingenious means: a bell, the meat dish it announces, and the fruit dish that arrives out of turn—I spare you the rest.”

Lacan’s tone is overtly mocking, targeting the behaviorist approach to neurosis, particularly as represented by Pavlovian conditioning. The slow, syllabic enunciation of “ex-per-i-men-tal-ly” underscores the absurdity of claiming scientific rigor in such a caricatured scenario. The reference to the dog, bell, and meat evokes Pavlov’s experiments, but the added twist—the fruit dish replacing the expected meat—parodies attempts to draw analogies between neurotic symptoms and conditioned reflexes. The implication is that this empirical model misses the essential structure of neurosis, which is not built on associations between stimuli and responses, but on symbolic formations, desire, and lack. Behaviorist conditioning, even if it mimics anxiety, cannot reproduce the unconscious structure of neurosis, because it excludes speech, the signifier, and the Other.

“At least it is not he, so he assures us, who will be taken in by the ‘ample ruminations,’ as he puts it, to which philosophers have consecrated the problem of language. He will take you by the throat.”

Lacan sarcastically notes that Massermann (or his ilk) proclaims himself immune to philosophical reflection, deriding the traditional concerns of linguistics and philosophy as “ample ruminations.” But it is precisely in ignoring these ruminations that such a figure misses the structural reality of language—its unconscious effects, its constitutive role in the subject. The image of “taking you by the throat” mocks the violent positivism of such approaches: they aim to grasp behavior directly, bypass signification, and impose mechanistic clarity in place of conceptual rigor. Lacan suggests that this attitude not only simplifies, but silences—cutting off the subject’s speech at the very place where psychoanalysis begins.

“Picture this: through clever conditioning of its reflexes, a raccoon can be trained to head toward its pantry when presented with a card that displays its menu. We are not told whether prices are listed, but it is added, quite convincingly, that if the service disappoints him, he will come back and tear up the overly promising card, like a scorned lover shredding the letters of an unfaithful partner (sic).”

Lacan offers another ironic fable—this time involving a raccoon conditioned to respond to pictorial cues, as if to suggest that it can comprehend and react symbolically. The exaggerated image of the raccoon acting like a jealous lover is meant to ridicule the anthropomorphizing of conditioned behavior, where affective or symbolic responses are mistakenly attributed to simple stimulus-reward mechanisms. The analogy to the lover’s destroyed letters is pointed: the letters are signifiers of betrayal, loss, and desire—a domain entirely foreign to Pavlovian semiotics. Yet Massermann projects symbolic meaning onto animal behavior without demonstrating that the structure of the signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, or lack is operative. The “sic” emphasizes that this claim is made seriously in the original, underlining its absurdity.

“Such is one of the arches under which the author makes the road pass that leads from signal to symbol. It’s a two-way route, and the return path shows no lesser works of art.”

Lacan concludes this passage with a wry metaphor: the author constructs a gateway (arch) through which the signal (stimulus-response) is elevated into symbol—the domain of language, law, and meaning. This path from natural sign to symbolic signifier is one behaviorists attempt to traverse without recognizing the rupture between the two. Lacan calls this effort a “two-way route,” meaning that not only does it falsely elevate signals into symbols, it also drags the symbol back down into the realm of behavior, erasing the structural difference. These reciprocal misrecognitions are, for Lacan, works of art, but only in the sense of fabricated fictions that ignore the Real of the unconscious. He critiques the entire epistemological slippage that allows analytic discourse to be co-opted by ethological or experimental psychology, and insists that psychoanalysis must preserve the radical alterity of the symbolic if it is to remain faithful to Freud.

Each of these references clarifies Lacan’s central polemic: that psychoanalysis must not abandon its foundation in language and the symbolic in exchange for the mirage of scientific credibility. The unconscious cannot be located in conditioned behaviors or visual recognition but only in speech, and the subject’s division in relation to the signifier.

“For if in man you associate the projection of a bright light before his eyes with the sound of a bell, then link that bell with the command: contract (in English: contract), you will manage to bring the subject, by modulating that command himself, by murmuring it, soon merely by producing it in thought, to obtain the contraction of his pupil—that is, a reaction of the system called autonomic because ordinarily inaccessible to intentional effects.”

Lacan recounts an experiment attributed to Massermann’s school of thought, where a conditioned reflex is artificially constructed in a human subject through repeated association of stimulus (light) and verbal command (“contract”), eventually producing an autonomic response—pupillary contraction—even through internal verbalization or mere thought. This operation mimics Pavlovian conditioning, but applied to linguistic material. What is critiqued here is the reduction of language to a signal—as if words functioned only as triggers for physiological responses, neglecting their symbolic dimension. The subject here is trained to respond to a signifier as if it were a stimulus, effacing the subject’s division and symbolic implication in meaning. The term “autonomic” is crucial: these are bodily functions beyond conscious control, and yet the experiment seeks to show they can be intentionally modulated through sign usage, a claim that skirts the symbolic in favor of a mechanistic imaginary of the psyche.

“Thus Mr. Hudgins, if we are to believe our author, ‘created in a group of subjects a highly individualized configuration of ideationally-affined and visceral responses to the idea-symbol “contract”—a response that could be traced back through their particular experiences to a seemingly distant but actually fundamentally physiological source: in this example, simply the protection of the retina from excessive light.’”

The citation from the author (presumably Massermann or one of his affiliates) exemplifies a category error: treating the word “contract” as a straightforward idea-symbol, which supposedly evokes a visceral reaction reducible to biological necessity. The rhetoric masks the leap from semantic complexity to physiological automatism, reducing the chain of signifiers to an associative reflex. Lacan draws attention to the pseudo-explanatory style of the passage—an attempt to ground linguistic symbolism in retinal defense, thereby rooting language in biological function rather than symbolic structure. This stands in sharp contrast with the Freudian model, where the word is never merely a cue, but a site of unconscious displacement and condensation.

“And the author concludes: ‘The significance of such experiments for psychosomatic and linguistic research needs no further elaboration.’”

This ironic closing sentence becomes the target of Lacan’s critique. The declaration that “no further elaboration is needed” is precisely what masks the lack of theoretical rigor. In psychoanalysis, such an elision is suspect: what is not elaborated is what demands interpretation. The suggestion that conditioned word-reaction bears immediate significance for both psychosomatics and linguistics implies a false unity between biological response and symbolic meaning, bypassing the entire logic of the signifier. Lacan exposes the gesture as a shortcut, falsely closing the gap between bodily and symbolic realms.

“Yet we ourselves would have been curious to learn whether the subjects thus trained would also react to the utterance of the same word articulated in such expressions as: marriage contract, bridge contract, breach of contract, or even gradually reduced to the emission of its first syllable: contract, contrac, contra, contr…”

Here Lacan introduces a counterproof, demanding the kind of methodological rigor that the experiment lacks. He tests whether the conditioning effect truly depends on the semantic unity of the word “contract”, or if it is triggered by any phonetic resemblance. By citing various compound uses—marriage contract, bridge contract, etc.—he points out that words are embedded in larger syntactic and semantic structures, which shape their function. If the response still occurs in these alternate contexts, it demonstrates that the so-called idea-symbol lacks definable semantic limits, making the original claim scientifically incoherent. If it doesn’t occur, it shows the reaction is not semantically grounded, but purely contextual or associative.

“The counterproof, required by strict method, offers itself here in the murmuring between the teeth of that syllable by the French reader who would have undergone no other conditioning than the intense light projected upon the problem by Mr. Jules H. Massermann.”

Lacan satirically performs the methodological test himself, inviting the French-speaking reader to repeat the syllables “con-tra-ct” in decreasing segments, absent any conditioning, and see whether it induces pupillary contraction. The reference to “the intense light projected upon the problem” plays with the dual image: both the stimulus used in the experiment, and the supposed clarity Massermann’s model sheds on the issue. Lacan exposes the farce of experimentalism divorced from symbolic theory: the joke lies in the non-result—no French speaker’s pupil will contract, proving the insufficiency of conditioning to explain symbolic effects.

“We would then ask him whether the effects thus observed in the conditioned subjects would still seem to him able to dispense so easily with elaboration. For either they would no longer occur, thereby showing that they do not depend even conditionally on the semanteme, or they would continue to occur, raising the question of the limits of that semanteme.”

Lacan concludes with a rigorous critique of the semantic premise underlying the experiment. If the conditioned response disappears in variant contexts, then the semanteme (the minimal unit of meaning) is not structurally stable—its effect is accidental, not symbolic. If the response persists, then we face the collapse of the semanteme: it functions beyond its own boundaries, meaning that the term “contract” does not contain its own meaning, but is dispersed across multiple contexts, raising the question: where does meaning reside? This is a psychoanalytic question par excellence. Lacan thus dismantles the behaviorist illusion by showing that meaning is not in the word itself, but in its symbolic positioning within a structure, determined by difference, relation to other signifiers, and the unconscious desire of the speaking subject.

“In other words, they would bring to light, in the very instrument of the word, the distinction between the signifier and the signified, so blithely conflated by the author in the term idea-symbol.”

Lacan clarifies that the core failure of the behaviorist-leaning author lies in a fundamental conflation: treating the word as a transparent “idea-symbol,” as if it immediately unites a meaning (idea) with its form (symbol). But this bypasses the central Saussurean—and Lacanian—distinction between signifier (sound-image, form) and signified (concept, meaning), a difference that defines how language functions structurally. To conflate them is to imagine language operates like a labeling system, when in fact it operates through differential structure, where a signifier has meaning only in relation to other signifiers. Lacan insists that the symbolic cannot be reduced to an ideational mechanism, and doing so betrays the misrecognition of language as such.

“And without needing to question the reactions of conditioned subjects to the command don’t contract, or even to the full conjugation of the verb to contract, we could point out to the author that what defines any given element of a language as belonging to language is that it is distinguished as such for all users of that language within the assumed whole of homologous elements.”

Rather than engaging further in the ridiculous implications of conditioning (e.g., whether saying “don’t contract” would reverse the reflex), Lacan moves the focus back to linguistic structure. What defines an element as linguistic is not its use in an experiment, but its structural function within a whole system—that is, within the chain of signifiers recognized by a community of speakers. A word like “contract” has meaning not due to its internal properties or its association with any single referent or effect, but because it is different from and related to other terms in the language. Language is a synchronic system, and every unit takes its value from its position in the structure, not from conditioned or experiential associations.

“It follows that the particular effects of that language element are tied to the existence of that whole, prior to its possible linkage with any particular experience of the subject.”

The meaning of a word is not grounded in individual experience but predicated on the system of language itself—which pre-exists and determines the subject’s relation to meaning. Language is transindividual, and the subject enters it always-already structured. Lacan stresses that no associative conditioning can account for the effect of a signifier unless one first acknowledges the prior symbolic field in which it circulates. This is fundamental to the Freudian notion of the unconscious: the unconscious is structured like a language, and therefore cannot be reduced to biographical content or empirical stimulus-response patterns.

“And to consider that latter linkage apart from any reference to the former is simply to deny the proper function of language in that element.”

To isolate a word’s meaning to a subject’s individual reaction—disregarding its function within the linguistic system—is to abandon language theory altogether. This amounts to reducing the symbolic to the imaginary, where words are pictures or emotive triggers, not differentiated signifiers. Such a move undermines the structuralist basis of psychoanalysis and opens the door to ego psychology and adaptationist misreadings, which see speech not as revealing unconscious truth but as a behavioral tool or ego function. Lacan insists that language cannot be understood without its systemic order, which alone determines the meaning-making function of the signifier.

“A reminder of principles that might spare our author the discovery, in utter naivety, of the textual correspondence of childhood grammar categories with relations in reality.”

Here Lacan turns to irony, noting that without grounding in linguistic theory, the author risks making laughably naïve correlations—for example, thinking that children’s grammar reflects natural reality. This echoes critiques of those who imagine language develops by mimicking the world, rather than emerging through a symbolic system that imposes structure on reality. It also touches on the mistake of treating grammar as a natural reflection of subject-object relations, rather than as an imposed structure that produces the very categories (subject, object, verb) that organize experience.

“This monument of naivety—admittedly a rather common species in such matters—would not warrant such attention were it not the work of a psychoanalyst, or rather of someone who, seemingly by chance, connects everything that occurs in a certain trend of psychoanalysis to it, under the heading of ego theory or defense analysis technique, most opposed to Freudian experience, thereby manifesting by contrast the coherence of a sound conception of language with the maintenance of that experience.”

Lacan now turns to the ideological stakes: the error here is not just theoretical—it’s being made by a psychoanalyst, or at least someone claiming to be one. The individual in question uses ego psychology, with its emphasis on adaptation, defense, and functionality, to explain everything from a perspective that is fundamentally opposed to Freud’s discovery. Lacan positions this as a rupture within psychoanalysis itself, where the symbolic nature of language and the unconscious is displaced by a model of self-regulating behavior and meaning rooted in consciousness and biological realism. That opposition serves to highlight the necessity of returning to Freud through language, as Lacan is doing here, showing that only a structural theory of language can sustain the radical implications of Freudian experience.

“For Freud’s discovery is that of the field of incidences, in human nature, of his relations to the symbolic order, and the ascent of their meaning to the most radical instances of symbolization in being.”

This is a central theoretical statement: Freud discovered not drives or instincts per se, but the human subject’s structuring by the symbolic—how language organizes being. The “field of incidences” refers to the unconscious effects of this symbolic order: symptoms, dreams, slips, fantasies—each an instance of symbolic overdetermination. What Freud found was not just a theory of psyche, but a radical anthropology: man as a being spoken by the signifier, whose truth arises only through the symbolic function. This defines psychoanalysis as a practice of interpretation, not behavioral adjustment.

“To ignore it is to doom the discovery to oblivion, the experience to ruin.”

For Lacan, the consequences are dire. Abandoning the symbolic structure of language means abandoning the very terrain Freud opened. Without this understanding, psychoanalysis collapses into therapeutic eclecticism or scientific mimicry, losing its specificity and efficacy. The “experience” of the analytic cure—that encounter through which truth is produced via speech—is then emptied of substance. What remains is a clinical form without a subject, and a discourse reduced to suggestion or management, where the unconscious has no place. Lacan affirms that preserving Freud’s discovery means preserving its linguistic core, its symbolic rigor, and the structural horizon it opens for both subjectivity and ethics.

“And we assert, as a statement that cannot be removed from the seriousness of our present purpose, that the presence of the raccoon mentioned earlier in the armchair where Freud’s timidity, according to our author, would have confined the analyst by placing him behind the couch, seems to us preferable to that of the scientist who holds such a discourse on language and speech.”

Lacan now employs biting irony to drive home his critique: he would rather seat the raccoon—a reference to the earlier ethological example—in the analyst’s chair than the experimentalist who misunderstands language. The raccoon, while absurd as a symbolic subject, at least does not violate the symbolic order by pretending to interpret it through the lens of reflex conditioning. Freud’s “timidity,” as the behaviorist sarcastically labels the analytic position behind the couch, is revalorized: it is not timidity but symbolic structure that dictates the analyst’s discreet position—a presence outside the field of the patient’s gaze, that enables the subject’s speech to unfold. The scientist who lacks this understanding undermines analysis from the outset, not only by mislocating the analyst but by reducing speech to a biological function. Lacan highlights the scandal of such a figure speaking authoritatively within the analytic field.

“For the raccoon, at least, by the grace of Jacques Prévert (‘a stone, two houses, three ruins, four gravediggers, a garden, flowers, a raccoon’) has entered forever into the poetic bestiary and as such, in its essence, participates in the eminent function of the symbol; whereas the being in our likeness who professes such systematic ignorance of that function banishes himself forever from all that may by it be called into being.”

Through a poetic invocation of Jacques Prévert’s surreal imagery, Lacan elevates the raccoon into the symbolic by its very inclusion in poetic language. Prévert’s poem—a montage of mundane and surreal elements—demonstrates that meaning in language is not representational but symbolic, and that symbolic function rests in how elements are inscribed into discourse. The raccoon, through poetic metaphor, has a place within this symbolic field; it signifies. The human scientist who reduces language to conditioning removes himself from this field; he banishes himself by refusing symbolic logic. Thus, the raccoon’s symbolic inclusion paradoxically surpasses the reductionist thinker, whose ignorance excludes him from the very ontology language sustains—the order of being-through-speech.

“From then on, the question of the place that said semblable holds in natural classification would seem to us to fall only under an out-of-place humanism—if his discourse, intersecting with a technique of speech under our care, were not all too fertile, even in giving rise to sterile monsters.”

The term “semblable”—the other as fellow man, as mirror image—invokes a fundamental Lacanian category: the imaginary relation between subject and other. Here, Lacan plays on the term by dehumanizing the scientist: questioning whether he belongs to the human community, at least in symbolic terms. His discourse, by failing to respect the technique of speech central to psychoanalysis, constitutes a distortion of analytic principles—a productive error, paradoxically fertile in generating misuses of technique, or “sterile monsters.” The phrase refers to malformed theoretical constructs that proliferate while lacking generative value, symptomatic of an analytic field drifting from its symbolic ground.

“Let it be known, then—since after all he prides himself on braving the charge of anthropomorphism—that this is the last term we would use to say he makes his being the measure of all things.”

This final flourish skewers the irony of the scientist’s stance: rejecting anthropomorphism while reducing the symbolic to the reflexive is itself the ultimate act of making man the measure of all things, in the worst sense. By treating language as a tool derived from instinct or behavior, the scientist re-centers the ego as sovereign interpreter, contradicting the decentering that Freud’s discovery imposed on the subject. Lacan places himself squarely against this humanist illusion, insisting that the subject is spoken, not the master of speech; and that truth emerges not from empirical control, but from symbolic structure and its slips.

“Let’s return to our symbolic object, which in itself is quite substantial in its material, even if it has lost the weight of its use, but whose imponderable meaning will cause displacements of some weight. Is this then the law and language? Perhaps not yet.”

Lacan shifts back toward the object of analysis, the symbolic object—a thing which, though materially insubstantial, has real effects due to its function in symbolic displacement. Such an object—say, a token, gift, or word—carries weight not through utility, but through its position within a symbolic structure. Its “imponderable meaning” displaces desire, affects the subject, and orients actions. The question of whether this object already contains the law and language remains open. Lacan teases that we are not yet at the full emergence of the Law, but approaching it. This anticipation reflects his method: to circumscribe the symbolic not through definition, but through demonstrating its structural effects—showing how even the smallest object, once inscribed in the symbolic, restructures the field of desire.

“For even if some top bird in the colony of swallows were to appear who, by gobbling up the symbolic fish from the wide-open beaks of the other swallows, inaugurated this exploitation of swallow by swallow—an idea we once delighted in spinning out as a fancy—this would not suffice to reproduce among them that fabulous story, image of our own, whose winged epic held us captive on the Isle of Penguins, and something more would be needed to create a ‘swallowized’ universe.”

Lacan indulges here in a dense and ironic metaphor to illustrate the difference between symbolic behavior and true symbolic structure. He references a fantasy once entertained—the idea that a hierarchy of birds (swallows) could develop a kind of exploitation system by stealing symbolic tokens (fish) from one another. This is clearly a satire of attempts to project human social structures (like capitalism or linguistic exchange) onto animal behavior, often done in ethological or behaviorist traditions. Even if animals perform acts that resemble gift-giving or symbolic exchange, such acts do not amount to symbolic universes unless there is language—a structured system of signifiers through which meaning is both established and displaced. The “Isle of Penguins” is an allusion to Anatole France’s satirical novel Penguin Island, in which penguins are baptized and civilized by mistake, parodying the projection of human society onto animal fables. Lacan’s point is that only humans inhabit a symbolic universe, because they are constituted by language, not merely by signals or ritualized behavior.

“This ‘something’ completes the symbol to make it language. For the symbolic object, freed from its use, to become the word, freed from the hic et nunc, the difference is not in the quality, the sound, of its substance, but in its evanescent being where the symbol finds the permanence of the concept.”

The essential transformation from symbol to language occurs when the object is liberated from immediate context—from usefulness, from presence. A symbol in ritual or gesture may signify something, but language requires the abstraction of time and place. The “hic et nunc” (here and now) must be surpassed. What matters is not the material quality of the word (its sound or substance), but the fact that it functions within a differential and temporal system. Lacan underscores that meaning in language arises not from the referent but from the symbol’s place in the system. In the signifier, a fleeting form gains conceptual stability, giving the illusion of permanence to what is fundamentally absence.

“Through the word, which is already a presence made of absence, absence itself comes to be named in an original moment whose perpetual recreation Freud’s genius grasped in the child’s game.”

Lacan returns to Freud’s famous example of the fort/da game. The child’s symbolic play with absence—throwing away a reel and saying fort (“gone”), then retrieving it with da (“there”)—is the archetypal moment of symbolization. In this game, absence becomes representable. The word introduces presence into absence, allowing for its naming and hence its mastery in symbolic terms. This is also where the subject is constituted: as one who speaks from within lack, from the cut in the Real that the signifier introduces. Language, for Lacan, is born in this act—not as a tool, but as a structure built on absence.

“And from this modulated pair of presence and absence—which is equally constituted by the trace in the sand of the simple line and the broken line of the Chinese koua mantic figures—arises the universe of meaning of a language in which the universe of things will come to be arranged.”

Here Lacan widens the horizon: all language, all meaning arises from the dialectic of presence and absence. He invokes the broken and unbroken lines of the I Ching (koua figures)—an ancient Chinese divination system—which symbolize yin and yang, negative and positive, absence and presence. These primal oppositions, abstract yet readable, operate like binary code or phonemes: their differences structure the system. The universe of meaning emerges from this system before it organizes our perception of the universe of things. This supports Lacan’s thesis: the symbolic precedes the real, and the world is made intelligible through the symbolic.

“Through what takes form only by being the trace of a nothingness, and whose support therefore cannot be altered, the concept, saving the duration of what passes, engenders the thing.”

Language arises from the trace of nothing, from the mark of absence. The signifier is not a copy or imprint of the real, but a trace of a loss, and this trace cannot be erased because it does not depend on materiality. It is because of this trace, which preserves absence, that the concept can emerge and give the illusion of permanence to fleeting things. The subject constructs “the thing” (das Ding) not from its materiality, but from its symbolic consistency in discourse. The Real is thereby engendered retroactively by language, by the desire to fix what has already escaped.

“For it is not enough to say that the concept is the thing itself—something a child could prove against the school. It is the world of words that creates the world of things, initially confused in the hic et nunc of the all-in-becoming, by giving their essence its concrete being, and its place everywhere to what is of all time: ktēma eis aei.”

Lacan mocks the naïve nominalism that claims the concept is merely the thing itself, a child’s error. He reiterates that language structures reality—not passively reflecting it, but producing it. Before language, things are a blur, an overwhelming flow, the all-in-becoming. It is through symbolic nomination and structuring that they acquire consistency, essence, identity. The phrase “ktēma eis aei” is from Thucydides, meaning “a possession for all time.” It applies to historical writing—but here Lacan applies it to language itself, which alone allows humans to preserve, record, and structure meaning beyond the present moment. The signifier is what fixes time, giving stability to the flux of being, and in doing so, establishes subjectivity and reality alike.

“Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol made him man.”

This axiom is central to Lacan’s thesis: the human being becomes a subject not through biology or cognition alone, but by entry into the symbolic order. It is the symbol that precedes and produces subjectivity. In contrast to theories that see language as a tool of preexisting individuals, Lacan asserts the inverse: language structures the subject, and speech is the evidence of symbolic capture. This is not speech as mere emission of sound or communication of intent, but as the subject’s insertion into a system of signifiers. To speak is to already be spoken, to be caught within a network that predates and transcends the individual.

“For if indeed abundant gifts welcome the stranger who has made himself known, the life of the natural groups constituting the community is subject to the rules of alliance, which order the direction in which the exchange of women takes place, and to the reciprocal prestations determined by that alliance: as the Sironga proverb says, an in-law is a thigh of elephant.”

Lacan draws from structural anthropology, especially Lévi-Strauss, to root the symbolic in kinship systems. In so-called primitive societies, social cohesion is not based on affect or instinct, but on rules of exchange—in particular, the exchange of women. This is symbolic exchange par excellence, wherein marriage and alliance are governed by unconscious laws akin to grammar. The Sironga proverb poetically expresses the weight of the in-law relationship within this symbolic economy. The “thigh of elephant” is both massive and ceremonial, highlighting the gravity of alliance, not reducible to individual desire but instituted by symbolic mandates that regulate group structures.

“Alliance is presided over by a preferential order whose law, involving the names of kinship, is, like language, imperative in its forms but unconscious in its structure.”

The parallels between kinship and language are made explicit here: both function as formal systems with rules, categories, and oppositions, and both are unconscious in their operation. A speaker follows grammatical rules without knowing them explicitly; likewise, a subject in a kinship system follows the law of alliance—whom one may or may not marry, for instance—without full awareness. This structural unconsciousness aligns with Lacan’s broader theory: the unconscious is not a reservoir of repressed content, but a structured field, analogous to a linguistic grammar or a system of symbolic positions.

“Now, in this structure whose harmony or deadlocks govern the restricted or generalized exchange discerned by the ethnologist, the astonished theorist rediscovers the whole logic of combinations: thus, the laws of number—that is, of the most purified symbol—prove to be immanent in the original symbolism.”

Lacan aligns mathematical logic—combinatorics, number theory—with the structure of the symbolic. Ethnologists such as Lévi-Strauss have demonstrated that kinship systems exhibit a formal logic of permutation and exchange, sometimes with algebraic regularity. This demonstrates that symbolism is not arbitrary; it is structured and rule-governed, even in societies with no written language. By pointing to the laws of number as immanent to kinship symbolism, Lacan shows that symbolic structures always involve relations, difference, and position—just like language or algebra. The symbolic is not content but form, not intention but relation.

“At least it is the richness of the forms in which the so-called elementary structures of kinship develop that makes them legible there.”

This richness refers to the articulable complexity of kinship systems once one adopts a structuralist lens. “Elementary structures” are not simple, but are systematized, and therefore legible—they can be read like a text. This confirms Lacan’s broader claim: the unconscious is structured like a language, and what was once thought pre-linguistic (kinship, myth, taboo) is in fact symbolic through and through. It is in this legibility that the ethnologist and the analyst both interpret, reconstructing a subject’s position within a network of relations.

“And this leads one to think that it is perhaps only our unconsciousness of their permanence that allows us to believe in the freedom of choices in the so-called complex structures of alliance under whose law we live.”

Modern, “complex” kinship systems (e.g., Western familial structures) are mistakenly believed to be free from symbolic law. But the apparent freedom of romantic choice or social mobility is an illusion sustained by unconsciousness of symbolic determination. The symbolic still governs us, even if its rules are less transparent. The illusion of autonomy masks a deeper symbolic structuration of desire and choice. Thus, what we consider personal preferences—in partners, in careers, in values—are often determined by unconscious symbolic coordinates.

“If statistics already hint that this freedom does not operate at random, it is because a subjective logic would orient it in its effects.”

Empirical studies (e.g., patterns in marriage, social mobility, inheritance) show non-random regularities, implying that choices are structured, not free. Lacan attributes this to subjective logic, which refers to the unconscious logic that shapes a subject’s experience of freedom. The subject is divided, driven not by self-transparent will but by desire structured through the Other—the symbolic. Thus, subjectivity itself is a product of symbolic determinations, and its “logic” is discernible not by introspection but by tracing the effects of symbolic structures on choices, symptoms, and speech.

“This is precisely why the Oedipus complex, insofar as we continue to recognize that its meaning covers the entire field of our experience, will be said, in our discourse, to mark the limits our discipline assigns to subjectivity: namely, what the subject can know of his unconscious participation in the movement of the complex structures of alliance, by verifying the symbolic effects in his particular existence of the tangential movement toward incest manifest since the advent of a universal community.”

The Oedipus complex, for Lacan, is not just a developmental phase or psychosexual conflict, but the nodal point where the subject enters the symbolic order of kinship, law, and desire. It marks the limit of what the subject can know about how he is constituted through prohibitions and positions within the structure of alliance. The movement “toward incest” represents the structuring of desire around the forbidden, and through this tangential relation to the law, the subject encounters his own symbolic determination. The Oedipus complex thus represents the limit of subjectivity, where the subject touches the Real through the Symbolic, and where psychoanalytic interpretation must recognize the subject’s place within a larger field—not merely familial, but universal, governed by language and law.

This is not a myth but a structure, and its persistence in clinical experience reflects that subjectivity is not reducible to individual biography, but always embedded in symbolic institutions—marriage, law, speech. Lacan shows here that analysis must focus not on content, but on structure, where the subject is positioned by signifiers that long precede him.

“The primordial Law is therefore the one that, by regulating alliance, superimposes the reign of culture upon the reign of nature left to the law of mating.”

Lacan designates the “primordial Law” as that which inaugurates symbolic structure over the merely biological order. The regulation of alliance—specifically through rules that determine who may marry whom—marks the shift from natural mating patterns (the “law of mating”) to the cultural law of kinship. This is not merely a social imposition, but a symbolic law that institutes the prohibition of incest as its founding gesture. It is in this gesture that the human subject is constituted—not by instinct but by language, by the symbolic. Thus, culture emerges not by addition, but through the structural repression of nature, and this repression marks the entrance of the subject into the symbolic order.

“The incest taboo is only its subjective pivot, laid bare by the modern tendency to reduce to the mother and the sister the objects forbidden to the subject’s choices, although all license has not yet been opened beyond.”

The incest taboo, which is often simplistically understood in modern societies as a prohibition against mother and sister, is for Lacan merely the subjective point through which the primordial Law manifests itself in the psyche. The emphasis here is that the taboo is not simply a biological restriction, but a symbolic prohibition that installs difference, law, and desire. Even if contemporary norms appear to limit the prohibition to a few specific relations, the symbolic prohibition remains active and structuring, despite the expansion of social “license” or transgressive behaviors. What matters is not the empirical content of the prohibition, but the structural position it creates for the subject within the symbolic field.

“This law therefore reveals itself clearly enough as identical to an order of language. For no power without the nominations of kinship is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that tie and braid through generations the thread of lineages.”

Here, Lacan unequivocally aligns the law of alliance with the order of language. The terms of kinship—father, son, sister, uncle—are signifiers that assign positions in a structure of relations. It is these nominations that sustain lineages across generations, not biological continuity alone. Without the symbolic system of names, there would be no structured field of rights, prohibitions, roles, or heritage. The “thread” Lacan speaks of is thus not a genetic thread, but a signifying chain that organizes human groups through speech and law. This is the field of the Name-of-the-Father, where prohibition and meaning converge.

“And it is indeed the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as the abomination of speech and the desolation of the sinner.”

Lacan emphasizes that mixing generational positions—a son as brother, a father as rival, etc.—is not simply a social inconvenience but a collapse of the symbolic order. Traditional laws, especially biblical ones, identify this confusion as abomination, precisely because it threatens the stability of the signifying structure. Such violations of temporal and symbolic coordinates are experienced not only as ethical crises but as linguistic violations: the “abomination of speech.” The proper functioning of language and law depends on the structural clarity of generational difference. When this breaks down, subjective identity unravels.

“We know indeed what devastation, even going as far as dissociation of the subject’s personality, can be wrought by a falsified filiation, when the pressure of the surroundings is used to sustain its lie.”

When filiation is falsified—when a subject is misled about who their parents are, or when familial structures are lied about—the symbolic foundation of the subject is undermined. This isn’t just a factual error; it constitutes a trauma at the level of the symbolic, potentially producing psychic disintegration. Lacan identifies this as a key vector of subjectivation: to know where one is inscribed in the symbolic chain, to occupy a position that is named and recognized. A falsified name, a hidden truth about parentage, imposes a structural void or inconsistency that can fragment the subject, especially when it is socially maintained.

“The effects may be no less grave when a man, marrying the mother of the woman with whom he has had a son, causes that son to have as brother a child who is the brother of his mother.”

Here Lacan presents a complex case of symbolic confusion: a man fathers a child with a woman, then marries that woman’s mother, making his son’s brother also his mother’s brother. This generates a collapse of generational boundaries and a perversion of kinship nomenclature. It’s not the biological arrangement that matters to Lacan, but the breakdown in the consistency of symbolic positions. The subject caught in this network will experience difficulty in locating himself in relation to the Law, the Other, and desire. These “impossible structures” of kinship are symbolic disturbances, not just moral anomalies.

“But if he is then— and this case is not invented—adopted by the compassionate household of a daughter from a previous marriage of the father, he will once again find himself half-brother to his new mother, and one can imagine the complex feelings in which he awaits the birth of a child who will be both his brother and his nephew in this repeated situation.”

This elaborates the prior case into an even more absurd and troubling symbolic entanglement, one that leads to the complete short-circuiting of names and positions. The child’s relation to himself and others becomes symbolically undecidable. He is caught in a system that no longer maintains clear distinctions of generation, function, and identity. Lacan is not moralizing here—he is showing how these arrangements damage the symbolic order and therefore the subject’s access to meaning. The result is not simply confusion, but a foreclosure of signification, a state which may produce psychosis or unbearable anxiety.

“That slight shift in generations that occurs through a late-born child from a second marriage, whose young mother is a contemporary of an older brother, can produce similar effects, and it is known that this was Freud’s own case.”

Even less dramatic generational shifts—such as a stepmother being the same age as an elder sibling—can lead to subtle but significant symbolic distortions. Lacan draws on Freud’s own biography to illustrate this: Freud’s father remarried and had children with a much younger woman, making Freud’s half-brothers older than his own mother. Lacan notes that such configurations affect the position of the subject with respect to authority, identification, and desire. What matters is the symbolic order that underlies familial experience, and how anomalies in this order contribute to the formation of the unconscious. Freud’s own theoretical sensitivity to family romance, sibling rivalry, and paternal function no doubt owes something to this symbolic irregularity in his own origins.

“This same function of symbolic identification by which the primitive believes himself to be the reincarnation of his namesake ancestor, and which even in the modern man determines an alternating recurrence of traits, thus introduces in subjects subject to such discordances in the paternal relation a dissociation of the Oedipus complex, in which one must see the constant spring of its pathogenic effects.”

Here Lacan emphasizes the function of symbolic identification as foundational to subjectivity. The belief of the so-called “primitive” that he is the reincarnation of a namesake ancestor is not to be read literally but as an example of how naming functions symbolically to inscribe the subject into a lineage. This symbolic chain, which assigns identity through names, persists in modern subjectivity as recurrent traits or roles unconsciously repeated. When this symbolic function is disturbed by discordant paternal relations—such as illegitimacy, failed transmission, or inconsistent identification—it leads to a fracturing of the Oedipal structure. That is, instead of traversing the Oedipus complex in a coherent symbolic fashion, the subject is split across imaginary and real registers, unable to reconcile these with the symbolic position of the father. This dissociation is pathogenic, not because of empirical trauma but because the symbolic law that should anchor the subject’s desire and identity is lacking, inconsistent, or misrecognized.

“Even when represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates within itself imaginary and real relations, always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.”

Lacan distinguishes the symbolic father—the Name-of-the-Father—from both the imaginary father (the fantasized rival, ideal, or protector) and the real father (the actual man, with his limitations and actions). Even if these three dimensions are embodied by a single individual, they do not coincide harmoniously. The symbolic function of the father is not about his presence or qualities, but about his function as bearer of the law—he is the one who inhibits incestuous desire and institutes prohibition, thus allowing the subject to enter language and desire properly. When this symbolic function fails to be differentiated from the imaginary or the real father, pathology ensues—neurotic repetitions, psychotic foreclosure, or perverse identifications.

“It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, identifies his person with the figure of the law.”

The Name-of-the-Father is not a metaphor but the metaphor that anchors the symbolic order. Lacan stresses that since ancient times, the father’s name has served as the guarantor of social order, law, and transmission. It is this name—not the father’s person—that carries symbolic efficacy. This is why Lacan emphasizes the phrase “in the name of the father” as both legal formula and psychoanalytic truth: it names the place of the Law, making it possible for the subject to situate himself within a stable signifying chain. When the Name-of-the-Father is absent, symbolic foreclosure ensues, a key mechanism in psychosis, where the symbolic law is missing entirely.

“This conception allows us to clearly distinguish in the analysis of a case the unconscious effects of this function from narcissistic relations, or even from the real relations that the subject maintains with the image and the action of the person who embodies it, and from this arises a mode of understanding that echoes into the very conduct of interventions.”

Lacan insists on the clinical utility of distinguishing the symbolic father function from imaginary identification and empirical relationship. In psychoanalytic practice, confusion among these levels can lead to misdiagnosis or intervention that targets the wrong register. The symbolic function may be present even in a distant or dead father; conversely, a loving and active real father may have no symbolic effect if he fails to occupy the function of Law. Thus, analysts must trace how the symbolic father has or has not been inscribed in the subject’s unconscious—which can be done only through the structure of speech and desire. This structural clarity affects not only theory but how the analyst intervenes, choosing speech acts, interpretations, or silences depending on where the subject is positioned within the symbolic order.

“Practice has confirmed its fruitfulness for us, as well as for the students we have guided into this method. And we have often had the opportunity, in supervisions or in reported cases, to point out the harmful confusions engendered by ignorance of this approach.”

Lacan appeals to the empirical validation of his method: the clinical efficacy of maintaining a distinction between the registers of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, particularly with regard to the paternal function. He asserts that this approach is not abstract, but one whose practical results are observable in analytic supervision and clinical outcomes. Students unaware of this conceptual framework may fall into reductive explanations or interpretive errors—misattributing failures in subjectivation to personal relationships or traits rather than structural deficiencies in symbolic positioning. This underscores the necessity of structural thinking in psychoanalytic technique.

“Thus, it is the virtue of the word that perpetuates the movement of the Great Debt which Rabelais, in a famous metaphor, extends to the stars in its economy.”

Here Lacan returns to the symbolic function of speech—the word as bearer of law, lineage, and obligation. The “Great Debt” refers to symbolic indebtedness, the chain of generation, obligation, and name that binds subjects across time. By invoking Rabelais, Lacan links this symbolic economy to a literary tradition that grasps language as structuring human fate. Debt here is not material but signifying—the symbolic debt to the Law, to the Name-of-the-Father, to the Other. This debt structures the subject’s relation to desire and speech, and its economy extends even to the stars—that is, it organizes the most cosmic and intimate coordinates of human being.

“And we will not be surprised that the chapter in which he presents to us, with the macaronic inversion of kinship names, a foretaste of ethnographic discoveries, reveals in him the substantive divination of the human mystery that we attempt to elucidate here.”

Lacan sees in Rabelais’ linguistic play—particularly in the inversion of kinship names—a proto-ethnographic insight into the arbitrary, rule-governed structure of symbolic systems. The “macaronic” mixing of tongues, parodic distortion of roles, and playful disorder actually illuminate the structural rules that organize symbolic meaning. What Rabelais shows in fiction and satire, Lacan seeks to uncover analytically in discourse: the mystery of human subjectivity as grounded in symbolic relations, particularly those mediated by names, roles, and speech. The “divination” Rabelais achieves is not mystical but poetic, reaching toward the very essence of the symbolic field psychoanalysis traverses.

“Identified with the sacred hau or the omnipresent mana, the inviolable Debt is the guarantee that the voyage on which women and goods are sent returns in an unbroken cycle to their point of origin with other women and other goods, bearers of an identical entity: symbol zero, says Lévi-Strauss, reducing to the form of an algebraic sign the power of the Word.”

Lacan refers here to Marcel Mauss’s anthropological concept of the hau and mana, spiritual forces inherent in gifts that guarantee their return, which Claude Lévi-Strauss reinterprets structurally. This passage invokes Lévi-Strauss’s idea that exchange systems, especially of women and goods, operate according to a symbolic logic that transcends empirical content. The “inviolable Debt” refers not to economic obligation but to the primordial structure of reciprocity, a symbolic law that orders social life. The phrase “symbol zero” points to the minimal signifier, the algebraic function which grounds the symbolic chain. It is not the content of the gift that matters, but that it circulates in a closed chain of signification, producing meaning and social order. Lacan’s alignment with Lévi-Strauss here underscores that the symbolic order pre-exists and structures subjectivity—and that this logic is not metaphorical but literal in its operation.

“Indeed, symbols envelop human life in so total a network that they join together before he comes into the world those who will engender him “by bone and by flesh,” that they bring to his birth, with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the design of his destiny, that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of acts that will follow him even to where he is not yet and beyond his very death, and that through them his end finds its meaning in the Last Judgment where the word absolves or condemns his being—unless it reaches the subjective realization of being-for-death.”

Lacan articulates here a totalizing vision of the symbolic order, one that not only structures interpersonal relations but surrounds the subject from before birth to after death. The subject is always already spoken, inscribed in a network of names, genealogies, laws, destinies, and roles—long before he emerges into speech. This recalls Freud’s notion of the archaic heritage, as well as Heidegger’s being-toward-death, which Lacan explicitly names at the end. The subject’s actions, identity, morality, and even final judgment are mediated through the word. Lacan stresses that it is language, not biology, that determines one’s fate. In psychoanalysis, this symbolic fabric is what the subject reenters and rewrites through speech. The “design of his destiny” is not mystical fate, but the structured field of language into which the subject is born.

“Servitude and greatness in which the living would be annihilated, if desire did not preserve its share in the interferences and the pulsations that converge upon him from the cycles of language, when the confusion of tongues enters the mix and orders contradict each other in the rending of the universal work.”

Lacan introduces a tension between the weight of the symbolic—its potential for alienation and annihilation—and the vital, errant function of desire. While the symbolic may threaten to totalize, desire introduces disruption, polysemy, and movement. The “confusion of tongues” references Ferenczi’s expression describing traumatic miscommunication between child and adult, and more broadly, the Babel-like condition of language: contradictory imperatives, failed transmissions, misinterpretations. Lacan sees this confusion not as dysfunction but as the very condition of subjectivity—language is not whole, and its fractures allow desire to circulate, giving the subject both servitude and greatness. Desire resists total symbolic capture, thus preserving subjectivity from annihilation.

“But this desire itself, in order to be satisfied in man, requires to be recognized, either through the agreement of speech or the struggle for prestige, in the symbolic or in the imaginary.”

Desire, for Lacan, is not a biological instinct, but a lack articulated within the symbolic order. Its satisfaction depends not on consumption but on recognition—by the Other. This recognition can come through speech (symbolic recognition: being named, heard, addressed) or through imaginary rivalry (struggle for prestige, image, or love). The former aligns with symbolic identification, the latter with narcissistic mirroring. Lacan draws here on Hegel’s dialectic of recognition, in which desire seeks validation from another consciousness. Psychoanalysis intervenes precisely in this structure of desire—aiming to shift recognition from the imaginary toward the symbolic, where it can be worked through.

“The stake of a psychoanalysis is the advent in the subject of the little reality that this desire sustains therein in the face of symbolic conflicts and imaginary fixations as a means of their reconciliation, and our path is the intersubjective experience in which this desire comes to be recognized.”

The goal of analysis, according to Lacan, is not healing, adjustment, or catharsis, but the emergence of desire as the subject’s truth. The “little reality” is that of the subject’s own desire, which is obscured by symbolic conflicts (e.g., contradictions in the Law, name, identity) and imaginary fixations (ideal egos, images of the other, mirror identifications). Psychoanalysis provides a space where desire can be spoken, recognized, and assumed—not as fantasy but as the kernel of subjectivity. This occurs only in intersubjective speech, where the analyst listens through the symbolic and imaginary layers to allow desire to emerge. The recognition of desire, rather than its fulfillment, is what constitutes the ethical act of psychoanalysis.

“From there it becomes clear that the problem is that of the relations, within the subject, between speech and language.”

Lacan sets up the fundamental psychoanalytic problem not as the content of thought, nor even the symbolic order alone, but the relation between speech (parole) and language (langue) within the subject. Speech is the act of enunciation, the subject’s position in discourse; language is the structured system, the symbolic Other. The subject is split precisely at this junction—between the symbolic order that precedes him and the singular articulation he gives in speech. This disjunction is not merely linguistic but constitutive of the unconscious: the unconscious speaks, but not in the subject’s own voice; speech always carries more than the speaker intends. Thus, understanding the subject means grasping how he is both in language and divided by it, and how speech attempts to resolve or express that division.

“Three paradoxes in these relations present themselves in our field.”

Lacan prepares to articulate three distinct modalities of this split—three paradoxes that emerge within psychoanalytic clinical experience. Each paradox reveals a different structural articulation of how speech relates to or fails to relate to the symbolic order, and hence, how the subject is or is not constituted as such. These paradoxes point toward the real, the failure or impossibility internal to symbolization, that marks each clinical structure differently.

“In madness, whatever its nature, we must recognize, on the one hand, the negative freedom of a speech that has renounced recognition—what we call the obstacle to transference—and, on the other hand, the singular formation of a delusion which—fabulatory, fantastic, cosmological, interpretive, litigious or idealistic—objectifies the subject in a language without dialectic.”

Here Lacan addresses psychosis, the first paradox. The “negative freedom” refers to a speech liberated from the demand for recognition—the subject speaks, but not to be heard by the Other. This is the failure of transference: there is no subject supposed to know, no symbolic Other, and thus, speech no longer functions dialogically. Instead, the subject inhabits a monological delusion, producing language that may be cosmological, interpretive, or even philosophical, but that lacks the dialectic of intersubjective exchange. Delusion here is not mere error, but a rigorous reconstruction of the symbolic order in the wake of foreclosure—the Name-of-the-Father was never inscribed, and thus the symbolic lacks a necessary element, causing the subject to invent a private system.

“The absence of speech is manifested there in the stereotypies of a discourse in which the subject, one might say, is spoken rather than speaks: we recognize there the symbols of the unconscious in petrified forms which, alongside the embalmed forms in which myths are presented in our collections, find their place in a natural history of these symbols.”

This absence of dialogical speech does not imply silence, but rather a discourse emptied of enunciation. The subject is spoken, determined entirely by the signifier without occupying a position in speech. Stereotypies—repetitive verbal structures—replace dynamic speech. These are fossilized signifiers, akin to myths in their formal preservation, but lacking subjective assumption. Like embalmed myths, they may retain meaning, but not living speech. This aligns with Lacan’s earlier formulation: “the unconscious is structured like a language”, but here, language has hardened into a closed system that no longer supports subject formation.

“But it is an error to say that the subject assumes them: the resistance to their recognition being no less than in neuroses, when the subject is led into them through a therapeutic attempt.”

Contrary to naive assumptions that psychotic subjects might spontaneously recognize or “own” their delusions, Lacan insists that the resistance to recognition is no less in psychosis than in neurosis. In both cases, the symptom resists interpretation—not because it is unconscious in the repressive sense (as in neurosis), but because its function is structural. In psychosis, the delusional construction is a compensatory apparatus, and the symbolic is radically altered. It cannot be interpreted in the same fashion as neurotic symptoms because it was never inscribed in the same way—there is no repression, but foreclosure.

“Let us note in passing that it would be worth identifying in social space the positions that culture has assigned to such subjects, especially regarding their assignment to social functions related to language, for it is not implausible that one of the factors demonstrating these subjects’ designation by the effects of rupture caused by the symbolic discordances characteristic of the complex structures of civilization may be revealed there.”

Lacan briefly raises a sociological hypothesis: the positions assigned to psychotic subjects within culture may not be arbitrary. If psychosis results from a structural rupture in the symbolic, then it is worth exploring how culture identifies, isolates, or uses those affected. In particular, roles that involve language—priests, poets, bureaucrats, madmen—might be more revealing than previously thought. This suggests that symbolic discordance—gaps, contradictions, or excesses in the cultural symbolic order—might call forth subjects marked by a foreclosure, who are then inscribed into society as bearers of that failure. This is a call for a structural anthropology of madness, beyond medical nosology.

“The second case is represented by the privileged field of psychoanalytic discovery: namely, symptoms, inhibition and anxiety, in the constitutive economy of the different neuroses.”

With this transition, Lacan moves to the second paradox—neurosis, the classical terrain of analytic work. Here, the subject does enter the symbolic order, but with a split and division that gives rise to symptoms, inhibitions, and anxieties. These formations are compromises between the unconscious and the ego, between the repressed and the law, and they reveal a dialectical conflict within speech itself: speech that both reveals and conceals, that asks for recognition and fears it. Unlike psychosis, neurosis preserves the structure of transference, and thus, analysis can proceed through symbolic interpretation. Yet even here, the relation between speech and language remains paradoxical: the subject’s speech is never entirely his own, and the unconscious, speaking in slips and symptoms, structures desire through misrecognition.

“Speech is here driven out of the concrete discourse that orders consciousness, but it finds its support either in the natural functions of the subject—provided that an organic thorn initiates that breach from his individual being to his essence, which makes illness the introduction of the living being to the existence of the subject¹⁵—or in the images that organize at the boundary of the Umwelt and the Innenwelt their relational structuring.”

In the second paradox, tied to neurosis, Lacan underscores that speech is repressed, no longer appearing in “concrete discourse”—that is, the everyday, conscious speech of the subject. However, speech does not vanish; it returns through other channels, through the symptom, sustained either in the body (“natural functions”) or in the imagistic domain where inner and outer worlds are mediated. The “organic thorn” recalls the Freudian idea that a minor somatic trigger can become the site of symptom formation—the body becomes a surface upon which the subject’s being inscribes itself, but only if that inscription entails a cut, a rupture, a breach. Lacan plays with the Heideggerian resonance of illness as an ontological opening, where the subject emerges precisely by being dislodged from the imaginary unity of the body. The Umwelt/Innenwelt reference (borrowed from Uexküll) situates this breach at the interface between world and interiority—the place of image, fantasy, and symptom.

“The symptom here is the signifier of a signified repressed from the subject’s consciousness. A symbol written on the sand of the flesh and on the veil of Maia, it partakes of language through the semantic ambiguity that we have already highlighted in its constitution.”

The symptom is a signifier, not a sign. It does not transparently refer to a fixed meaning but implies a displaced, repressed signified. This is a key Lacanian reformulation of the Freudian symptom: it is not the return of the repressed content per se, but the return of the repressed signifier, a structure in language. “Written on the sand of the flesh” points to the psychosomatic expression of the symptom, while “the veil of Maia” invokes illusion—Maya as the deceptive screen of phenomenal appearances. Thus, the symptom is an ambiguous symbol: it encrypts meaning through its place in a structure of language, and that ambiguity is essential to its function—it means too much and too little at once.

“But it is a fully operative speech, for it includes the discourse of the Other in the secrecy of its cipher.”

Despite being inaccessible to conscious discourse, the symptom is not mere noise—it is structured speech, even if encrypted. It is “fully operative” because it carries the Other’s discourse: that is, the law, the demand, the interdiction—the symbolic order—that the subject cannot or will not articulate openly. The ciphered nature of the symptom is not an accident; it is the necessary form by which the unconscious speaks. It encodes the desire of the Other in a disguised form, and to analyze is to decode this foreign speech inscribed in the subject’s body and behavior.

“It is by deciphering this speech that Freud rediscovered the primal language of symbols¹⁶, still alive in the suffering of civilized man (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur).”

Freud’s deciphering of symptoms amounts to a rediscovery of a primordial symbolic system—one that underlies even our contemporary neuroses. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur frames this suffering as structural to civilization, not incidental: the repression required by cultural norms produces symbolic formations, and these return in symptomatology. Lacan stresses that modern suffering is not post-symbolic, but deeply symbolic—it emerges through misrecognition and failure within the symbolic order itself, and the unconscious continues to speak in its archaic, figurative tongue.

“Hieroglyphs of hysteria, emblems of phobia, labyrinths of Zwangsneurose—charms of impotence, enigmas of inhibition, oracles of anxiety—speaking arms of character¹⁷, seals of self-punishment, disguises of perversion—such are the hermetic forms that our exegesis resolves, the ambiguities that our invocation dissolves, the artifices that our dialectic absolves, in a release of the imprisoned meaning that leads from the revelation of the palimpsest to the word given of the mystery and to the forgiveness of speech.”

In this richly poetic enumeration, Lacan presents the symptomatic field as a cryptographic archive. Symptoms appear as hermetic signifiers, layered and interwoven: hysteria writes in hieroglyphs, obsession in labyrinths; phobia manifests in emblems; inhibition and impotence form enigmatic riddles; perversion wears a mask. These symptoms are not mere malfunctions—they are discursive formations, encrypted and encrypted again. Psychoanalysis, then, is not behavioral correction, nor merely interpretation—it is exegetical, invocatory, dialectical: it reads, invokes, and transforms. The “palimpsest” metaphor evokes layers of overwritten text—the unconscious is not erased, only obscured. To arrive at the “forgiveness of speech” is not merely a moral gesture—it is the moment when speech is restored to the subject, when he can own the signifiers that once enslaved him. Forgiveness here is re-symbolization, a reconciliation of the subject with his position in the symbolic, where the Other’s law no longer crushes, but permits speech and recognition.

“The third paradox in the relationship of language to speech is that of the subject who loses his meaning in the objectifications of discourse. However metaphysical the definition may seem, we cannot ignore its presence at the forefront of our experience. For this is the most profound alienation of the subject of scientific civilization, and it is what we first encounter when the subject begins to speak to us about himself: likewise, in order to resolve it entirely, analysis would have to be carried through to the end of wisdom.”

Lacan identifies here a third paradox involving speech and language: the subject’s alienation in the very discourse that should support his emergence. Unlike in madness or neurosis, this form of alienation is more subtle, yet more pervasive—it appears at the very threshold of analysis when the subject speaks of himself. The paradox is that language, which grants subjectivity, also objectifies it. The modern subject, shaped by scientific discourse, speaks in forms that estrange him from his own being. This is not merely a clinical observation but a structural condition of modernity, wherein objectifying discourse (from science, bureaucracy, or ideology) hollows out the subject. Analysis, to counter this, must go all the way to the limit of symbolic understanding—“to the end of wisdom”—which implies confronting this alienation and traversing the illusion of self-coherence.

“To offer an exemplary formulation of this, we could find no more pertinent ground than the usage of everyday discourse, by noting that the ‘ce suis-je’ of Villon’s time has been reversed into the ‘c’est moi’ of modern man.”

Lacan contrasts the reflexive, enunciative structure of medieval subjectivity with that of modern ego-assertion. Villon’s “ce suis-je” contains a grammatical structure in which the self is located at the level of enunciation—it says: “this [person] am I,” suggesting a subject caught in the act of speech, constituted by it. In contrast, “c’est moi”—“it’s me”—represents a self that asserts itself as object: “I am the ‘me’ that I point to.” The shift marks the alienation of the subject into the ego, now positioned in the imaginary, misrecognized as a given identity. Lacan uses this linguistic evolution to show how even the grammatical form reflects a structural shift in subjectivity under the influence of modernity’s objectifying discourses.

“The ego of modern man has taken shape, as we have indicated elsewhere, in the dialectical impasse of the beautiful soul who does not recognize the very reason for its being in the disorder it denounces in the world.”

This “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele) is a reference to Hegel—a subject who criticizes the world from a place of imagined moral purity, yet remains blind to its own implication in that disorder. For Lacan, the ego of modern man is exactly this: a formation in the Imaginary, asserting its coherence and virtue while disavowing its position in the Symbolic order. It is a subject who speaks as if exterior to the mess, forgetting that its speech is already structured by the same law it decries. This “dialectical impasse” is precisely where psychoanalysis must intervene: to reveal the ego as alienated, not as the site of mastery.

“But an outlet is offered to the subject for the resolution of this impasse where his discourse goes awry. Communication can validly establish itself for him in the common work of science and in the roles it dictates in universal civilization; this communication will be effective within the enormous objectification constituted by that science, and it will allow him to forget his subjectivity.”

Here Lacan highlights the seductive remedy that scientific objectification offers: an impersonal structure of discourse—science, technology, administration—where one can lose oneself while appearing to be functional. The subject enters into symbolic roles, productive and validated, and in doing so, abandons the enigma of subjectivity. Language here is reduced to code, to communication without opacity. This is the social bond of modern civilization, where the Symbolic functions, but the subject is excluded from it as a cause, living instead as a cog in a system of “efficient” speech.

“He will collaborate efficiently in the common endeavor through his daily work and fill his leisure with all the pleasures of a profuse culture which, from detective novels to historical memoirs, from educational lectures to the orthopedics of group relations, will provide him with matter to forget his existence and his death, while simultaneously misrecognizing in a false communication the particular meaning of his life.”

The modern subject is offered an abundance of compensatory narratives: popular culture, knowledge consumption, therapeutic discourse. These are not bad in themselves, but Lacan’s point is structural: these cultural offerings allow the subject to misrecognize himself in the mirror of social meaning. He forgets death—not just mortality but the division at the heart of being, the symbolic lack that grounds desire. In this “false communication,” there is no encounter with the real—only imaginary coherence, displacement, and a covering-over of the truth of desire. Psychoanalysis, then, aims not at adaptation to this profusion but at the production of a speech that traverses it, revealing the singular truth within it.

“If the subject did not rediscover in a regression—often pushed to the mirror stage—the enclosure of a stage in which his ego contains his imaginary exploits, there would be hardly any limits assignable to the credulity to which he must succumb in this situation.”

Lacan points here to the regression, recurrent in analysis and social life alike, toward the mirror stage—that pivotal moment in subject formation when the subject misrecognizes himself in the coherent image of the body. This phase produces the ego as a structural illusion: a Gestalt of imaginary unity that veils the subject’s underlying fragmentation. In moments of crisis or alienation—such as those amplified by the objectifying discourse of modern culture—the subject retreats to this narcissistically reassuring but fundamentally deceptive enclosure. The “imaginary exploits” contained by the ego refer to identifications, heroic narratives, or fantasies that mask the incoherence of desire and the gap in being. Without the structuring frame of Symbolic law, the subject, in this regression, is exposed to unbounded credulity—a susceptibility to ideology, suggestion, or misrecognition—because his anchor in truth (as a function of speech) is compromised.

“And this is what makes our responsibility so fearsome when we bring him, along with the mythical manipulations of our doctrine, yet another opportunity to alienate himself in the decomposed trinity of ego, superego, and id, for example.”

Lacan warns against the uncritical use of Freudian topographical constructs—ego, superego, id—when treated as reified psychological agencies rather than structural functions. These terms, often degraded into clinical clichés, risk becoming imaginary identities into which the subject further alienates himself. Rather than disalienating speech that reveals the truth of the unconscious, the theoretical constructs become mythic placeholders, assimilated by the ego and misused in the name of normalization or therapeutic adjustment. This is the “fearsome” ethical burden of the analyst: not to contribute, under the guise of explanation or guidance, to the subject’s further alienation within an imaginary map of his psyche.

“Here, it is a wall of language that opposes speech, and the precautions against verbalism that are a theme in the discourse of the ‘normal’ man of our culture only serve to increase its thickness.”

Lacan clarifies that it is not a lack of language, but its excess and misdirection that block access to true speech. The “wall of language” is the accumulated, dead weight of clichés, platitudes, diagnostic labels, ideological catchphrases, and self-help slogans that crowd the field of subjectivity. Even the “precautions against verbalism”—the modern fetish for “authenticity,” “non-verbal communication,” or the injunction to “be yourself without words”—paradoxically reinforce this wall. In effect, these responses are defensive operations, shielding the subject from the encounter with full speech, which would implicate him in his desire.

“It would not be futile to measure this thickness against the statistically determined total of kilograms of printed paper, kilometers of phonographic grooves, and hours of radio broadcast, which said culture produces per capita in zones A, B, and C of its territory.”

Lacan ironically proposes an empirical metric for this “wall of language”—the sheer volume of mass cultural production in speech and writing. Zones A, B, and C likely correspond to ideological or geopolitical divisions (perhaps capitalist, socialist, and colonial/underdeveloped regions), all equally engaged in manufacturing speech-like noise. The quantitative saturation of discourse—texts, recordings, broadcasts—does not bring us closer to speech in the analytic sense. Rather, it thickens the screen that separates the subject from his own truth. Language becomes detached from subjective responsibility, automated and distributed across bureaucratic or ideological systems.

“This would be a fine research topic for our cultural institutions, and one would see that the question of language does not reside solely in the area of convolutions where its usage reflects itself in the individual.”

Here Lacan extends the critique to institutional and scientific conceptions of language. The belief that language is housed only “in the convolutions” of the brain—that is, in the neurological individual—neglects the symbolic dimension of language as a trans-individual structure. Language precedes and exceeds the subject: it is not a private tool but a field into which the subject is thrown. The “question of language” is thus not reducible to psycholinguistic or cognitive models; it is a matter of symbolic structures, the unconscious, and the social link.

“We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! / and the rest.”

Lacan ends this passage by citing T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, which captures with poetic precision the condition of modern subjectivity. “Hollow” and “stuffed” signify a paradox: the subject is both empty (lacking symbolic anchoring) and overfilled (with the clutter of Imaginary identifications and dead speech). The “headpiece filled with straw” evokes meaningless discourse, a mind saturated with borrowed, inert signifiers. “Leaning together,” these men share no intersubjective bond; their proximity is mechanical, devoid of speech that touches the real. In invoking Eliot, Lacan aligns psychoanalysis with poetry’s power to articulate the disintegration of speech and the alienation of the subject in the modern world. The reference to “and the rest” suggests that what remains unspoken or elided is precisely the object a—the impossible remainder of desire that psychoanalysis must approach through speech.

“The resemblance of this situation to the alienation of madness—inasmuch as the formula given above is authentic, namely, that the subject is spoken rather than speaking—is clearly linked to the requirement, presumed by psychoanalysis, of a true speech.”

Here Lacan returns to one of the central theses structuring his critique of ego psychology and his reconceptualization of the subject: the idea that the subject is not master of his speech but is, in a certain sense, spoken by language. This formula reverses the classical humanist belief in the autonomy of the speaking subject. In psychosis (madness), this alienation is at its most visible: the subject is overwhelmed by signifiers he cannot integrate or master—hence delusion appears as a kind of language without subject. But Lacan stresses that this is not unique to psychosis; the alienation by the signifier is constitutive of subjectivity itself. Psychoanalysis aims, however, not to silence this alienation, but to open the space for true speech (parole pleine), that is, speech where the subject assumes the truth of his desire within the symbolic order. Madness appears when this function collapses. Thus, the requirement of true speech is precisely what makes the psychoanalytic act possible.

“If this consequence, which brings to its limits the constitutive paradoxes of our current discussion, were to be turned against the very common sense of the psychoanalytic perspective, we would grant full relevance to such an objection, but only to find ourselves thereby confirmed: and this through a dialectical reversal in which we would not lack for authorized sponsors, starting with Hegel’s denunciation of the ‘philosophy of the skull,’ and stopping only at Pascal’s warning, resounding from the dawn of the historical era of the ‘self,’ in these terms: ‘Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would be another form of madness.’”

Lacan anticipates the objection that equating everyday alienation with madness undermines the very structure of the psychoanalytic project, which, after all, presumes the possibility of distinguishing truth-bearing speech from delirium. But he replies by way of dialectical subversion: precisely in pushing this logic to its extreme, one rediscovers the necessity of psychoanalysis. Hegel’s critique of phrenology (“philosophy of the skull”) denounces a reduction of subjectivity to physical determinism. Pascal, on the other hand, anticipates Lacan’s structural vision: madness is not the exception but the rule of human discourse—the only alternative to it would be another kind of madness. Lacan positions the subject as constitutively split (barred), and any fantasy of full mastery (non-madness) is itself symptomatic. Thus, psychoanalysis does not rescue us from madness; it reveals that we are all spoken by a discourse not fully our own, and only through that recognition can speech become something other than noise.

“This is not to say, however, that our culture continues in darkness foreign to creative subjectivity. On the contrary, this subjectivity has never ceased to be active within it, renewing the never-exhausted power of symbols in the human exchange that brings them to light.”

Lacan here reinscribes hope—not in a naïve humanism but in the symbolic field itself. Despite the alienating conditions of modern civilization, symbolic creativity persists. Even within a world saturated with dead or commodified speech, subjectivity survives as the power to generate meaning through symbolic articulation. The symbolic order is not simply a constraint; it is also the only field in which truth can appear, and culture—even in its degraded forms—bears traces of this creative movement. Every genuine act of speech that touches the real of desire, that invokes the Name-of-the-Father or traverses fantasy, participates in this unending renewal of symbolic possibility. In psychoanalysis, such speech is not merely therapeutic but world-creating—it shapes the very horizon in which subject and Other co-emerge.

“To emphasize the small number of subjects who sustain this creation would be to yield to a romantic perspective by confronting that which is not equivalent.”

This is a critique of the romantic notion that creation—symbolic or otherwise—is the privileged domain of a rare few. To uphold that only exceptional individuals maintain the symbolic function is to mistake quantity for structural position. The subject of the unconscious, as Lacan conceptualizes it, is not reducible to the creative genius; it is present wherever the signifier operates. Symbolic creation occurs not only in canonical works of art or science but wherever speech structures being. To romanticize the few would be to overlook the universality of symbolic inscription in each speaking subject.

“The fact is that this subjectivity, in whatever field it appears—mathematics, politics, religion, even advertising—continues to animate the human movement as a whole.”

Subjectivity is not confined to elevated realms. It permeates all domains where the symbolic order structures meaning, including the most profane, such as advertising. In Lacanian terms, the subject is an effect of the signifier, and thus, wherever signifiers circulate—be it the axioms of mathematics, the slogans of ideology, or the rituals of belief—subjectivity is at play. The subject of the unconscious animates even the very structures meant to control or obscure it.

“And a no less illusory perspective would be to stress the opposite point: that its symbolic character has never been more manifest.”

To claim that subjectivity has never been more saturated with symbolicity is just as misleading. While the signifier may be omnipresent, it does not follow that it is consciously assumed or dialectically integrated. A proliferation of signifiers is not equivalent to the assumption of subjective truth. The symbolic may dominate, but it does so often as empty discourse—what Lacan calls empty speech—rather than as full speech that implicates the subject in his desire.

“It is the irony of revolutions that they generate a power all the more absolute in its operation, not, as is said, because it is more anonymous, but because it is more reduced to the words that signify it.”

Here, Lacan reads revolution through a structural lens. The outcome of revolutionary movements, rather than freeing the subject, often results in a more radically symbolic power, abstracted from the individuals who wield it. The real efficiency of power lies not in its anonymity, but in its function as a signifier, which organizes the social order independently of personal authority. The Law—like the Name-of-the-Father—operates by its signifying function, not its embodiment.

“And more than ever, on the other hand, the strength of churches resides in the language they have managed to maintain: an instance, it must be said, that Freud left in the shadows in the article where he outlines what we may call the collective subjectivities of the Church and the Army.”

This returns us to Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, where Freud defines the Church and the Army as libidinally invested groups, bound by identification with an ideal ego. Lacan notes that Freud did not fully account for the role of language in sustaining these identifications. The power of institutions such as the Church lies in the preservation of a symbolic language that grounds belief, repetition, and subjectivation. These are not merely social formations but discursive structures supported by the signifier.

“Psychoanalysis has played a role in the direction of modern subjectivity and cannot continue to do so without ordering itself according to the movement that, in science, elucidates it.”

Lacan insists that psychoanalysis has not been merely reactive but formative of modern subjectivity. Yet, for it to retain this role, it must attend to the epistemological standards of science as formalization, not positivist empiricism. He is referring not to science in the experimental sense, but to science in its structural and formalist dimension, which includes logic and linguistics—sciences of the symbolic.

“This is the question of the foundations that must secure for our discipline its place among the sciences: a question of formalization, one that is, to be honest, very poorly underway.”

Here Lacan identifies the central lacuna in psychoanalysis: a lack of rigorous formalization of its concepts. For psychoanalysis to be a science, it must define the structure of its field, including the operations of the signifier and the logic of the subject. This requires moving beyond clinical empiricism and entering into the domain of topology, linguistics, and mathematical formalism—which is Lacan’s own method.

“For it seems that, seized again by a bias of the medical mindset against which psychoanalysis had to constitute itself, we seek to affiliate ourselves to science by its example with a half-century delay in the movement of the sciences.”

The “medical mindset” Lacan denounces here refers to the naturalistic and positivist framework that psychoanalysis was meant to break from. To adopt outdated models from biology or experimental psychology is to regress rather than advance. Modern science no longer operates solely through empirical observation, and psychoanalysis should not model itself on sciences that no longer model themselves on 19th-century empiricism.

“An abstract objectification of our experience based on fictitious principles, even simulated ones, of the experimental method: this is the effect of prejudices from which our field must first be cleansed if we are to cultivate it according to its authentic structure.”

Lacan issues a warning: if psychoanalysis continues to model itself on simulacra of scientific method—experiments, variables, data collection divorced from structure—it betrays its own field. The real task is to ground psychoanalytic experience in the formal logic of the signifier, and to do so requires cleansing it of empirical prejudices. For psychoanalysis to remain scientific, it must develop its own rigorous formalization, internal to its symbolic foundation.

“As practitioners of the symbolic function, it is astonishing that we shy away from deepening it, to the point of ignoring that it is this function that situates us at the heart of the movement that is establishing a new order of the sciences, with the advent of an authentic anthropology.”

This sentence expresses the central paradox of contemporary psychoanalysis: psychoanalysts, whose entire practice is founded on the symbolic function—the structuring power of the signifier—have failed to pursue the implications of that function within the scientific field. For a Lacanian, the symbolic is not merely one register among others but the very framework within which subjectivity is constituted. The symbolic function places psychoanalysis not at the margins, but at the center of a reorientation in science—especially where the subject, language, and culture are concerned. This new anthropology, grounded in the structure of speech, demands from psychoanalysis a more rigorous alignment with its structuralist underpinnings.

“This new order means nothing other than a return to a notion of true science that already bears its credentials within a tradition going back to the Theaetetus.”

Here Lacan invokes Plato’s Theaetetus to locate a classical conception of knowledge as structured and formal. The shift Lacan proposes is not a revolutionary rupture but a return to a model of science that sees truth as internally coherent, based on symbolic relations—not empirical accumulation. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as a structured field of language aligns precisely with this philosophical lineage.

“This notion has been degraded, as we know, in the positivist reversal that, by placing the human sciences at the apex of the edifice of the experimental sciences, in fact subordinates them.”

Positivism, particularly in its 19th-century form, claims to elevate the human sciences by importing methods from the natural sciences. But in so doing, it subordinates them to empirical verification, losing the specificity of their symbolic and subjective structure. In Lacan’s view, this subordination is not a step forward but a regression, one that misrecognizes the particularity of the symbolic in human formation.

“This notion stems from an erroneous view of the history of science, based on the prestige of a specialized development of experience.”

The mistake is historical and epistemological. The rise of the experimental sciences led to the fetishization of empirical data, ignoring that scientific thought is always structured by language and formal categories. The symbolic, not the sensory, is the foundation of any knowledge that can be considered science in the proper sense. To misplace that is to conflate observation with structure.

“But today the human sciences, by rediscovering the enduring notion of science, compel us to revise the classification of the sciences inherited from the nineteenth century, in a direction clearly indicated by the most lucid thinkers.”

This revision is underway in anthropology, linguistics, and structuralism—fields that return to formal models, showing that language precedes and conditions thought. Psychoanalysis must follow this movement or risk isolation. In Lacanian terms, it must abandon imaginary affiliations with empirical psychology and assert its place alongside the symbolic sciences.

“It suffices to follow the concrete evolution of disciplines to become aware of this.”

The evidence is in the transformation of the disciplines themselves. Linguistics, for example, has already reoriented its methods toward formal, binary structures (phonemes, morphemes, syntax) that mirror the logic of the unconscious.

“Linguistics can serve us here as a guide, since it plays the leading role in contemporary anthropology, and we cannot remain indifferent to it.”

Linguistics—especially as reshaped by Saussure and Jakobson—has become the model science for analyzing symbolic structures. In anthropology (particularly in the work of Lévi-Strauss), myth, kinship, and law are treated as systems of signs, homologous to language. For psychoanalysis, to ignore this development would be to overlook its own founding principle, namely that the unconscious is structured like a language.

“The form of mathematization in which the discovery of the phoneme is inscribed—as a function of opposing pairs formed by the smallest discriminative semantic elements—leads us to the very foundations where Freud’s later theory locates, in a vocalic connotation of presence and absence, the subjective sources of the symbolic function.”

The binary nature of phonemes (minimal pairs like /p/ vs. /b/) shows how meaning arises from difference, not substance. Lacan links this structural operation to Freud’s idea of presence and absence in the psyche—what is most famously exemplified in the child’s fort/da game. The voice, for Freud and Lacan alike, carries the trace of lack, and the subject emerges as a function of this play of presence and absence within the symbolic chain.

“And the reduction of any language to the group of a very small number of these phonemic oppositions, initiating just as rigorous a formalization of its highest morphèmes, gives us a glimpse of a most precise approach to the phenomena of language.”

The finiteness of phonemic units and the rigorous rules that generate infinite meaning from them mirror the way the unconscious operates with a finite number of signifiers (the paternal metaphor, the phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, etc.) to structure subjectivity. Formal linguistics thus offers a precise, operational model for psychoanalysis—one that does not reduce the subject to biology or behavior, but roots it in the differential structure of speech itself.

“This progress comes close enough to our grasp to offer an immediate access, thanks to the convergence of lines polarized by ethnography, with a formalization of myths into mythemes that most directly concerns us.”

This points directly to the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose concept of the mytheme—the minimal structural unit of myth—mirrors the function of the phoneme in language. For a Lacanian psychoanalyst, the mytheme functions analogously to the signifier: it is not meaningful in isolation but acquires meaning through its differential position within a structure. This formalization of myth into combinatory elements represents not only a new way of organizing narrative material but also a model for the unconscious, whose “syntax” Freud had already begun to uncover. Lacan signals here that psychoanalysis must attend to this convergence, as it shows how symbolic structures mediate desire and social law.

“Let us add that the research of Lévi-Strauss, by demonstrating the structural relationships between language and social laws, provides nothing less than the objective foundations for the theory of the unconscious.”

Lévi-Strauss’s work proves that symbolic systems—kinship structures, myths, taboos—follow rules homologous to those of language. For Lacan, this provides a scientific confirmation of Freud’s thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language. The unconscious is no longer a murky psychic region but a network of signifiers governed by syntactic and differential rules. Thus, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism offers psychoanalysis the “objective foundation” it requires: not metaphysical speculation, but symbolic logic grounded in anthropological evidence.

“From that point on, it becomes impossible not to center a new classification of the sciences on a general theory of the symbol, in which the human sciences reclaim their central place as sciences of subjectivity. Of course, we will only be able to indicate the principle here, but its consequences are decisive for the field it defines.”

This is a call to revise the epistemological order of disciplines. A Lacanian reading understands that science—if it is to engage with human subjectivity—must reorganize around a theory of the symbol rather than of the object. The subject is not something that can be observed externally but something constituted in and by language. Hence the “human sciences” (including psychoanalysis) regain their proper stature not by imitating empirical methods but by situating themselves at the level of the signifier, the symbolic condition of knowledge itself.

“The symbolic function is characterized, in fact, by a double movement within the subject: man makes an object of his action, but in due time, he returns to it its founding function. In this operative equivocation at every moment lies all the progress of a function where action and knowledge are intertwined.”

Here Lacan articulates the dialectical nature of the symbolic. Initially, a subject exteriorizes—projects—a symbolic structure to act upon the world. Yet retroactively, that structure determines the subject who engaged it. This “double movement” characterizes the subject’s relation to language: he speaks, but it is speech that defines him. The implication is that symbolic systems are not simply tools; they produce the subject who wields them. This is central to Lacan’s rereading of Freud: the unconscious speaks not from within but through the Other.

“Examples, one borrowed from school benches, the other from the heart of our present era:”

By moving from a Kantian example to a Marxist one, Lacan traces the symbolic function across both epistemology and historical praxis—a movement from theoretical cognition to revolutionary subjectivity.

“– the first, mathematical: first moment, man objectifies in two cardinal numbers two collections he has counted; second moment, he performs with these numbers the act of adding them (cf. the example cited by Kant in the introduction to the Transcendental Aesthetic, § IV in the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason);”

This is a Kantian illustration of synthesis: the subject abstracts (objectifies) quantities into numbers and then operates upon them with addition. The symbolic function appears in the very act of conceptualizing and transforming empirical multiplicity into structure, demonstrating that even abstract reason is rooted in a symbolic system. For Lacan, this illustrates how the symbolic does not merely reflect the world but organizes and institutes its intelligibility.

“– the second, historical: first moment, the man working in production within our society counts himself among the proletariat; second moment, in the name of this belonging, he calls a general strike.”

Here Lacan illustrates the symbolic function at work in historical subjectivity. The worker recognizes himself as part of a symbolic category—the proletariat—which he did not create but which retroactively grants him a position of enunciation. His identity, formed within language and class discourse, allows him to act collectively in history. This demonstrates how symbolic identification precedes and enables political agency. Just as the mathematical subject engages symbolic numbers, the revolutionary subject engages class categories—and both are structured by the same symbolic dialectic.

“It is not by chance that we chose these two domains, nor that our examples are situated at the two extremes of concrete history.”

The examples—mathematics and class struggle—are not arbitrarily chosen. They reflect the universality of the symbolic function, from its abstract expression in logical formalism to its concrete impact in historical and collective action. For a Lacanian analyst, the implication is that psychoanalysis too must be located at this intersection, not outside of it, because it is concerned with the subject as constituted by these very symbolic articulations.

“For the effects of these domains are far from negligible and reach us from afar, but they intersect through time in a unique way: the most subjective science having created a new reality, and the most opaque reality becoming an acting symbol.”

Lacan here suggests a convergence between disparate epistemological fields—those of subjective inquiry (psychoanalysis, anthropology) and objectified scientific models (physics, mathematics). What’s vital to the Lacanian analyst is that these seemingly divergent realms now intersect because subjectivity itself has come to structure reality symbolically, while the external world—traditionally viewed as resistant to meaning—has been internalized and symbolized. For example, the unconscious, a subjective formation, is now read as a structured, symbolic “reality,” while in reverse, the atom or the gene—once strictly “real” objects—have become symbolic operators in discourses.

“Certainly, the juxtaposition of the science considered most exact with that shown to be most conjectural is initially surprising, but this contrast is not contradictory.”

This line addresses the apparent tension between hard sciences (e.g., physics) and conjectural sciences (e.g., psychoanalysis, anthropology). Yet Lacan asserts that this juxtaposition is not incoherent—what matters is not the empirical solidity but the function of structure, symbolic consistency, and logical coherence. Psychoanalysis, though conjectural, retains internal rigor. The point for a Lacanian is that truth is not reducible to empirical certainty.

“For exactness is distinct from truth, and conjecture does not exclude rigor. And if experimental science derives its exactness from mathematics, its relationship to nature remains nonetheless problematic.”

Here Lacan lays bare the difference between exactitude (precision) and truth (aletheia). A formula can be exact and yet miss the truth of the subject. Similarly, psychoanalysis may rely on conjecture but can still deliver something true about desire or the unconscious. Mathematics is the paradigm of precision, but it is not transparent with respect to the Real—it structures it, but does not express it as such. The Real, for Lacan, remains that which escapes symbolization, no matter how exact the symbolic system.

“If our connection to nature, in fact, leads us to ask poetically whether it is not its own movement that we rediscover in our science, in / … that voice / That knows itself when it sounds / To no longer be anyone’s voice / So long as waves and woods,”

This poetic interlude—likely an echo of Mallarmé or Valéry—insists that even our most objective articulations of the natural world are reflections of subjectivity. The “voice” here is both the symbolic articulation of knowledge and the fading trace of the subject in that articulation. The subject is displaced into the structure itself. The natural world, in its symbolic capture, is no longer neutral—it is implicated in a network of human meaning, and it “speaks” through mathematical and scientific constructs.

“it is clear that our physics is only a mental fabrication, of which the mathematical symbol is the instrument.”

Physics, for Lacan, is not a direct mapping of reality but a symbolic system, much like language. The mathematical symbol doesn’t reflect nature—it constructs a model that makes nature legible. This is why psychoanalysis and modern physics (as in quantum mechanics) can be brought into dialogue: both rely on the mediation of a symbolic system that structures what can be known.

“For experimental science is not so much defined by quantity—which indeed dominates it—as by measurement.”

Measurement, not quantity, is central because measurement implies a reference system, a symbolic framework. A Lacanian would understand measurement as a process that requires a symbolic anchor—an a priori structure that enables quantification. It is not the quantity that matters, but the conditions that give it meaning. The psychoanalyst deals with this in the clinic where time, for instance, isn’t a neutral continuum but a symbolic operator within transference.

“As is evident with time, which defines it, and whose instrument of precision, without which it would be impossible—the clock—is merely the realized organism of Galileo’s hypothesis on the equigravity of bodies, in other words, on the uniform acceleration of their fall. And this is so true that the instrument was completed in its assembly before the hypothesis could be verified by observation, which it made unnecessary anyway.”

Time, understood through the Galilean clock, is a symbolic construction, a measuring device that does not emerge from experience but precedes and structures it. The anecdote about the clock’s realization before verification of the hypothesis exemplifies Lacan’s thesis: the symbolic precedes the Real. The hypothesis was made operable—true—in and through its symbolic articulation. Measurement systems (like the clock) don’t mirror nature; they constitute its intelligibility.

“But mathematics can symbolize another time, notably intersubjective time, which structures human action, of which game theory, still called strategy but better named stochastic theory, has begun to deliver the formulas.”

Lacan distinguishes objective, physical time (Galilean, Newtonian) from subjective, intersubjective time—the time of speech, waiting, anticipation, delay. Game theory (especially in its stochastic dimension) opens up a way to formalize the temporality of decision and interaction, thus approaching the logic of intersubjective action. This is key in Lacanian psychoanalysis, where temporality is not linear but structured by the retroactive logic of après-coup (nachträglichkeit). The unconscious functions through such time—not the ticking of the clock, but the punctuation of the signifier.

In this synthesis, Lacan places psychoanalysis in dialogue not with biology or neurology, but with formal sciences, asserting that only by formalizing the symbolic can we articulate subjectivity without reducing it.

“The author of these lines has attempted to demonstrate in the logic of a sophism the springs of time by which human action, insofar as it is ordered in response to the action of the other, finds in the scansion of its hesitations the emergence of its certainty, and in the decision that concludes it, gives to the other’s action—now included within it—both its sanction in the past and its meaning for the future.”

This refers to Lacan’s own famous “logical time” and the example of the prisoner’s dilemma or the “three prisoners” sophism. What’s at stake is the constitution of subjective certainty through intersubjective scansion. Action arises not in linear, biological time, but in symbolic time, a time punctuated by moments of hesitation, anticipation, and conclusion—a triad that corresponds to the retroactive logic (après-coup) fundamental to Lacanian theory. The decision of one subject folds in the gesture of the Other and re-signifies it, retroactively assigning value and meaning not just to the act, but to what came before and what comes after. In this movement, time becomes truly dialectical—not sequential but structured through symbolic anticipation.

“It is shown there that it is the certainty anticipated by the subject in the time to understand that, through the haste precipitating the moment to conclude, determines in the other the decision that renders the subject’s own movement error or truth.”

Here Lacan points out that certainty is not epistemological but temporal, emerging from a logical structure of anticipation and not from empirical verification. The subject anticipates an outcome in the Other before the Other has even acted. But this anticipation determines the Other’s act, and that act in turn either validates or invalidates the subject’s initial anticipation. This is the very structure of transference, where the subject’s interpretation or intervention calls forth a response from the Other that rewrites the original gesture. Thus, the “moment to conclude” is a performative act that retroactively constitutes both truth and error—a perfect image of analytic interpretation.

“This example shows how the mathematical axiomatization that inspired Boolean logic, even set theory, can bring to the science of human action this formalization of intersubjective time that psychoanalytic conjecture needs to ground its rigor.”

Lacan affirms that psychoanalytic theory can be rigorously formalized—not through the empirical methodology of natural science, but through mathematical logic and set theory, which offer a means of structuring the logic of desire and time. Boolean logic and modern formalism provide a model for how signifiers operate as pure difference and how subjective decisions arise within a structured field. This is why psychoanalysis finds its conceptual cousin not in biology but in topology, logic, and structural linguistics. The time of the unconscious is logical time, not chronological.

“If, moreover, the history of historiographic technique shows that its progress is defined in the ideal of an identification of the historian’s subjectivity with the constitutive subjectivity of primary historization wherein the event is humanized, it is clear that psychoanalysis finds therein its exact scope: in knowledge, by realizing this ideal; and in efficacy, by finding therein its rationale.”

This draws an analogy between the historian and the analyst, both of whom must identify with a subjectivity other than their own—the subjectivity embedded in the text of the past, or the unconscious. For the analyst, this means recognizing that the analysand’s speech always refers to a prior historization, and that healing comes through reinscription of this history via interpretation. Psychoanalysis doesn’t reconstruct facts but re-symbolizes events so they become legible within the subject’s present structure of meaning. The event is humanized by being taken up in discourse. In this, psychoanalysis becomes a science of historization.

“The example of history also dispels, like a mirage, the recourse to lived reaction that obsesses both our technique and our theory, for the fundamental historicity of the event we retain suffices to conceive of the possibility of a subjective reproduction of the past in the present.”

Lacan refutes the phenomenological bias that privileges the “lived” as the locus of authenticity. In psychoanalysis, the truth of the subject is not in a raw experience of the past but in the symbolic traces that structure the present. What matters is not the event as it was, but how it is subjectively reconstructed, re-articulated in speech, and recognized as part of a symbolic order. The past is not relived but resignified, and this resignification is the work of transference and interpretation. The event returns not as experience but as discourse, which is the very axis on which the unconscious turns.

“More than that, this example allows us to grasp how psychoanalytic regression implies this progressive dimension of the subject’s history, which Freud highlights as lacking in the Jungian concept of neurotic regression, and we understand how the experience itself renews this progression by ensuring its continuation.”

Regression in the Freudian field is not a mere return to the past as in Jung’s conception, which tends to see the neurotic’s backward movement as a return to archetypes or collective images. Freud’s view, which Lacan is reaffirming here, conceptualizes regression within the dynamic of the nachträglich—where the return to earlier stages is never merely circular, but rather produces new subjective meaning. The analytic process allows the subject to revisit structural fixations not to retreat, but to move through them, creating the very history of the subject retroactively. Regression is thus a dialectical progression, rewriting psychic temporality.

“Reference to linguistics, finally, will introduce us to that method which, by distinguishing synchronic from diachronic structurations in language, may allow us to better understand the different value our speech assumes in the interpretation of resistances and of transference, or again to differentiate the proper effects of repression from the structure of the individual myth in obsessional neurosis.”

This passage maps onto the structuralist distinction introduced by Saussure between synchronic (language as a system at a given time) and diachronic (language through historical development) levels. For the analyst, understanding resistance or transference requires moving between these planes. Transference, which is a synchronic formation in the analytic situation, is not to be confused with the diachronic myth that the subject carries from the past—such as in the Urverdrängung (primal repression) structuring obsessional neurosis. Repression creates a rupture in diachronic continuity, while the analysand’s speech articulates a synchronic grid of signifiers in the analytic encounter. Interpretation works at this junction.

“We know the list of disciplines that Freud designated as forming the ancillary sciences of an ideal faculty of psychoanalysis. Alongside psychiatry and sexology, we find: ‘the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religions, literary history and criticism.'”

Lacan recalls Freud’s original vision for psychoanalysis not merely as a medical subfield but as a human science, rooted in cultural and symbolic knowledge. These ancillary sciences—mythology, religion, literature—serve not as background but as mirrors of the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is structured like a text, populated with myths and metaphors. Hence, interpreting dreams or symptoms entails engaging with the same tools as one would with a literary narrative or mythic structure.

“The entirety of these subjects, forming the curriculum of a technical education, is normally situated within the epistemological triangle we have described, and which would provide its method to a higher teaching of its theory and technique.”

The “epistemological triangle” Lacan refers to likely encompasses logic, language, and subjectivity—the three vertices that define psychoanalysis as a science of the symbolic. Any proper analytic formation, then, cannot be reduced to empirical knowledge or clinical practice alone. It must be situated in a broader epistemic field, one that gives proper weight to the methodological formalization of discourse and the logical foundations of desire.

“To this we will gladly add, for our part: rhetoric, dialectic in the technical sense given to this term in Aristotle’s Topics, grammar, and, as the pinnacle of the aesthetics of language: poetics, which would include the technique—left in the shadows—of the witticism.”

Here Lacan explicitly proposes a return to classical disciplines as vital for psychoanalytic training. Rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic are not archaic curiosities but crucial for understanding how the subject is caught in language. Poetics is the analytic analog of dreamwork and slips of the tongue—it is where condensation and displacement are at play. And the Witz, or witticism, which Freud analyzed in his early work, embodies the logic of the unconscious in its most condensed and enigmatic form.

“And if these headings evoke somewhat outdated resonances for some, we would not hesitate to adopt them, as a return to our sources.”

This return to rhetorical and poetic sources is not nostalgic. Rather, it is a strategic re-grounding of psychoanalysis in its symbolic origins. Against the drift toward biologism, psychology, or experimentalism, Lacan insists that psychoanalysis must reclaim its roots in the disciplines of speech and meaning. For only there can the truth of the subject, caught between signifier and desire, be faithfully addressed.

“For psychoanalysis in its first development, linked to the discovery and study of symbols, tended to partake in the structure of what in the Middle Ages was called the ‘liberal arts.'”

This reference frames early psychoanalysis within the scholastic tradition, where the liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the quadrivium—formed the basis of intellectual formation. Lacan highlights that psychoanalysis, like these medieval disciplines, originally approached the symbolic through interpretation, not formal science. That is, it was preoccupied with the meaningfulness of speech, metaphor, myth, and narrative—the symbolic chain through which the unconscious manifests itself. This aligns with Lacan’s assertion that psychoanalysis is a “science of the subject” grounded in the logic of language.

“Deprived like them of true formalization, it was organized like them around a body of privileged problems, each promoted by some felicitous relation of man to his own measure, and taking from this particularity a charm and a humanity that may compensate in our eyes for the slightly recreational appearance of their presentation.”

Here Lacan draws attention to the informal, almost artisanal, nature of early psychoanalytic work, which revolved around exemplary cases and theoretical motifs, not yet rigorously systematized. This “relation of man to his own measure” is precisely the kind of human-scale investigation that psychoanalysis allows: the symbolic return of speech to a subject who is himself split by language. The “charm” and “humanity” stem from this intimate scale, much like the medieval trivium, which was more hermeneutic than mathematical in character.

“Let us not disdain this aspect in the early developments of psychoanalysis; for it expresses nothing less, in fact, than the recreation of human meaning in the arid times of scientism.”

Scientism here refers to the positivist reduction of knowledge to what can be experimentally measured. Lacan insists that the interpretative richness of early psychoanalysis must not be dismissed as merely literary or unscientific; rather, it responded to a profound historical crisis in meaning. The symbolic interpretation of symptoms and dreams served as a rebellion against the dehumanization of subjectivity under scientific objectivism.

“Let us disdain it all the less in that psychoanalysis has not raised its level by embarking on the false paths of a theorization contrary to its dialectical structure.”

Lacan warns against theoretical developments—especially those inspired by ego psychology or adaptationist models—that treat psychoanalysis as a psychotechnical adjustment of the individual to reality. These approaches sever psychoanalysis from its dialectical core: the movement of meaning between signifiers, between subject and Other, between past and present. True theory must remain structurally faithful to the analytic experience of the divided subject.

“It will only provide scientific foundations for its theory and its technique by adequately formalizing those essential dimensions of its experience which are, alongside the historical theory of the symbol: intersubjective logic and the temporality of the subject.”

Here Lacan clarifies what kind of formalization psychoanalysis requires: not empirical regularities, but a logical structure—a topology—of the subject’s relation to speech and time. The theory of the symbol (rooted in Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), the logic of intersubjectivity (the relation of the subject to the Other), and a theory of subjective temporality (nachträglichkeit, the retroactive constitution of meaning) form the tripod of a structural psychoanalysis.

III THE RESONANCES OF INTERPRETATION AND THE TIME OF THE SUBJECT IN PSYCHOANALYTIC TECHNIQUE

This new section signals a shift to the clinical level, where the effects of interpretation and the structure of time in the cure are brought into focus. Resonance evokes the idea that interpretation is not a univocal decoding but a signifier that reverberates in the subject’s discourse, potentially reshaping their relation to the unconscious. The “time of the subject” refers not to chronological time but to the logical time of subjectivization—entry into the symbolic, punctuated by acts of speech and moments of insight.

“Between man and love, There is woman. Between man and woman, There is a world. Between man and the world, There is a wall.”
(Antoine Tudal, in Paris in the Year 2000)

This poetic epigraph is a meditation on separation. Woman is the object of desire but also a mediating third between man and love—already Lacan’s not-all (pas-toute), that which both enables and disrupts desire. The world stands between the sexes as symbolic order, and a wall separates man from world—symbol of alienation within language. This anticipates the later theme of castration and the Real, where language both structures and occludes the Real of jouissance.

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis, respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.”
(Satyricon, xlviii)

This classical allusion to the Sibyl who wants to die, though given immortality without eternal youth, evokes the tragedy of desire. The Sibyl, suspended in a glass vessel, is caught in a condition of speech without body, condemned to an endless temporality of inassimilable demand. She speaks, but her truth is one of despair beyond interpretation. For Lacan, this speaks to a mode of subjectivity trapped in the symbolic, disconnected from any act that would truly engage desire or temporality. Her response—”I want to die”—is a pure signifier, devoid of historicization, perhaps the zero-degree of the speaking being.

“To bring psychoanalytic experience back to speech and language as its foundations cannot help but reverberate onto its technique.”

This sentence affirms the Lacanian conviction that psychoanalysis must be re-centered on its essential medium: language. Interpretation, transference, and subjectivation occur in and through the symbolic. When one reaffirms that speech is not just a tool but the very ground of psychoanalytic experience, this necessarily reshapes the praxis of interpretation. Technique is not a neutral application of method, but an extension of the symbolic field—reorienting it to speech reveals its missteps when detached from that foundation.

“In restoring the principles to their foundation, the path already traveled becomes visible, as does the one-way direction in which analytic interpretation has displaced itself, further and further away.”

Here Lacan diagnoses the historical drift of psychoanalysis away from its origins in the symbolic. Once one returns to speech as the locus of truth, it becomes clear that much of modern technique has deviated unilaterally—away from the dialectical function of speech and toward a positivistic, objectivist mode. This “one-way” direction points to the narrowing of interpretation into reductive categories, neglecting the dialogical encounter that makes interpretation transformative.

“One is then justified in suspecting that this evolution in practice motivates the new aims with which theory adorns itself.”

Technique’s movement away from the symbolic, Lacan suggests, is not innocent—it has led theory itself to evolve in a compensatory or justificatory way. Theories of ego development, adaptation, or object relations have grown not from clinical necessity but to rationalize a practice that has already abandoned speech as a locus of truth. Theory, far from guiding practice, increasingly trails after its misdirections.

“Looking more closely, the problems of symbolic interpretation began by intimidating our little world before becoming embarrassing.”

There is a telling historical irony here: the early richness of symbolic interpretation—where dreams, slips, and symptoms were deciphered like myths—once awed the analytic community. But now, stripped of its foundational logic in the symbolic order, this mode of interpretation is perceived as excessive, even comical. What once revealed unconscious truth now appears as theatrical overreach, in part because its logic has been forgotten.

“The successes obtained by Freud now astonish by the brazenness of the indoctrination from which they appear to proceed, and the ostentation noted in the cases of Dora, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man cannot help but scandalize us.”

The reference to Freud’s major case studies touches on their interpretative boldness—how Freud imposed a structure of meaning (Oedipus, castration, desire) on fragmented narratives. Without an appreciation for the symbolic logic guiding these interventions, contemporary analysts see these cases as symptomatic of suggestion, or even coercion. What is called brazenness here is in fact a kind of full commitment to the wager of symbolic speech—interpreting the subject’s utterance as bearing a truth the subject does not master.

“It is true that our clever ones do not hesitate to question whether that was ever a good technique.”

This ironic jab addresses the revisionist tendency in post-Freudian theory to claim that Freud misunderstood his own discoveries, or that his methods were unsound. Lacan resists such dismissals, which reduce interpretation to a kind of informational feedback. Freud’s technique was radical because it engaged the unconscious as structured like a language, not as a collection of repressed representations to be reflected upon by the ego.

“This disaffection, in truth, derives in the psychoanalytic movement from a confusion of tongues which, in a casual conversation from a recent era, the most representative figure of its current hierarchy did not conceal from us.”

A clear allusion to the Babel-like proliferation of theoretical idioms in psychoanalysis: ego psychology, Kleinian theory, object relations, etc. Lacan links this to Ferenczi’s phrase “confusion of tongues,” originally designating the traumatic disjunction between infantile and adult meaning. Here it points to the breakdown in common language within the analytic field itself, where different schools no longer speak to each other, each assuming its own code of interpretation.

“It is quite remarkable that this confusion increases with the pretension each person believes themselves mandated to discover within our experience the conditions for a fully realized objectification, and with the fervor that seems to greet these theoretical attempts in direct proportion to their increasing derealization.”

Lacan critiques the drive toward making psychoanalysis a fully objective science of the psyche. This desire for objectification—diagnostic categories, developmental schemas, ego functions—alienates theory from clinical experience. The more abstract and derealized these systems become, the more fanatically they are embraced. It’s an uncanny reversal: the further theory drifts from lived speech, the more it demands belief.

“It is certain that the principles of the analysis of resistances, however well-founded they may be, have in practice given rise to an ever-growing misunderstanding of the subject, due to their failure to be understood in their relation to the intersubjectivity of speech.”

Lacan asserts that the concept of resistance, if not re-situated within the symbolic exchange between subject and Other, becomes a tool of misrecognition. Resistance is not a hydraulic blockage but a signifier positioned within a dialectic. Its meaning emerges only in speech, in relation to the desire of the analyst and the speech of the analysand. Misunderstanding arises when resistance is treated as a force within the psyche rather than as a position within a structure of language.

“In following, for example, the process of the first seven sessions which are entirely reported from the case of the Rat Man, it seems unlikely that Freud did not recognize the resistances in their proper place, that is, precisely where our modern technicians claim he missed their occurrence—since it is his very text that allows them to pinpoint them—once again manifesting that exhaustion of the subject in the Freudian texts that never ceases to amaze us, and which no interpretation has yet fully mined.”

Lacan here draws attention to the Rat Man case as a textual field still rich with interpretive potential—textually “exhausted” only in the sense that Freud’s own articulation of the subject’s speech is so dense, so saturated with resonances, that later critics can find within it the very resistance they accuse Freud of having missed. But Lacan points out the paradox: it is Freud’s meticulous transcript that reveals these resistances—proof, not of oversight, but of analytic lucidity. The real issue lies in how these “modern technicians” misread Freud by applying retrospective schemas rather than attending to the intersubjective dynamics unfolding within the speech act. For Lacan, the subject’s emergence is not reducible to content but must be traced in the movement of speech itself.

“We mean to say that Freud not only allowed himself to encourage his subject to move beyond his initial reticence, but that he fully understood the seductive scope of this play in the imaginary.”

This sentence draws out the complexity of Freud’s position within the transference. Freud is often criticized for not confronting resistance quickly enough, but Lacan sees instead an acute awareness of the structure of the imaginary: Freud does not “miss” the resistances—he navigates them with the awareness that their staging is itself the drama of desire. The “seductive scope” refers to the imaginary captivation that structures the relationship between analysand and analyst, but Freud does not collapse into it; rather, he follows it dialectically to its critical point.

“One need only refer to the description he gives us of the patient’s expression during the painful account of the imaginary torture that forms the theme of his obsession—the rat forced into the anus of the tortured victim: ‘His face,’ Freud tells us, ‘reflected the horror of an unknown pleasure.'”

Lacan emphasizes that Freud saw clearly the libidinal ambivalence at the heart of obsessional structure. The Rat Man’s fantasy, ostensibly horrifying, is also tinged with jouissance—l’horreur d’un plaisir inconnu. This moment crystallizes the core of neurosis: the subject’s enjoyment is disavowed, unknown to consciousness, but leaks through in expression. The analyst’s task is not to “interpret” this as a symbol of something else, but to hear it as speech: a signifier of the subject’s division, his entrapment in the dialectic of desire and guilt.

“The current meaning of the repetition of this narrative therefore did not escape him, nor did the identification of the psychoanalyst with the ‘cruel captain’ who forcibly inserted this tale into the subject’s memory, nor indeed the significance of the theoretical clarifications the subject demanded as a pledge to continue his discourse.”

Freud is presented not as naive but as fully implicated in the transference structure, even in his own role as the object of identification or aggression. The analysand’s repeated fantasy operates as a kind of offering, one that positions the analyst as both interlocutor and persecutory figure—here, the “cruel captain.” Freud does not attempt to sidestep this identification, nor does he rupture the transference prematurely by pointing to resistance. He sees that the subject demands theory as a stabilizing token: a symbolic “pledge” that makes it possible to continue speaking. The demand for knowledge is thus not simply epistemic—it is libidinal and strategic.

“Far from interpreting the resistance at this point, Freud surprises us by acceding to the request, and seems to enter deeply into the subject’s game.”

Rather than confronting resistance in the classical sense, Freud consents to play—he grants the subject the space to elaborate, because he knows the truth will emerge through the detour of desire. Lacan draws attention here to the performative and erotic logic of analysis: by entering the game, Freud permits the subject to produce himself through the structure of repetition. It is not a matter of correcting misrecognition with insight, but of sustaining the dialectical unfolding of speech until the subject can encounter the Real that underlies his fantasy.

“But the extremely approximate, even vulgar to our ears, nature of the explanations he grants him teaches us enough: it is not so much a matter of doctrine here, nor even of indoctrination, but of a symbolic gift of speech, laden with a secret pact, within the context of the imaginary participation that encompasses it, and whose significance will later be revealed in the symbolic equivalence the subject establishes in his thought between the rats and the florins with which he remunerates the analyst.”

What Freud offers in response to the Rat Man’s demand for clarification is not a theoretical exposition in the modern sense, but rather an apparently crude or imprecise explanation. To Lacan, this is no failure—it is precisely the transmission of speech as gift, not content. The effect of such speech is symbolic, in the fullest psychoanalytic sense. It inaugurates a pact—sealed within the imaginary identification between analyst and analysand—and this pact is later retroactively interpreted by the analysand himself through his symbolic equation of rats (his obsessional content) and florins (the fee he pays Freud). That equivalence is not accidental; it reflects the subject’s transference investment, the substitution of one signifier for another. The analyst’s presence in the field of desire is thus mediated through the symbolic chain.

“We thus see that Freud, far from failing to recognize the resistance, uses it as a favorable condition for setting in motion the resonances of speech, and he conforms, as much as possible, to the original definition he gave of resistance, using it to implicate the subject in his message.”

Resistance, classically seen as an obstacle, is here reframed: Freud leverages it as a vector for interpretive resonance. Rather than confronting or removing resistance, he reads its structure and channels it. This reflects Lacan’s insistence that resistance is not against the analyst but against the subject’s own desire. Freud’s tactic is to turn resistance into speech—by implicating the subject through speech, Freud reintroduces him into the chain of signification. Resistance becomes a transference gesture; its very articulation points to what the subject cannot yet say.

“And indeed, he will suddenly break the engagement as soon as he sees that, if indulged, the resistance turns into a way of maintaining the dialogue at the level of a conversation in which the subject would then perpetuate his seduction through evasion.”

When the analyst senses that the analysand is instrumentalizing resistance to maintain a purely imaginary rapport—flattering, seductive, evasive—he intervenes to rupture the illusion. This is not a correction in the pedagogical sense, but a disruption of the level of empty speech. The moment the symbolic collapses into the imaginary—when resistance becomes a conversational defense—Freud withdraws his symbolic complicity. This withdrawal reinscribes the structure of lack necessary for analytic work to continue.

“But we learn that analysis consists in playing upon the multiple resonances of the score that speech constitutes within the registers of language: from which derives the overdetermination of the order targeted by analysis.”

Analysis is not an operation of decoding one-to-one meanings, but a play across registers—symbolic, imaginary, real. Speech, like music, has resonances that can be harmonized or dissonant. The analytic act listens for this polyphonic structure. Overdetermination (a concept borrowed from Freud) here refers not just to multiple causes, but to the semantic layering of signifiers—each with its echoes in other registers. The analyst’s task is to strike at this polysemy, to touch the subject where his speech trembles with a truth he cannot yet master.

“And we simultaneously grasp the mechanism behind Freud’s success. For the analyst’s message to respond to the subject’s profound questioning, the subject must in fact hear it as the response uniquely addressed to him, and the privilege Freud’s patients had in receiving the good word from the mouth of its very herald satisfied this demand within them.”

Freud’s interpretations struck with such force not merely because of their content, but because they fulfilled a structural condition: the subject received them as his truth, a singular reply to his singular question. This is the logic of the oracle, not of explanation. The symbolic function of Freud as “herald” of the unconscious imbued his words with a transference weight that made them resonate as answers—even if they were only fragments. This shows how transference structures the very reception of interpretation.

“Let us note in passing that here the subject had already had a foretaste of it through his initial reading of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a work then freshly published.”

The Rat Man’s prior encounter with Freud’s writing primes the transference. The analysand already bears within him the signifier “Freud” as one who knows—the subject supposed to know. This familiarity predisposes him to hear Freud’s words as charged, authoritative, and destined for him. The analytic experience thus retroactively confirms a structure that was already symbolically in place before the first session. Interpretation begins not with the spoken word but with the position of the analyst in the subject’s symbolic field.

“This is not to say that the book is much more widely known now, even among analysts, but the vulgarization of Freudian concepts in common consciousness, their absorption into what we call the wall of language, would dull the impact of our speech were we to adopt the tone of Freud’s conversations with the Rat Man.”

Even though The Psychopathology of Everyday Life might not have a deeper readership among contemporary analysts, its vocabulary has nonetheless been absorbed by the general discourse, losing the singular edge it once had. This observation points toward the Lacanian notion of the “wall of language”—that sedimented layer of familiar, received signifiers that function more as a screen than as a site of revelation. Once Freudian terms become clichés, they no longer produce the shock of recognition that analytic speech demands. Thus, simply imitating Freud’s vocabulary or rhetorical manner—such as in his transference dialogues with the Rat Man—would be sterile today because it would repeat signifiers emptied of their cutting force.

“But the issue here is not imitation. To recapture the effect of Freud’s speech, it is not to his terms that we shall return, but to the principles that govern them.”

Rather than reproducing Freud’s words as a script, the analytic task must be to recover the structure or logic behind those words—the principle of their function. This distinction between signifier and function is crucial. The effect of Freud’s speech was not in its style or its terminology, but in its capacity to engage the subject within a symbolic dialectic. What is at stake is the structural efficacy of interpretation, not the lexical fidelity of repetition.

“These principles are none other than the dialectic of self-consciousness, as realized from Socrates to Hegel, beginning from the ironic supposition that all that is rational is real, and culminating in the scientific judgment that all that is real is rational.”

This genealogy locates Freud’s procedure in the lineage of dialectical reason, where recognition of the self is achieved only through the mediation of another—first in Socratic irony, later in Hegel’s dialectics. The passage from ironic questioning to universal Reason in Hegel—where the real is rational and vice versa—frames the symbolic necessity of analytic speech. In Lacanian terms, this corresponds to the subject’s confrontation with the symbolic order as the locus of truth, not of psychology.

“But Freud’s discovery was to demonstrate that this verifying process authentically reaches the subject only once decentered from self-consciousness, along the axis in which the Hegelian reconstruction of the Phenomenology of Spirit maintained it: that is to say, Freud renders even more obsolete any attribution of effectiveness to ‘conscious awareness,’ which, when reduced to the objectification of a psychological phenomenon, causes the Selbstbewusstsein to fall from its universal meaning and, simultaneously, from its particularity by reducing it to its general form.”

Freud’s intervention shifts the axis of verification from Selbstbewusstsein (self-consciousness) to the unconscious structured as a language. In contrast to any model that would see awareness or insight (Bewusstwerden) as therapeutic in itself, Freud shows that the subject is split by the symbolic. The truth of the subject is not to be found in conscious knowledge but in the point at which he is spoken by the Other. To objectify awareness as a psychological fact—as the ego-psychological tradition tends to do—is to strip the dialectic of its operative force. This is what Lacan calls a regression to the imaginary.

“These remarks define the limits within which our technique cannot ignore the structuring moments of Hegelian phenomenology: foremost the dialectic of Master and Slave, or that of the Beautiful Soul and the Law of the Heart, and in general all that allows us to understand how the constitution of the object is subordinated to the realization of the subject.”

These specific moments of the Phenomenology of Spirit are emblematic of the intersubjective constitution of desire. The Master–Slave dialectic articulates how recognition is mediated through struggle and subjugation, and how the subject emerges through this relational matrix. Likewise, the dialectic of the Beautiful Soul and the Law of the Heart stages the impasse of the subject who believes in the purity of his desire, only to discover its alienation in the law. These structures mirror the Lacanian coordinates of transference, where the object (symptom, fantasy, Other’s desire) becomes legible only insofar as it is a function of the subject’s place in the symbolic. Psychoanalytic technique must attend to this dialectic rather than bypass it with theories of adaptation, object-relations, or rational insight.

“But if there remained something unfulfilled in Hegel’s recognition—wherein his genius lies—of the fundamental identity between the particular and the universal, it is psychoanalysis that brings it a concrete foundation each time it opens the way through its obstacles to the point where they converge for a subject in the present.”

Hegel’s dialectical resolution of the universal and the particular remained in the realm of philosophical abstraction, where their unity is posited through the mediations of Spirit. Psychoanalysis provides a material and intersubjective ground for this convergence by locating it within the singularity of the subject’s speech, as it unfolds in the analytic setting. Each analytic act of interpretation opens the way to that nodal moment in which the universal law of the symbolic (the Name-of-the-Father, the Oedipus complex, the structuring function of language) intersects the singular impasse of the analysand. The symbolic order, through psychoanalysis, is no longer a philosophical principle but a field of speech effects that are transcribed in symptoms and fantasies.

“And if on this path nothing properly individual and thereby collective can appear that does not belong to the order of illusion, it is what can no longer be forgotten, thanks to psychoanalysis—except by psychoanalysts themselves, who in the so-called ‘new trends’ of their technique are forging a discipline renegade to its own inspiration.”

The tension here is between the symbolic universal and the imaginary misrecognition of the subject who takes the illusion of individuality as substance. Psychoanalysis unmasks the illusory autonomy of the individual, revealing how the very sense of uniqueness is shaped by symbolic structures. That psychoanalysts themselves forget this, under the banner of ego psychology or “relational” trends, shows how the discipline can become alienated from its own foundations. These so-called “new techniques” often attempt to adapt the subject to a normative ego ideal or interpersonal harmony, abandoning the structural decentering that Freud’s discovery demands.

“That if only Hegel allows us to authentically assume the position of our neutrality, it is not because we have nothing to learn from the maieutics of Socrates, nor even from the technical usage that Plato presents to us, if only to situate in relation to the idea what we put into operation in the subject, and which is as distinct and distant from it as the repetition analyzed by Kierkegaard is from the reminiscence supposed by Plato.”

Analytic neutrality, misunderstood as passive or observational in the ego-psychological model, finds its structural basis in the Hegelian dialectic—where the truth of the subject emerges through recognition, mediated by negation and conflict. Socratic dialectic, with its pedagogical maieutics, assumes the truth is latent in the subject and retrievable through reminiscence (anamnesis). Freud’s and Lacan’s position is quite different: what is at work in the unconscious is not memory but repetition, as Kierkegaard defined it—not the return of the same, but the return of the missed, the deferred, the impossible. Thus, in analytic technique, the analyst’s neutrality is structurally necessary to allow the signifiers of the subject to circulate and organize themselves, without being foreclosed by imaginary suggestion or ethical injunction.

“But there is also a historical difference worth measuring between Socrates’ interlocutor and our own. When Socrates relies on a craftsman’s reason which he can extract just as well from the discourse of a slave, it is to lead true masters toward the necessity of an order that would render justice to their power and truth to the master-words of the city.”

Socrates’ interlocutors often occupy positions of ignorance, but their ignorance is pedagogically useful: it allows the philosopher to reconstruct a rational discourse that reorders the city. The goal is civic and ethical harmonization. But in psychoanalysis, the subject encountered is not simply unaware but structurally alienated—entangled in a symbolic order whose master-words (signifiers) he does not command but by which he is commanded. The analyst does not aim at instilling knowledge in the subject but rather at allowing the subject to recognize the truth of their position within language.

“But we are dealing with slaves who believe themselves to be masters and who find in a language of universal mission the support of their servitude, with the ties of its ambiguity.”

The modern subject imagines themselves as sovereign, autonomous, rational. Yet psychoanalysis shows how this supposed mastery is sustained by the very structures that enslave them—the signifiers of the Other, the demands of the superego, the ideal Ego. The illusion of mastery masks a deeper submission to unconscious structures. This “language of universal mission”—the discourse of liberal humanism, of self-actualization, or ego empowerment—is the fantasy that sustains the subject’s imaginary mastery while veiling their subjection to the symbolic.

“So much so that one might say with humor that our goal is to restore in them the sovereign freedom displayed by Humpty Dumpty when he reminds Alice that, after all, he is the master of the signifier, if not of the signified in which his being has taken shape.”

This ironic allusion to Through the Looking-Glass underscores the impossibility and yet the structural desire of the subject to master the signifier. Humpty Dumpty’s claim to dominate meaning is a fantasy that illustrates, in reverse, the Lacanian axiom: the subject is subjected to the signifier. The psychoanalytic process reveals to the subject their divided status—the impossibility of mastery over language—yet also opens the path to assuming their place in the symbolic in a different way: no longer as master, but as cause.

“Thus we again find our double reference to speech and language. To liberate the subject’s speech, we introduce him to the language of his desire, that is, to the primary language in which, beyond what he tells us about himself, he is already speaking to us unknowingly, and in the symbols of the symptom first and foremost.”

This sentence returns us to the foundational Lacanian distinction between la parole (speech) and la langue (language). What is at stake in analysis is not simply that the subject speaks, but that his speaking is already situated within a structure that speaks him. His symptom—what appears as meaningless or suffering—is already a fragment of language, a speaking in its own right. The analyst’s task is not merely to listen to what the subject consciously declares, but to decipher the langue in which the subject’s desire inscribes itself, precisely where he does not know what he is saying. The “liberation” of speech is thus a kind of second birth: an introduction to a symbolic articulation that precedes the subject yet determines him.

“It is indeed a language that is at issue in the symbolism brought to light in analysis. This language, echoing the playful wish found in an aphorism by Lichtenberg, has the universal character of a tongue that would make itself heard in all other tongues, but at the same time, being the language that grasps desire at the very point where it becomes human by seeking recognition, it is absolutely particular to the subject.”

The aphoristic allusion to Lichtenberg suggests a paradoxical language that is both universal and singular. In Lacanian terms, this is the language of the unconscious: structured like a language, yet without being a language among others. It functions universally because it is inscribed within the symbolic order that constitutes every subject, but it is singular in that it gives form to the particular relation of each subject to desire. Desire, which is never entirely one’s own but always mediated through the Other’s signifiers, seeks to be heard—to be recognized—through symbolic traces that analysis renders legible.

“Primary language, we also say, by which we do not mean primitive language, since Freud—who may be compared to Champollion for the merit of having made the complete discovery—fully deciphered it in the dreams of our contemporaries.”

The term primary language should not be confused with an archaic or evolutionarily early language. Rather, it refers to the structure of the unconscious as it is manifest in the dream-work, in slips, in symptoms. Freud’s comparison to Champollion, the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is not idle: he uncovered a symbolic code through which the unconscious communicates, especially in dreams. This code is not innate in a biological sense, but is organized by the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order—language as the locus of the Other.

“And indeed, its essential field has been defined with some authority by one of the earliest collaborators associated with this work, and one of the few who brought something new to it: namely, Ernest Jones, the last survivor of those to whom were given the seven rings of the master, and who attests, through his presence in honorary positions of an international association, that they are not reserved only for relic-bearers.”

Ernest Jones, both as a close disciple and biographer of Freud, played a role in elaborating Freudian symbolism—especially as it concerns dream interpretation and myth. The reference to the “seven rings of the master”—a veiled joke perhaps on Tolkien or on occult tradition—ironizes the institutional sanctification of Freud’s followers, contrasting the relic-bearing repetition of doctrine with true creative continuation. Jones is acknowledged here not just for his loyalty, but for contributing an original insight, especially in his work on symbolism.

“In a fundamental article on symbolism, Dr. Jones, around page 15, makes the remark that although there are thousands of symbols in the analytic sense, all of them refer to the body itself, to kinship relations, to birth, to life, and to death.”

This comment echoes Freud’s insistence that symbols—especially those found in dreams—are not arbitrary, but refer to a restricted, insistent field of human experience. In Lacanian terms, the recurring reference to the body and its relations (especially in terms of sexual and familial structure) is a sign of the Real intruding in the Symbolic. The body becomes the site where the symbolic chain is both anchored and disrupted. These few fundamental themes—birth, death, sex, family—form a matrix from which the infinite variations of symbolic displacement arise. Jones’s insight is thus entirely compatible with Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, where the signifier always circles around a kernel of jouissance rooted in the body.

“This truth, here implicitly acknowledged, allows us to understand that although the symbol, psychoanalytically speaking, is repressed into the unconscious, it carries within itself no indication of regression, nor even of immaturity. It suffices, for it to exert its effects in the subject, that it be heard, for these effects operate unbeknownst to him, as we admit in our daily experience, when we explain many reactions of both normal and neurotic subjects by their response to the symbolic meaning of an act, a relationship, or an object.”

This affirms a fundamental principle of the Lacanian conception of the symbol: its efficacy does not depend on conscious comprehension or developmental stages. Against any developmental psychology that would situate symbolic processes in infantile regression or phases of immaturity, Lacan reminds us that the symbol is not a fossil of the past, but a structure that acts in the present. Whether or not the subject recognizes it, the symbol intervenes in the economy of his desire. The unconscious is structured like a language not because of immaturity, but because it functions entirely through the play of signifiers—where meaning is not needed for effect. The symbolic can operate “in absence”—precisely when it is not known or mastered by the subject.

“There is thus no doubt that the analyst can play on the power of the symbol by evoking it in a calculated manner through the semantic resonances of his words.”

Here the technique of interpretation is directly grounded in the symbolic function of language. The analyst is not to provide insight or explanations, but to strategically position speech so that the symbolic effects—already active in the subject—may be displaced, dislodged, or made to resonate. The unconscious responds not to content, but to the movement of the signifier. Hence, the analyst’s speech functions less as commentary than as intervention: it acts like a pebble dropped into the network of signifiers that constitute the subject’s relation to the Other.

“This may well be the object of a renewed use of symbolic effects, in a reformed technique of interpretation.”

Rather than interpreting as though revealing hidden content, the modern analytic act is to provoke, via the symbol, a transformation in the subject’s position within the signifying chain. This reformation implies moving away from the illusion of transparency and toward an ethics of interpretation that treats the unconscious as a text—not to be decoded, but to be made to speak. The analyst’s symbolic interventions—cuts, repetitions, puns, silences—can activate latent structures that otherwise remain frozen within the imaginary.

“We might here take reference from what Hindu tradition teaches about dhvani [resonance/suggestion in poetic speech], inasmuch as it distinguishes in it this property of speech: to make heard what it does not say. It is illustrated by a little tale whose naivety, seemingly the rule in such examples, displays enough humor to guide us toward the truth it contains.”

The reference to dhvani underscores the indirectness proper to the analytic act. Lacanian interpretation is not about saying what something “really means,” but about letting what is repressed resonate. Dhvani designates a poetics of implication, of evocation rather than denotation. Psychoanalytic speech, especially the analyst’s, must function this way—it must not claim the final word, but allow what is not said to emerge, like the unconscious itself, between the lines.

“A young girl, it is said, awaits her lover on the riverbank, when she sees a brahmin walking toward it. She goes to him and exclaims in the tone of the warmest welcome: ‘What happiness today! The dog that used to scare you with its barking on this shore is no longer here, for it has just been devoured by a lion who roams the area…'”

The tale operates entirely through implication: nothing is stated about the girl’s real intentions, but the speech effects its message via dhvani. She communicates both the danger and her desire indirectly. The listener must supply the unsaid. The humor here is structural: speech functions not as expression of inner truth but as deployment of symbolic cues whose meaning is produced in the Other.

“The absence of the lion can therefore have as much effect as the leap it would make in presence, which it only makes once, according to the proverb.”

This final aphorism captures a central psychoanalytic idea: the symbolic’s power lies in absence. The lion, like the phallic signifier, is not there—but its possible presence reconfigures the scene. The symbol operates precisely in its non-fulfillment, in the way it introduces the lack around which desire orbits. That absence, named or hinted at, has more effect than presence ever could. And so too does the analytic word: not by what it says, but by what it causes to echo in the subject’s speech.

“The fundamental nature of symbols brings them close, in fact, to those numbers from which all others are composed, and if they thus underlie all the semantemes of language, we may, through a discreet investigation of their interferences along the thread of a metaphor whose symbolic displacement neutralizes the secondary meanings of the terms it associates, restore to speech its full evocative value.”

This sentence establishes a deep structural analogy between symbolic signifiers and prime numbers, both serving as irreducible elements from which all other combinations (linguistic or numerical) derive. Lacan posits that just as prime numbers underlie all composite ones, fundamental symbols undergird the semantemes—units of meaning—in language. Through metaphor, these symbols displace and neutralize conventional or secondary connotations, thereby accessing a more originary resonance. The metaphor, in this usage, does not simply embellish meaning but structurally displaces it, allowing something of the unconscious to emerge. This restoration of speech’s evocative force aligns precisely with Lacanian technique: to move interpretation away from fixed meaning toward the movement of the signifier.

“This technique would require, both for teaching and for learning it, a profound assimilation of the resources of a language, and particularly of those concretely realized in its poetic texts.”

The analyst must immerse themselves in the internal workings of language, not merely as an instrument of communication but as a field structured by the unconscious. This immersion, especially through poetic language, is vital because poetry exploits the ambiguity, displacement, and condensation that mirror the formations of the unconscious itself. The poetic text becomes a privileged terrain for understanding the symbolic mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, which Freud observed in dreams, jokes, and symptoms—mechanisms that the analyst must learn to read and reproduce in their interventions.

“It is known that this was the case for Freud with regard to German letters, including the theater of Shakespeare by virtue of a translation without equal.”

Freud’s mastery of German literature and of Shakespeare—specifically through the Schlegel-Tieck translation—grounded his sensitivity to language as more than communication. The implication here is that Freud’s own analytic sensitivity was informed by his literary ear, trained in the resonances, displacements, and ambiguities of poetic and dramatic speech. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, this literary sensibility is not accessory, but foundational.

“His entire work attests to this, as well as to the recourse he continually found in it, no less in his technique than in his discovery.”

Freud’s recourse to literary models was not a flourish but a methodological necessity. His technique relied upon an understanding of language that exceeds the referential. Whether interpreting dreams, parapraxes, or hysterical symptoms, Freud continually leaned on structures of metaphor, poetic condensation, and rhetorical twist to detect the unconscious logic at work. Lacan insists that analysts must recognize this as intrinsic to the analytic act.

“This is without prejudice to the support of a classical knowledge of the Ancients, a modern initiation into folklore, and an engaged participation in the contemporary humanist achievements in the ethnographic field.”

Freud’s humanism was encyclopedic in scope. The analyst’s symbolic sensitivity must be formed not only by clinical training but by a cultivated engagement with the symbolic orders that shape human life across cultures and eras—myth, legend, tragic drama, religious rite. The symbolic is not reducible to private fantasy: it is inscribed in collective history and culture. The unconscious speaks in the same register.

“One might ask the analyst not to consider vain any attempt to follow him on this path.”

This is an appeal to analysts not to dismiss as irrelevant or romantic the path of cultural, poetic, and symbolic literacy. To follow Freud means not merely mastering the protocol of sessions but entering into the terrain of language, myth, and metaphor that Freud explored, and upon which the unconscious operates. This is both a technical and ethical injunction.

“But there is a current to go against. One can measure it by the condescending attention given, as to a novelty, to wording: English morphology here provides a sufficiently subtle support to a notion still difficult to define, so that it is taken seriously.”

Lacan here critiques a trend in analytic discourse—particularly within Anglo-American ego psychology—where wording becomes fetishized, isolated from its symbolic and structural functions. The fascination with terminological nuance or semantic reformulation substitutes for the rigorous work of engaging with the symbolic structure of speech. The analyst is warned against mistaking linguistic fashion for analytic insight. Morphology may serve subtlety, but without anchoring in the symbolic order, such subtlety becomes a trap, mistaking style for structure.

“What it covers, however, is hardly encouraging, and the wonder that an author expresses over the opposite success he encountered with a patient, from his successive and, as he says, unpremeditated use of the words need and demand to analyze the same resistance, leaves one puzzled.”

Lacan points out a naïve anecdote offered in clinical literature, where a psychoanalyst recounts with amazement the success of an interpretation hinging on the words need and demand—used interchangeably and without preparation. For a Lacanian, such confusion is not innocent; it reveals a fundamental lack of understanding regarding the structure of speech and the distinctions that sustain subjectivity. In Lacan’s teaching, need pertains to the biological register, demand is what transforms that need through the entry into language, and desire emerges precisely in the gap between the two. To collapse need and demand is to flatten the symbolic articulation of the subject into a mere behavioral or affective register—antithetical to analytic rigor.

“We believe we show neither a great need for purism nor excessive rigor in measuring here the degree of fumbling that this amazement reveals as commonplace in practice.”

The critique is not pedantic. What Lacan draws attention to is a widespread structural misunderstanding. The casual interchange of terms like need and demand reflects not just linguistic imprecision but a symptomatic disavowal of the symbolic register, which is fundamental to analysis. The “fumbling” is not merely semantic but conceptual, undermining the logic of the unconscious.

“For need and demand have for the subject diametrically opposed meanings, and to claim that their usage can even momentarily be confused amounts to radically misunderstanding the imperative nature of speech.”

This distinction is central to Lacan’s symbolic economy. Need refers to what is biologically rooted and satisfied, while demand is articulated in speech, addressed to the Other, and therefore laden with symbolic meaning. To overlook this is to miss the subject’s constitution in language. Demand introduces a third term—recognition—which is absent from need. It is the imperative nature of speech that transforms demand into something that engages the subject in his very being, not merely in his physiology.

“For in its symbolizing function, speech goes no less than to transform the subject to whom it is addressed by the bond it establishes with the one who emits it, namely: by the virtue of the gift it constitutes.”

Speech is not simply a vehicle for conveying content; it is an act that forges a bond between speaker and addressee. In its symbolic function, it operates as a gift—with all the structural implications of giving in terms of obligation, recognition, and return. This is a foundational structure in Lacanian theory: the subject is not anterior to speech; the subject is constituted in and by speech, in the act of being addressed. Thus, interpretation is not about matching meanings, but about intervening in this intersubjective bond.

“This is why we must once again return to the structure of interhuman communication and definitively dispel the misunderstanding of language-as-sign, which in this domain is the source of discourse confusions and of the malformations of speech.”

Lacan targets the dominant communication theory model—language as a code, where a sender transmits a message to a receiver—as inadequate to describe the analytic situation. This model, based on the transmission of signs, completely misses what he insists upon: that language is a symbolic structure, not merely a system of signs. Misunderstanding language in this way results in what Lacan calls malformations of speech—interpretations and interventions that reduce the subject to a content-bearing speaker, rather than a being constituted in relation to the Other’s desire.

“If language communication is indeed conceived as a signal by which the emitter informs the receiver of something through the means of a certain code, then there is no reason why we should not place just as much and even more credence in any other sign when the “something” in question is the subject himself: there is even every reason for us to prefer any mode of expression that comes closest to the natural sign.”

The implication here is deeply ironic: if one accepts the sign-based communication model, one ends up preferring body language, gestures, or physiological signs—because these appear more immediate and “truthful” than mediated language. But this return to the natural sign bypasses the subject as speaking being (parlêtre). In fact, this model leads psychoanalysis toward behaviorism or phenomenology, abandoning the symbolic order that Freud’s discovery inaugurated.

“Thus discredit has come upon us regarding the technique of speech, and we find ourselves in search of a gesture, a grimace, an attitude, a mimicry, a movement, a shiver—what am I saying—even of a halt in the habitual movement, for we are refined and nothing will now stop in its stride our unleashed hounds.”

Lacan’s sarcasm is clear. What replaces the analytic act in this degraded scenario is a fetishization of the body as expressive of truth. The analyst, instead of attending to speech as symbolic, ends up chasing the signified in gestures and tics—”unleashed hounds” searching for evidence of an unconscious which they no longer understand as structured like a language. This hunt is refined in its technique but misguided in principle, precisely because it has abandoned the symbolic field where the subject is constituted.

“We will demonstrate the insufficiency of the notion of language-as-sign by the very phenomenon that illustrates it best in the animal kingdom, and which it seems, had it not recently been the object of an authentic discovery, would have had to be invented for this very purpose.”

The reference to the bee’s dance functions as a counterexample precisely to expose the limits of defining language as a mere signaling system. Lacan seizes on this scientifically observed and much-celebrated phenomenon not to deny its intricacy, but to contrast it with the irreducibility of human speech to signification alone. The irony that this example would need to be invented “for this very purpose” signals how ideal it is to contrast animal code with the structure of language as symbolic.

“It is now widely accepted that the bee returning from foraging to the hive transmits to its companions, through two types of dance, the indication of the existence of nearby or distant forage.”

Lacan summarizes von Frisch’s discovery: bees perform two types of dance upon returning to the hive, each indicating different foraging distances. This is presented not as a denial of communicative sophistication among animals but to foreground that what appears to resemble language is in fact something entirely different from it.

“The second is the more remarkable, for the plane in which it traces the figure-eight curve that has earned it the name wagging dance, and the frequency of the trips the bee makes in a given time, indicate precisely the direction determined in relation to the solar inclination (which bees can perceive in any weather thanks to their sensitivity to polarized light), on the one hand, and the distance up to several kilometers where the forage is located, on the other.”

The waggle dance is presented as a highly efficient, systematic code—precise in orientation and distance communication. But it remains a rigid, innate behavior. The bee’s “message” is tied unambiguously to referents in the environment. There is no generative or combinatory creativity; no arbitrariness of the sign.

“And the other bees respond to this message by heading immediately toward the indicated location.”

The behavioral result is immediate and unambiguous. The message triggers a specific action without mediation or reflection. This directly contrasts with human speech, which always involves a distance between the signifier and its interpretation, a gap in which the subject is constituted.

“A dozen years of patient observation sufficed for Karl von Frisch to decode this mode of messaging, for it is indeed a code, or a signaling system whose generic character alone prevents us from calling it conventional.”

Von Frisch’s work is praised for uncovering a stable code—but this very stability is what makes it distinct from symbolic language. Lacan underscores that what makes it a code is its non-arbitrariness. It is generic, meaning fixed and species-wide, not subject to historical variation or creative deployment. Thus, although the bee’s dance communicates, it does not signify in the way human language does.

“Is it therefore a language? We can say that it is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality they signify.”

This sentence delivers the theoretical punch: true language is not defined by a fixed one-to-one correlation between sign and referent. Instead, it operates through differential relations within a system of signifiers. The bee’s code lacks the essential characteristic of language: arbitrariness and structural difference. It does not involve the symbolic register that introduces the split subject.

“For in a language, signs derive their value from their relation to one another, both in the lexical distribution of semantemes and in the positional, or even inflectional, usage of morphèmes—contrasting with the fixed coding deployed here.”

Lacan points to structural linguistics—Saussure’s principle that the signifier only has value through its relation to other signifiers. Lexical and grammatical systems are relational and differential, unlike the bee code, where a sign always points directly to the same object. This is where symbolic language reveals its dimension of unconscious structuring: meaning is not transparent or fixed but deferred, layered, and context-bound.

“And the diversity of human languages takes, in this light, its full value.”

The variety of human languages is not a complication but a confirmation of the symbolic nature of speech. It attests to the freedom of signifiers from fixed referents and to the fact that language always exceeds communication. It creates meaning rather than merely transmitting it. This final point prepares the ground for Lacan’s view that speech constitutes the subject in its relation to the Other, and that psychoanalysis, operating on this terrain, cannot reduce language to signs or codes without evacuating its core.

“Moreover, if the message of the described mode determines the action of the socius, it is never retransmitted by him. And this means that it remains fixed in its function as a relay of action, from which no subject detaches it as a symbol of communication itself.”

This clarifies the structural limit of the bee’s waggle dance as a communicative system: the message, though functionally effective, is not re-enunciated, retransmitted, or reappropriated by another bee. The signal functions as a closed circuit—it operates without symbolic recursion. No bee reflects on, retranslates, or modifies the message. From a Lacanian standpoint, this means that no subject is constituted through it. The system is all function, no subjectivity. In human speech, by contrast, the message can circulate, be quoted, disavowed, inverted—precisely because it functions in the symbolic order.

“The form in which language expresses itself defines subjectivity in itself.”

This marks the return to the central thesis: subjectivity is not a preexisting interiority that uses language as a tool, but something formed through the structure of language. It is the form—relational, recursive, symbolic—by which language operates that creates subjectivity. In Lacanian terms, the subject is an effect of the signifier.

“It says: ‘You will go this way, and when you see this, you will turn there.’ In other words, it refers to the discourse of the other.”

This imperative form, which looks like instruction, is not merely utilitarian; it structurally references the Other. It engages an addressee in a chain of signification already shaped by the Other’s discourse. Even in its most apparently straightforward, indexical form, human speech opens onto the symbolic field, where the speaker is interpellated by the Other’s language.

“It is enveloped as such in the highest function of speech, insofar as it engages its author by investing its addressee with a new reality, for example when a man says: ‘You are my wife,’ to signify his own gift.”

Here, Lacan draws on performative speech to show the creative power of language: not merely to designate, but to institute realities. The example evokes the speech act that founds a symbolic relationship, like marriage. This founding utterance does not just describe a situation—it changes it. Such speech binds speaker and addressee in the symbolic order, where the utterance institutes a transformation of status and identity.

“Such is indeed the essential form from which all human speech derives, rather than arrives.”

Human speech does not gradually evolve from simpler forms of communication (as if it were an advanced version of signaling). Rather, its structural originality—rooted in symbolic mediation and intersubjectivity—is primary. All speech presupposes this founding gesture where the subject is posited through address and recognition within the symbolic network.

“Hence the paradox pointed out by one of our sharpest listeners, who thought he could object when we began to present our views on analysis as dialectic, and who formulated it as follows: human language would thus constitute a communication in which the emitter receives from the receiver his own message in an inverted form—a formulation we had only to take back from the mouth of the objector to recognize it as the stamp of our own thought, namely, that speech always subjectively includes its response, that the phrase ‘You would not be seeking me if you had not already found me’ merely homologates this truth, and that this is why in the paranoiac refusal of recognition, it is in the form of a negative verbalization that the unavowable feeling emerges in the persecutory ‘interpretation.'”

This long sentence condenses a major point of Lacanian theory: the structure of human communication is fundamentally reflexive and dialectical. When someone speaks, the message is already shaped by the response it anticipates. The speaker is constituted through the (imagined or real) response of the Other. Hence, even the paranoiac’s delusion follows this structure: in the refusal to recognize the Other’s desire, the subject nonetheless betrays their own message through an inverted form—persecution instead of love, suspicion instead of acknowledgment.

“Likewise, when you congratulate yourself on having met someone who speaks the same language as you, do you not mean that you meet them in the discourse of all, but are united to them by a particular speech?”

The resonance of shared language—”speaking the same language”—has a Lacanian twist. What feels like deep mutual understanding is not merely a shared code. It is the convergence of two subjects within the general field of language (“the discourse of all”) finding in each other a point of singular intersubjective address (“a particular speech”). This intersection is what gives speech its full weight in analysis, where the unconscious is precisely what is structured like a language, and where recognition is always double-edged: a mirror and a misrecognition.

“Thus we see the immanent antinomy in the relationship between speech and language. As language becomes more general, it becomes unsuitable for speech, and as it becomes too particular to us, it loses its function as language.”

Here the contradiction internal to the speech-language dialectic is exposed: language, in its generality, enables communication between subjects but risks becoming so standardized that it loses the singularity of address necessary for true speech. Yet if it becomes too idiosyncratic—if it veers toward private language—it ceases to be shareable, hence no longer functions as language. From a Lacanian vantage, this tension marks the limit where speech either collapses into empty signification or disintegrates into solipsism.

“It is well known how, in primitive traditions, secret names are used through which the subject identifies himself or his gods, to such an extent that revealing them means losing or betraying them—and the confidences of our subjects, if not our own memories, tell us that it is not uncommon for the child to spontaneously rediscover the virtue of such usage.”

The motif of the secret name touches on the intersection of language and subjectivity. In many traditions, to name is to know and to hold power over. The symbolic efficacy of the name is emphasized here: to disclose one’s “true” name is to expose one’s being to the Other, thus risking symbolic dispossession. Children, who often play with naming, intuitively grasp the force of naming as identification, and also as potential alienation. Lacanian theory would say that the subject is born in the name given by the Other—and this example shows how the child, in discovering or hiding names, engages in a primary form of symbolic positioning.

“Ultimately, it is to the intersubjectivity of the ‘we’ that he assumes that the value of speech in language is measured.”

The efficacy of speech does not lie in its referential capacity but in its capacity to establish or presuppose a shared symbolic space. The “we” here is not simply a grammatical category but a structure of shared recognition. In Lacanian terms, it is within the register of the Symbolic, the intersubjective field governed by the Law of the Father, that speech takes on its truth value.

“Through an inverse antinomy, it is observed that the more the function of language is neutralized by approaching mere information, the more it appears burdened with redundancies.”

This contrasting contradiction reveals a second pole: when language is reduced to its instrumental communicative function—as in cybernetics or information theory—it paradoxically requires more redundancy to ensure clarity. But in doing so, it strips away what makes language speech. Redundancy, from the analytical perspective, is not merely excess—it is precisely the field where unconscious meaning may be carried.

“This notion of redundancy originated from research that was all the more precise because it was interested—driven by an economic problem concerning long-distance communication, specifically, the possibility of transmitting several conversations over a single telephone wire; it was found that a significant part of the medium of language is superfluous for achieving the communication actually sought.”

Here Lacan refers to Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication. In this framework, redundancy is noise—expendable. Yet the psychoanalytic critique is clear: in the analytical setting, it is this surplus—the slips, hesitations, repetitions—that indexes the unconscious. Where the engineer sees waste, the analyst sees symptom.

“This is highly instructive for us, because what is redundancy for information is precisely what, in speech, functions as resonance.”

The signifier’s excess, its echoes and reverberations in other signifiers, is not merely ornamental—it is the very space in which subjectivity emerges. Redundancy becomes resonance when seen through the Lacanian lens: repetition, slippage, punning, and ambiguity are the very vehicles of analytic interpretation.

“For the function of language there is not to inform, but to evoke.”

This reverses the conventional wisdom: language is not primarily about transmitting data. Its first function is to summon the Other. Evocation, not information, grounds language in desire. The analyst listens for evocation, not denotation.

“What I seek in speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. To be recognized by the other, I only utter what has been in view of what will be. To find him, I call him by a name he must assume or refuse in order to respond to me.”

Here Lacan articulates the fully intersubjective foundation of the speaking subject. The subject is not defined by what it says but by its desire to be answered. The temporality of speech is retroactive: one speaks in the hope of recognition, projecting a future response that will give the current utterance its truth. This dynamic is most visible in transference, where the subject speaks in the analyst’s presence precisely in search of a response that will structure their past. The analyst, by not assuming the name the subject offers, opens the field where the subject can hear their own speech anew.

“I identify myself in language, but not as an object. What is realized in my history is not the defined past of what was since it no longer is, nor even the perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I will have been for what I am in the process of becoming.”

The subject is constituted not as an inert referent in language, not as an object caught in the descriptive past, but as a subject of anticipation. In Lacanian terms, this is the temporal structure of the futur antérieur—the time of the subject who becomes retroactively. The subject will only have been what it is becoming in the moment when that becoming is complete, always deferred. It is through this temporality that the unconscious operates, creating a gap between enunciation and statement, between je and moi, through which the truth of the subject emerges in the symbolic.

“If I now place myself before the other to question him, no cybernetic apparatus, however rich you may imagine it, can make a reaction out of what is a response.”

The distinction is between mechanical causality (reaction) and subjective address (response). A response implies intersubjectivity and recognition; it presupposes desire. Cybernetics, as a discourse, reduces communication to information transfer, flattening the dialectic of speech into stimulus-response chains. Psychoanalysis, however, situates the response within the symbolic field, where the subject is always implicated.

“Its definition as the second term in the stimulus-response circuit is only a metaphor, sustained by the subjectivity imputed to the animal in order to then elide it in the physical scheme where it is reduced. This is what we have called putting the rabbit in the hat to then pull it out. But a reaction is not a response.”

The behaviorist framework smuggles in subjectivity—projecting intentionality onto the subject—only to deny it once the system is closed. This is the “magic trick” of scientism: subjectivity is invoked as explanatory scaffolding but erased from the mechanism. The subject’s speech, however, cannot be reduced to this. It is not a reaction—it is always caught in the logic of desire and the symbolic Other.

“If I press an electric button and the light comes on, there is only a response in regard to my desire.”

This underscores the difference between a physical effect and a symbolic function. The light is not a subject—it responds only insofar as the subject reads the effect as satisfying a desire. But the mechanism itself does not respond in the analytic sense; it does not address or acknowledge. Meaning emerges only when the subject’s desire is implicated.

“If, to achieve the same result, I must try an entire system of relays whose position I do not know, there is only a question in regard to my expectation, and there will be none once I have obtained from the system sufficient knowledge to operate it with certainty.”

Uncertainty here creates the space for the subject to pose a question—not to the machine, but to the symbolic structure it represents. Once the machine becomes knowable, predictability removes the subjective dimension. In psychoanalysis, this structure of uncertainty—the not-knowing—is crucial: it is where the unconscious reveals itself. The moment knowledge becomes mastery, the subject disappears into the function.

“But if I call out to the one I am speaking to, by whatever name I give him, I summon the subjective function he will take up to respond to me, even if it is only to repudiate it.”

Addressing the other is always more than designating; it is a performative act. To call the other is to posit a subjectivity in him, to summon him into a symbolic position. Even rejection is a response, a form of recognition. This is the interpellative structure described by Althusser, but in Lacan’s reading it is inseparable from the subject’s emergence through the signifier.

“Hence appears the decisive function of my own response, which is not merely, as it is said, to be received by the subject as approval or rejection of his discourse, but truly to recognize or abolish him as subject. Such is the responsibility of the analyst every time he intervenes with speech.”

The analyst’s intervention is not neutral—it is an act that reconfigures the symbolic coordinates of the analysand’s subjectivity. To speak, to interpret, is not just to clarify; it is to confirm or negate a position the subject has assumed. This is why interpretation is not commentary—it is a performative cut that either situates the subject in relation to the signifier or forecloses him from it. The analyst’s speech is thus ethically charged: it must aim not at understanding, but at recognition—at supporting the emergence of the subject in his truth.

“Indeed, the problem of the therapeutic effects of inexact interpretation, posed by Mr. Edward Glover in a remarkable article, has led him to conclusions where the question of accuracy takes second place.”

Glover’s inquiry brings to light the fact that, in the analytic experience, it is not the empirical correctness of the interpretation that guarantees its efficacy. The therapeutic impact lies elsewhere. What matters is not so much truth in a positivist sense, but the structural function of the intervention within the symbolic framework that constitutes the subject. Even an “inexact” interpretation may touch a real, precisely because it is articulated within the network of signifiers that define the subject’s unconscious position.

“Namely, not only is every spoken intervention received by the subject according to his structure, but it takes on a structuring function because of its form, and this is precisely the scope of non-analytic psychotherapies, even of the most commonplace medical ‘prescriptions,’ to be interventions that may be qualified as obsessive systems of suggestion, hysterical suggestions of a phobic order, even persecutory supports—each taking its character from the sanction it gives to the subject’s misrecognition of his own reality.”

The subject always hears according to the structure of his fantasy. That is to say, the analytic word enters not as a neutral datum but as a signifier that retroactively rewrites the field of meaning. Even banal or non-analytic utterances—those of medical authority, of therapeutic clichés—can function as interventions that reify the subject’s alienation in the imaginary or symbolic. They confirm and reinforce misrecognition (méconnaissance), sustaining formations like obsessional certainty, phobic avoidance, or persecutory interpretation. Thus, the very speech that could open up the unconscious can instead lock the subject into a structural position by being too quickly filled with imaginary meaning.

“Speech, indeed, is a gift of language, and language is not immaterial. It is a subtle body, but it is a body.”

This is a fundamental Lacanian point: language is not a transparent medium for communication. It has a materiality—not in the physical sense, but as an effect-bearing structure. The parole (speech) emerges from the langue (language) as a bodily event. Speech affects the body because it is inscribed in it; it resonates in the symptom, it wounds or pleasures, it leaves marks. The symbolic is not outside the corporeal—it passes through it as jouissance.

“Words are caught up in all the corporeal images that captivate the subject; they can impregnate the hysteric, identify with the object of penis envy, represent the stream of urine of urethral ambition, or the retained feces of miserly jouissance.”

Here Lacan demonstrates that words are not merely abstract; they become entangled with the imaginary and the drives. The word can act as a substitute or representative of the object a—the lost object cause of desire. In hysteria, for example, speech can be libidinally cathected in such a way that it acts out fantasies or substitutions for lack. Language, thus, is both symbolic and imaginary—capable of becoming the vehicle for the phantasm. The bodily functions mentioned are not to be taken literally but as modalities of jouissance, each structured by speech.

“Moreover, words themselves can undergo symbolic lesions, perform the imaginary acts of which the patient is the subject.”

This refers to the performative and structural violence language can suffer in the unconscious. The word is not immutable; in the unconscious it can be split, warped, or mutilated to sustain or represent the subject’s fantasy. Language itself bears witness to castration and desire through its very deformation in symptom and dream.

“One recalls the Wespe (wasp) castrated of its initial W to become the S.P. of the Wolf Man’s initials, at the moment when he realizes the symbolic punishment inflicted upon him by Grouscha, the wasp.”

The mutilation of Wespe to S.P. is an exemplary instance of how the unconscious treats signifiers. This distortion is not accidental—it inscribes castration, punishment, and symbolic debt. The subject reads in language his own division and loss, and this reading forms the material of analysis. Grouscha, the wasp (Wespe), becomes the agent of the paternal law—the agent of castration—rendered legible in the abbreviation of the subject’s own name.

“One also remembers the S that remains from the hermetic formula in which the conjuring invocations of the Rat Man were condensed after Freud extracted from its number the anagram of his beloved’s name, and which, joined to the terminal amen of his ejaculation, eternally floods the name of the lady with the symbolic ejection of his impotent desire.”

This is the Rat Man’s symptom as an eroticized, linguistic compromise formation: the S—the leftover letter from the signifier of the beloved—gets bound to the final amen of a masturbatory act, fusing religious, romantic, and anal-erotic registers in a single symbolic condensation. Here the symptom is a true cipher, not a message to be interpreted once and for all, but a knot of signifiers around which desire rotates. Freud’s analysis tracks these encryptions, showing that the unconscious is not a reservoir of images or instincts but a structured discourse in which every slip, letter, or fragment is overdetermined.

“Similarly, an article by Robert Fliess, inspired by Abraham’s initial remarks, shows us that discourse as a whole can become the object of an eroticization following the shifts of erogeneity in the body image, momentarily determined by the analytic relationship.”

Fliess’s insight, drawn from Abraham’s metapsychological groundwork, highlights the way in which the analytic setting and its transference dynamics can localize libidinal investment onto discourse itself. Within the analytic frame, speech is no longer neutral; it becomes charged, eroticized, and caught up in the shifting coordinates of the body image, which—as Lacan has demonstrated—structures the imaginary register. The erotization of discourse means the subject treats speech not as a vehicle of signification but as a partial object, invested with drive.

“Discourse then assumes a phallic-urethral, erotic-anal, even sadistic-oral function.”

This enumeration of erogenous zones recapitulates the metapsychological model of the drives, but framed in terms of the ways speech can be cathected. For instance, the phallic-urethral function relates to the excretory function as linked to mastery and control in speech; the erotic-anal dimension underscores withholding, repetition, and gain via accumulation; the sadistic-oral function implies devouring, biting speech—language used to wound or dominate. Each instance shifts the analytic act from symbolic articulation into jouissance, turning signifiers into objects of drive satisfaction.

“It is also remarkable that the author perceives its effect especially in the silences that mark the inhibition of the satisfaction the subject derives from it.”

This silence functions as a blockage not of meaning but of jouissance. It is in the absence—of speech, of recognition, of symbolic relay—that we find evidence of the subject’s relation to the speech object. These silences are pregnant, not void, and Fliess detects here the very traces of failed satisfaction. In Lacanian terms, it is where the speech fails to complete its circuit through the Other and returns as an unanswered or unanswerable demand.

“Thus, speech can become an imaginary, even real, object within the subject, and as such, in more than one aspect, reduce the function of language. We shall place it then in the parenthesis of the resistance it manifests.”

When speech is no longer a symbolic address but an object of drive, it slides from its function in language. Lacan marks this slippage from parole into jouissance as a resistance—not a conscious blockage, but a structural refusal to circulate meaning through the symbolic. Such speech doesn’t call upon the Other; it clings to the self, becoming a kind of echo chamber or fetish. To name this form of speech a “resistance” is to recognize it not as silence, but as saturated, excessive presence within the imaginary or real registers.

“But this will not be to banish it from the analytic relationship, for that would strip the latter of its very reason for being.”

The point is not to eliminate these manifestations—speech as object, speech as symptom—but to locate and interpret them. The analytic relationship must welcome even these deviant forms of speech, since they mark the very site of the subject’s division. They are not noise; they are formations of the unconscious. Banishing them would amount to a foreclosure of the subject’s jouissance and of the unconscious itself.

“Analysis can have no other goal than the advent of true speech and the subject’s realization of his history in its relation to a future.”

True speech—parole pleine—is that which inscribes the subject in time, reconciling the past (as structured in the unconscious) with the future (as open through desire). Analysis aims not for adaptation or knowledge per se, but for the emergence of this speech which allows the subject to assume their own desire in a new way. It is not about restoring reality, but rather historicizing truth.

“The maintenance of this dialectic stands in opposition to any objectivizing orientation of analysis, and emphasizing this necessity is crucial to understanding the aberration of the new tendencies manifesting in analysis.”

The dialectical tension—between subject and Other, between speech and language, between past and future—cannot be reduced to a technical manipulation or objectivist science. Contemporary analytic trends that lean toward diagnostic typologies or adaptive goals betray the very dialectic through which analytic truth emerges. Objectivization (the analyst as observer of content) replaces implication (the analyst as interlocutor of desire).

“It is through a return to Freud that we will again illustrate our point here, and specifically through the observation of the Rat Man since we have begun to use his case.”

The Rat Man case remains exemplary not merely as a clinical document but as a scene of interpretation. Returning to Freud is not nostalgic—it’s a methodological necessity. Freud’s technique, attentive to speech as a chain of signifiers, remains the basis upon which a Lacanian rereading insists: the unconscious is not only structured like a language; its effects only emerge within the logic of that structure. The Rat Man’s symptomatology, his rituals and phantasms, his speech and its ruptures—all serve to reanchor the analytic act within its symbolic dimension.

“Freud goes so far as to take liberties with the factual accuracy when it is a matter of reaching the subject’s truth.”

This statement must be understood in terms of Lacan’s distinction between truth and knowledge, between vérité and savoir. Freud is not interested in objective, historical truth but in the subjective truth articulated in the analysand’s speech. Factual inaccuracy, from the historian’s standpoint, may become the very axis around which the subject’s fantasy is structured and thus represents the place of a deeper truth. Interpretation does not operate at the level of empirical verification but seeks the structural truth that emerges through symbolic resonances.

“At one point, he perceives the determining role played by the marriage proposal brought to the subject by his mother at the origin of the current phase of his neurosis.”

Here the event—the mother’s suggestion of a marriage—is not traumatic per se; it becomes determining only insofar as it resonates within a pre-existing symbolic configuration. Freud discerns that the offer of marriage introduces a disturbance that sets into motion the Rat Man’s current neurotic crisis. From a Lacanian point of view, what matters is not the event itself but its function as a signifier—it signifies a disruption in the structure of desire.

“He had, in fact, a flash of insight about it, as we showed in our seminar, due to his own personal experience.”

Lacan reminds the reader of Freud’s subjective position and his transference in relation to the analysand, even in Freud himself. That Freud’s insight is conditioned by his own experience is not a flaw—it shows that interpretation is intersubjective, that the analyst, too, is embedded in language and desire. This is an acknowledgment of the structural transference that defines the analytic situation.

“Nevertheless, he does not hesitate to interpret its effect to the subject as if it were a prohibition laid down by his deceased father against his liaison with the lady of his thoughts.”

Here Freud displaces the significance of the mother’s speech act and retroactively installs a paternal prohibition. This intervention is interpretive in the strongest sense: it constructs a symbolic Name-of-the-Father retroactively structuring the subject’s desire. Even though it is not historically accurate, the analyst’s speech here installs a symbolic law where the subject’s discourse has been caught in imaginary impasse.

“This is not only materially inaccurate. It is also psychologically so, for the castrating action of the father, which Freud asserts here with an insistence that might be taken as systematic, played only a secondary role in this case.”

The critique of Freud’s intervention centers on his insistence on the father’s function as castrating agent, which here might not align with the subjective economy of the analysand’s neurosis. Lacan identifies the risk of reducing all neurotic formations to a simplistic reading of the Oedipus complex. The father’s role here may not operate through a traumatic interdiction but through symbolic absence or insufficiency—through a défaillance of the paternal function.

“But the apprehension of the dialectical relation is so accurate that Freud’s interpretation at that moment triggers the decisive lifting of the deathly symbols that narcissistically bind the subject both to his dead father and to the idealized lady, their two images supporting each other, in an equivalence characteristic of the obsessional, one of the fantasized aggression that perpetuates it, the other of the mortifying cult that turns her into an idol.”

Despite the inaccuracies, Freud’s intervention works because it touches the structural knot: the symbolic identification that fuses the figures of the dead father and the inaccessible beloved. This narcissistic pairing is specific to obsessional neurosis, in which desire is always subordinated to the Law in its mortifying function. The imaginary equivalence between these two figures—aggression toward the father and idealization of the woman—sustains the deadlock of the Rat Man’s symptom. Interpretation dissolves this knot by shifting its symbolic coordinates.

“Likewise, it is in recognizing the forced subjectivation of the obsessional debt which his patient plays out to the point of delirium, in the scenario too perfect in expressing its imaginary terms for the subject even to attempt its realization—of the vain restitution—that Freud reaches his goal:”

The Rat Man’s symptom revolves around a fantasy of debt and restitution—an impossible repayment that structures his desire. The scene is too saturated with imaginary terms to be acted upon. What matters is not the real possibility of fulfilling the debt but the function this unpayable debt plays in the subject’s structure—it serves as a guarantee of his identity. Freud sees this and interprets accordingly: the obsessional structure is defined by its endless deferral and guilt, not by action.

“namely, to have him rediscover in the history of his father’s indiscretion, of his marriage to his mother, of the “poor but pretty” girl, of his wounded loves, of the ungrateful memory toward the helpful friend, along with the fateful constellation that presided at his very birth, the impossible-to-fill gap of the symbolic debt of which his neurosis is the protest.”

The culmination of Freud’s interpretive work is not a revelation of a cause, but a restructuring of the signifying chain in which the subject is caught. The details of familial romance, seduction, betrayal, and mourning are symbolically organized around the void of a debt—one that can never be repaid because it constitutes the subject. This symbolic debt is the real of the obsessional structure: an unfillable lack around which the entire neurosis turns. The neurosis thus functions as a protest not against repression, but against the symbolic order itself—the very law that installs the subject.

“There is no trace here of an appeal to the ignoble specter of some so-called ‘original fear,’ nor even to a masochism which would be all too easy to invoke, still less to that obsessional counter-forcing that some propagate under the name of analysis of defenses.”

This sentence functions as a polemic against certain interpretive strategies that reduce the symptom to pre-Freudian or post-Freudian clichés. The reference to “original fear” targets biologizing explanations of anxiety that psychologize the drive by placing it at the origin, neglecting its mediation through language. Similarly, invoking masochism would flatten the economy of the symptom into a moral or pleasure-seeking narrative. Lacan critiques these by underscoring that they misrecognize the symbolic order in which the subject is constituted. Finally, the analysis of defenses, when reduced to a theory of forceful counteraction or energetic blockage, falls into an imaginary logic that misapprehends resistance as a thing, rather than as structured within speech.

“The resistances themselves, as I have shown elsewhere, are used as long as possible in the direction of the discourse’s progress.”

Here Lacan returns to his foundational claim that resistance is not something to be eliminated immediately, but to be interpreted—not as content, but as structure. Resistance is not external to the analytic process; it is the very site where the discourse of the Other makes itself known. As long as the subject continues to speak, resistance operates as a surface from which interpretation can be drawn. One works with it until its function as limit or as demand becomes legible and subjectivizable.

“And when they must be ended, it is by yielding to them that one brings them to a close.”

Rather than confronting or negating resistance, the analyst allows its logic to unfold to the point of exhaustion—precisely because this method respects the structure of the subject’s speech. To “yield” here is not to submit, but to symbolically register the position of the subject in the chain of signifiers, letting resistance expose itself as the defense of a desire. It is at that moment that interpretation may intervene—not as information, but as a structural cut.

“It is in this way, nevertheless, that the patient succeeds in introducing into his subjectivity his true mediation under the transferential form of the imaginary daughter he gives to Freud in order to receive from him the alliance, and who in a key dream reveals her true face: that of death staring at him with eyes of pitch.”

This allegorical formulation of the transference traces the dialectical progression of the analysand’s relation to Freud: in the place of alliance or recognition, the Rat Man projects an imaginary daughter, a figure of symbolic offering. This daughter functions as a médiation, a third term between himself and Freud, and serves to establish a symbolic bond. The dream in which she appears as a death figure shows that the imaginary has been traversed: the transferential demand is no longer veiled in seduction or idealization but confronts the real of castration. Death, in the dream, is not simply biological—it is the real kernel around which desire is organized. The pitch-black eyes stage the gaze of the Other, the deadly Thing (das Ding) at the heart of jouissance.

“If it is with this symbolic pact that the subject’s stratagems of servitude have fallen, then reality will not have failed him in fulfilling those nuptials, and the note, in the form of an epitaph, that Freud dedicated in 1923 to that young man who, in the risk of war, met ‘the end of so many young men of worth in whom so many hopes had been placed,’ concluding the case with the rigor of destiny, raises it to the beauty of tragedy.”

Lacan reads Freud’s final reflection on the Rat Man’s fate—dying in war—as a kind of tragic closure, not merely historical but structural. The “symbolic pact” of the transference is fulfilled in death, where the structure of the neurosis culminates in the real. The “stratagems of servitude”—the obsessive rituals that bound the subject—collapse when the pact of recognition is established. But that recognition comes too late to avert the end, and Freud’s note functions as a tragic chorus, naming the subject’s destiny with a pathos that reflects the irreversibility of the symbolic logic. The neurotic’s attempt to repay an impossible debt ends not in its resolution but in a death that, paradoxically, retroactively confirms the fatal structure.

“To know how to respond to the subject in analysis, the method is first to recognize the place where his ego is situated, that ego which Freud himself defined as an ego formed from a verbal nucleus, in other words, to know by whom and for whom the subject poses his question.”

The ethical responsibility of the analyst is thus grounded in the structural position of the ego. Freud’s remark that the ego is “a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes” finds here its Lacanian corollary: the ego is formed from words, that is, from identifications with the speech of the Other. To interpret is to situate where the subject speaks from, to hear who speaks in the symptom and to whom. Only when this place is clarified—through transference and the unfolding of the signifying chain—can the analyst’s speech truly respond, rather than merely react.

“As long as this is not known, one risks a misinterpretation of the desire to be recognized there and of the object to which this desire is addressed.”

To mislocate the ego in the analytic discourse is to mistake the structure of the demand. The subject speaks in order to be recognized—not as ego, not as person, but as divided subject, as split by the signifier. If the analyst fails to identify the position from which the desire for recognition emerges, the desire itself will be misrecognized, and the object that the subject addresses will be collapsed into an imaginary or real one—thus repeating rather than resolving the symptom. Lacanian technique is founded precisely on this vigilance toward the structure of enunciation: from where, to whom, and with what aim is the subject speaking?

“The hysteric captures this object in a refined intrigue, and his ego is in the third party through the medium of whom the subject enjoys the object in which his question is embodied.”

This formulation hinges on Lacan’s classical structural reading of hysteria. The hysterical subject stages desire by displacing it through a third party, investing another (the Other) with knowledge of their own desire. The “object” here is the phallus as symbolic placeholder of lack, and the intrigue is the symptom’s mise-en-scène: a strategy to elicit desire from the Other without ever fully claiming it. The ego does not stand directly between subject and object but is decentered into a position that seeks enjoyment only through the desire of the Other. The third party is essential—the subject places themselves in the position of being the object of another’s desire, while denying that they possess knowledge of what they want.

“The obsessional pulls into the cage of his narcissism the objects where his question reverberates in the multiplied alibi of deathly figures and, taming their lofty acrobatics, directs the ambiguous homage toward the box where he himself is seated, that of the master who cannot be seen.”

In obsessional neurosis, the relationship to the Other is radically different: the subject retains mastery only through retreat. His staging of desire turns around control and refusal. The reference to the “cage of narcissism” indicates how the obsessional encloses his question in elaborately staged delays and detours—through death, substitution, indirect homage—so that the question never quite emerges. He is both master and hidden audience, placing himself in the position of the one who controls the gaze but cannot be seen, preserving the illusion of autonomy. Unlike the hysteric, who puts the Other’s desire into play, the obsessional suspends it through imaginary identification and inhibition.

“Trahit sua quemque voluptas; one identifies with the spectacle, the other puts it on display.”

This Latin tag—“Each is drawn by his own pleasure”—underscores the structural difference in how each neurotic structure engages with desire and enjoyment. The hysteric finds jouissance in being caught up in the scene, misrecognizing herself in the Other’s gaze. The obsessional, however, choreographs the entire scene—he constructs a symbolic theater while simultaneously absenting himself from it, masterfully avoiding the place of demand.

“For the first subject, you must bring him to recognize where his action is located, for whom the term acting-out takes its literal meaning, since he acts outside himself.”

The acting-out of the hysteric is literal: it occurs outside herself, in the Other’s field. The analytic task is to bring the subject to recognize the locus of her desire in the Other’s discourse, to make her aware that what she “acts” is a message directed elsewhere. Her scene is staged to provoke recognition; the analyst must show her how she is caught in a signifying chain that precedes her, so she might assume her desire rather than defer it endlessly.

“For the other, you must make yourself recognized in the spectator, invisible from the stage, with whom he is united by the mediation of death.”

The obsessional structure places the analyst in the position of the unseen witness. Recognition cannot occur directly; the obsessional subject demands a recognition that is at once veiled and authorized by the figure of death—as limit, punishment, or ethical ideal. The analyst must operate within this veiled circuit, intervening from the “place of the dead,” so to speak, so that the subject’s phantasm can be brought to collapse, and a symbolic relation can emerge beyond narcissistic self-mastery.

“Thus, it is always in the relation of the subject’s ego to the ‘I’ of his discourse that you must understand the meaning of the discourse in order to disalienate the subject.”

Lacan insists on the structural split between the je and the moi—between the subject of the enunciation and the ego as constructed in the imaginary. The subject’s alienation lies in conflating these two. The discourse reveals this gap: the ego speaks, but the truth of the subject emerges in the enunciation. The analyst’s role is to listen beyond what is said, to what in the saying (dire) marks the unconscious articulation of desire. Disalienation, then, is not a reconciliation of ego and truth but a recognition of their difference.

“But you will not succeed if you hold to the idea that the subject’s ego is identical to the presence that speaks to you.”

To hear the ego as coincident with the speaking subject is to miss the subject of the unconscious. The ego may say “I,” but this is not the subject of desire; it is a mask, an image, a function of defense. The analyst must listen not to the ego’s assurances but to the slips, contradictions, and signifiers that betray the presence of the divided subject—the barred subject ($) in Lacanian notation. Only this subject, not the ego, can speak truth in analysis.

“This error is encouraged by the terminology of the topography, which all too easily tempts objectivizing thought, allowing it to slip from the ego defined as the perception-consciousness system—i.e., as the system of the subject’s objectivations—to the ego conceived as the correlate of an absolute reality, and thus to rediscover, in a singular return of the repressed of psychological thought, the ‘function of the real’ to which a Pierre Janet aligns his conceptions.”

Lacan critiques the classical topographical model when it becomes reified: treating the ego as if it were an observable entity or a rational organ. When one slips from the Freudian ego-as-interface (the system of objectifications and perceptions) into a metaphysical substance or a transparent consciousness, one returns to pre-Freudian psychology. Pierre Janet, emblematic here of that return, understands pathology in terms of the failure of real adaptation, collapsing symbolic causality into functional deficit. Lacan warns that this forgets Freud’s discovery: that the real at stake in neurosis is not biological or empirical, but the real as remainder of the signifying operation, that which resists symbolization.

“Such a slippage has occurred only because of the failure to recognize that in Freud’s work the topography of the ego, id, and superego is subordinated to the metapsychology whose terms he developed at the same time, and without which it loses its meaning.”

Here, the critique targets the misreading of Freud’s second topology—ego, id, and superego—as if it constituted a literal anatomy of the psyche. Lacan reminds the analyst that these are functional, dynamic relations grounded in Freud’s broader metapsychology, not in empirical psychology. When stripped of their metapsychological frame—which includes the economic (libidinal), topographical (systemic), and dynamic (conflictual) dimensions—these terms are falsely reified. The ego is then no longer a structural node in a signifying system but becomes psychologized, flattened into a pre-Freudian, normative self, leading to therapeutic misdirection.

“Thus one has become engaged in a psychological orthopedics whose fruits have yet to cease.”

The result of this misreading is a therapeutic ideology Lacan calls “psychological orthopedics”: the ego becomes the target of correction, normalization, adaptation. This is not psychoanalysis but a form of behavioral or supportive psychotherapy, which aims to realign the subject with supposed norms. Such practices strip away the unconscious and reduce analysis to a tool for ego-strengthening—precisely what Freud warned against in his paper on “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

“Michael Balint has analyzed with remarkable insight the intertwined effects of theory and technique in the genesis of a new conception of analysis, and he finds no better way to indicate its outcome than in the slogan he borrows from Rickman: the advent of a Two-body psychology.”

Lacan invokes Balint to highlight the consequences of misapplying theory in technique. “Two-body psychology,” a term borrowed from Rickman, captures the degradation of the analytic setting into a dualistic interaction between analyst and analysand conceived as full-bodied individuals. This conception erases the symbolic mediation intrinsic to psychoanalysis. Instead of the subject being caught in speech and the signifier, they are reduced to a relational system of lived experience, disrupting the very structure Freud laid out, which was triadic at minimum: subject, Other, and signifier.

“Indeed, one could not put it better. Analysis becomes the relation of two bodies between which a fantasmatic communication is established in which the analyst teaches the subject to grasp himself as object; subjectivity is admitted only in the parenthesis of illusion, and speech is banished in favor of a pursuit of lived experience that becomes the supreme goal—but the dialectically necessary result appears in the fact that the subjectivity of the psychoanalyst, being released from any restraint, leaves the subject at the mercy of all the injunctions of his speech.”

This critique extends: in “two-body psychology,” the fantasy is no longer analyzed, but enacted between the analyst and analysand. The analyst, rather than interpreting the subject’s speech and desire through symbolic mediation, begins to teach the subject to see themselves as an object. This is a reversal of analysis, reducing it to a relation between imaginary egos. When speech is no longer the privileged medium of subjectivation and interpretation, but replaced by experiential immediacy or emotional insight, the analyst’s position is no longer structured by the unconscious but by his own unbound subjectivity. The result is a transfer of suggestive power, not an unveiling of the unconscious.

“Once intra-subjective topography is reified, it is realized in the division of labor between the subjects present.”

Reifying the Freudian agencies (ego, id, superego) leads to a literalistic treatment of analysis. The subject is cut into parts, and the analytic dyad is imagined as split between them—i.e., the analyst embodies one function (the superego or ego-ideal), while the analysand becomes the id or object of reform. Such a model of “division of labor” turns psychoanalysis into interpersonal coaching. The structure of the symbolic is completely foreclosed.

“And this diverted usage of Freud’s formula that everything of the id must become of the ego appears in a demystified form; the subject transformed into an ‘it’ must conform to an ego in which the analyst will have no trouble recognizing his ally, since it is, in truth, his own ego.”

Lacan lays bare the ideological misuse of Freud’s dictum—Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—commonly translated as “Where id was, there ego shall be.” In the hands of ego psychology, this phrase is turned into a moral imperative to civilize the instinctual. But Lacan restores its structural meaning: the emergence of subjectivity through the symbolic order. Instead, in its ego-psychological misuse, the subject becomes an “it”—a passive mass to be molded—and the ego becomes the idealized rational self, coinciding with the analyst’s own image. What is thus enforced is not subjectivation but normalization—reinforcing alienation, rather than revealing it.

“It is this very process that is expressed in many theoretical formulations of the splitting of the ego in analysis. Half of the subject’s ego passes to the other side of the wall separating analysand and analyst, then half of the half, and so on, in an asymptotic procession that, no matter how far it proceeds in the belief the subject himself will have formed, will never succeed in eliminating every margin that might alert him to the aberration of the analysis.”

This sentence captures, through the metaphor of asymptotic division, the infinite deferral of unity in the subject’s relation to their ego when the analytic process is no longer oriented by the symbolic, but instead by imaginary and suggestive dynamics. The ego is split—not structurally, as in the Freudian or Lacanian sense of alienation in the signifier—but functionally, as an attempt to externalize self-knowledge through the figure of the analyst. This leads to a continuous projection of pieces of the ego into the other, fostering an illusion of self-mastery by way of communicative identification. The “wall” mentioned—between analyst and analysand—is the very space of the unconscious structured like a language. The idea that self-knowledge can be approached incrementally, with each portion of the ego becoming visible and communicable, is here parodied as a Zeno-like infinite regress. The subject is thus caught in a fantasy of total transparency, all the while sustaining a structural misrecognition.

“But how could the subject of an analysis based on the principle that all his formulations are defense systems be protected against the total disorientation into which this principle throws the analyst’s dialectic?”

This question underlines a central danger in the reduction of all analytic material to “defense.” If every utterance is presumed to conceal a defense mechanism, rather than being situated in a field of signifiers with symbolic resonance, the analyst loses their orientation in the dialectic. The subject is then no longer a divided being speaking through and around truth, but a cunning ego manipulating interpretations. The analyst, stripped of a coherent method for interpreting desire via the structure of speech, lapses into a hermeneutics of suspicion. The analysis becomes paranoid. The subject’s speech is no longer heard for what it says, but only for what it defends against saying—collapsing the dialectic into a closed loop of presumed intentions.

“Freud’s interpretation, whose dialectical procedure is so clearly displayed in the observation of Dora, presents none of these dangers, for when the analyst’s prejudices (that is, his countertransference—a term whose correct usage in our view should not extend beyond the dialectical grounds of error) lead him astray in his intervention, he pays the price immediately in the form of a negative transference.”

Lacan underscores that Freud’s technique remains exemplary precisely because it is subject to the dialectic: the truth of the intervention is returned to the analyst in the form of the subject’s transferential response. In Dora’s case, Freud’s misrecognition—failing to hear her position in the structure of the love triangle—led to a rupture, but that rupture is a dialectical event, not a therapeutic failure in the modern sense. Here, Lacan reframes countertransference not as a psychological phenomenon to be managed by the analyst’s self-awareness, but as a dialectical misstep: an error in reading the structure of the subject’s speech. The “negative transference” is not pathological resistance, but the return of the subject’s truth through structural discontinuity.

“For this manifests all the more strongly as such an analysis has already engaged the subject further into an authentic recognition, and a rupture usually follows.”

This clarifies that the negative transference is not a sign of failure, but of the subject’s resistance to being prematurely or improperly positioned in the analyst’s discourse. In Dora’s case, Freud’s insistence that she admit a desire for Mr. K. was too blunt, not aligned with her position in the symbolic. The rupture, far from invalidating the analysis, confirms its dialectical momentum: it marks the resistance not as a block, but as a subjective gesture of self-assertion when the analyst speaks falsely.

“That is precisely what happened in the case of Dora, due to Freud’s insistence on making her acknowledge the hidden object of her desire in the person of Mr. K., where the constitutive prejudices of his countertransference led him to see the promise of her happiness.”

Lacan reads Freud’s intervention in Dora not as an instance of clinical omnipotence, but as one where Freud’s belief in a heterosexual resolution of Dora’s conflicts (her “happiness”) overrode a structural reading of her desire. The “constitutive prejudices” refer to Freud’s identification with paternal desire and with the normative sexual aim he projected onto Dora. Lacan thus reframes this not as an ethical lapse, but as a theoretical misalignment: Freud, for a moment, substituted imaginary empathy for symbolic listening. Dora’s rejection of the interpretation is not neurotic resistance but the subject’s revolt against a misattribution of her desire. This rupture is therefore the very proof that the subject is alive within the transference—asserting a position, however enigmatic, within the symbolic field.

“No doubt Dora herself was misled in that relationship, but she nevertheless keenly felt that Freud was being misled with her.”

This sentence names the intersubjective dimension of the analytic encounter as misrecognized by both parties: Dora senses a shared misdirection in the analytic process, but crucially, she also perceives that Freud is equally caught in the illusion. Her misrecognition is not singular or private—it is entangled with Freud’s. In Lacanian terms, this moment foregrounds the symbolic register as failed in its function: the analyst is no longer the subject supposed to know, but is instead drawn into the imaginary dimension of the hysteric’s game. That Dora perceives this—and even experiences a form of jouissance from recognizing Freud’s implication in the misunderstanding—demonstrates the emergence of her own subject-position through the failure of the Other.

“But when she returns to see him, after the fifteen-month interval that bears the fateful number of her ‘time for understanding,’ one senses her entering the path of feigning to have feigned, and the convergence of this second-degree feint with the aggressive intention that Freud imputes to her—not without accuracy, to be sure, but without recognizing its true motivation—presents us with the sketch of the intersubjective complicity that a ‘resistance analysis’ confident in its rights could have perpetuated between them.”

The return of Dora after fifteen months—symbolically charged as Freud’s own conceptualization of the Nachträglichkeit, the “afterwardness” of understanding—introduces the idea of double feint: she feigns to have feigned. This structure, which echoes the imaginary specularity of the mirror stage, is a defensive ruse, but not an empty one. It is a staged performance of mastery—on Dora’s part—that signals both a return to the transference and a weaponization of her position within it. Freud accurately intuits her aggression, but Lacan insists that he misses the structure motivating it. This structure is the méconnaissance (misrecognition) of desire in its demand for recognition. If analysis were reduced to resistance analysis—that is, reading all speech as defensive—it would crystallize this mutual misrecognition into a sustained and closed circuit. The hysteric would seduce by resisting, and the analyst would interpret by presuming. Thus a perverse complicity would emerge: Dora would provoke transference while Freud would gratify it by wrongly recognizing her desire, and thereby his own position.

“There is no doubt that, with the tools our technical progress now offers, human error could have been prolonged beyond the limit where it becomes diabolical.”

This sentence cuts ironically: Lacan critiques the modern technical apparatus of psychoanalysis that claims to perfect interpretation through structured defenses or ego stages. He asserts that these same tools—if misused without a theory of speech and desire—risk reinforcing the error rather than resolving it. The term “diabolical” here is not rhetorical excess; it names the possibility that a falsely theorized transference (in the absence of the symbolic register) could support a monstrous reproduction of misrecognition, one in which the analyst is not corrected by the subject’s revolt but stabilized by their submission. The danger is not simply analytic failure but a betrayal of psychoanalysis as a praxis of truth.

“All this is not of our own invention, for Freud himself later recognized the prejudicial source of his failure in his ignorance at the time of the homosexual position of the object targeted by the hysteric’s desire.”

This final line returns to Freud’s own retrospective insight. Freud later acknowledged that he had missed the homosexual orientation of Dora’s desire—that her identification with Frau K., and not merely desire for Mr. K., was central. Lacan reads this not as a correction to be filed, but as the structural key Freud missed. The hysteric’s desire is always displaced; it passes through the Other. Dora’s desire was not for Mr. K. as man, but for the desire embodied in Frau K. And Freud, in insisting Dora’s object was masculine, reified a heteronormative phantasm in place of the actual circuit of desire. This error thus exemplifies the cost of ignoring the symbolic mediation of desire through identification, the signifier, and the Other’s desire. Freud intuited the issue, but its implications had yet to be theorized—something Lacan sets out to complete.

“Certainly, the whole process that led to this current tendency in psychoanalysis stems, first and foremost, from the bad conscience the analyst developed regarding the miracle worked by his speech.”

The analyst’s “bad conscience” reflects an internal split introduced by the failure to fully assume the symbolic efficacy of interpretation. What Lacan identifies here is the analyst’s discomfort with the performative function of speech in analysis—the way the word, when positioned rightly, acts upon the subject as an event. The effect appears “miraculous” only to those who fail to grasp that the symptom is structured as language, and that an intervention aimed at its signifying articulation might dissolve it like a resolved rebus. The analyst’s guilt, then, is the guilt of one who disavows the function of the symbolic order in favor of a scientistic alibi.

“He interprets the symbol, and behold, the symptom, inscribed in letters of suffering in the subject’s flesh, vanishes.”

Here, the reference to the symptom as “letters of suffering” invokes Freud’s insight that the symptom is a hieroglyph written on the body, which Lacan radicalizes by showing it to be a signifier displaced and disfigured. The analyst, in this scenario, performs a speech act that restores the repressed signifier to the symbolic chain. The vanishing of the symptom is thus a linguistic event, not a physiological miracle. The process aligns with the Freudian insight that the symptom is the return of the repressed in symbolic form.

“This thaumaturgy offends our customs. After all, we are scientists, and magic is not a defensible practice.”

The analyst’s retreat from the effects of interpretation marks a regression into scientism. The “miracle” of speech’s curative power is disavowed not because it is ineffective, but because it offends the empirical protocols of post-Enlightenment science. Yet Lacan highlights that psychoanalysis, properly understood, is not magical; its effects are grounded in the logic of the signifier. The refusal of this logic in favor of observable “evidence” masks the analyst’s own failure to subjectivize his position within the field of speech.

“We displace the discomfort by imputing magical thinking to the patient.”

This displacement is a projection: the analyst, confronted by the symbolic potency of interpretation, turns it into a deficiency in the patient. Magical thinking is not just a feature of the subject’s imaginary beliefs but is now attributed to their transference itself. Instead of treating the symbolic structure that underlies the transference, the analyst now diagnoses the transference as a form of pathology—thus neutralizing its dialectical function.

“Soon we will be preaching to our patients the Gospel according to Lévy-Bruhl.”

Here, Lacan sardonically points to a regressive anthropology. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl famously described the thought of “primitive” peoples as prélogique, marked by mystical participation and magical causality. To reduce the patient’s speech to magical thinking is to treat them as structurally pre-modern or irrational, thereby undermining their status as speaking subjects. This comparison critiques the paternalism that veils itself as scientific distance.

“In the meantime, we have become thinkers again, and here are restored those proper distances one must know how to maintain with patients, whose tradition had perhaps too hastily been abandoned—so nobly expressed in these lines by Pierre Janet on the modest capacities of the hysteric compared to our lofty heights: ‘She understands nothing of science,’ he confides to us, speaking of the poor thing, ‘and cannot imagine that one might be interested in it… If one considers the lack of control that characterizes their thinking, instead of being scandalized by their lies, which are moreover quite naïve, one will rather be surprised that there are still so many honest ones, etc.’”

This quote from Janet is not invoked merely to condemn his condescension, but to show how that posture has returned under the guise of modern scientific decorum. Janet’s diagnostic stance—interpreting the hysteric from above, as a defective subject—negates the transference and the truth-value of the symptom. What was at stake in Freud’s early encounters with hysteria was not their irrationality, but the symbolic structure of their suffering. That is precisely what is erased when the analyst assumes the position of the “objective” scientist who patronizingly translates the patient’s experience into diagnostic categories.

“These lines, which represent the sentiment to which many analysts of our day have returned—who condescend to speak to the patient ‘in their own language’—can help us to understand what has happened in the meantime.”

To speak to the patient “in their own language” here is not a gesture of recognition but of instrumental accommodation. It is the abandonment of the symbolic position of the analyst, who must not mirror the patient’s speech but instead occupy the place from which the unconscious is addressed. The pseudo-democratization of the analytic relation, framed as empathy or communication “on their level,” in fact reintroduces the asymmetry of domination and reinforces alienation.

“For if Freud had been capable of signing them, how could he have heard, as he did, the truth embedded in the anecdotes of his first patients, or even deciphered a dark delusion like Schreber’s and broadened it to the scale of man eternally bound to his symbols?”

Lacan reaffirms that Freud, unlike Janet, treated even the delusion of a paranoiac like Schreber as a coherent and interpretable discourse. Schreber’s system was not a collapse into madness but a reconstruction of meaning structured by language. Freud’s achievement was to hear truth where others heard nonsense, and to extract symbolic logic where psychiatry saw only dysfunction. The analyst who disdains the patient’s words as prelogical or naïve forecloses this very possibility and betrays psychoanalysis as a discourse founded on the dignity of the subject’s speech.

“Is our reason so feeble that it cannot recognize itself equally in the mediation of scholarly discourse and in the original exchange of the symbolic object, and fail to rediscover there the identical measure of its primordial cunning?”

This rhetorical question targets the intellectual split between theoretical discourse and the symbolic exchange at the heart of the analytic process. Lacan challenges the analyst who retreats from the core of symbolic mediation—such as the pact, the name, or the symptom—into a hollow intellectualism. He reminds the psychoanalyst that reason itself is not antithetical to the symbolic; rather, its historical cunning—la ruse de la raison, Hegel would say—is precisely to operate within symbolic mediation. The scholarly apparatus and the primal gift carry the same structure: the detour through the other by which desire finds its form.

“Must we be reminded what is the worth of ‘thought’ to practitioners of an experience whose preoccupation is drawn closer to an intestinal eroticism than to any equivalent of action?”

This caustic line mocks the reduction of analytic experience to biological or libidinal drives—particularly the fashionable preoccupations with the anal-erotic registers of control, retention, or excretion. Lacan targets the tendency within psychoanalysis to substitute genuine symbolic interpretation with theories grounded in instinct or affect, turning analytic practice into little more than a somaticist symptomatology. Such preoccupation with so-called ‘erotic zones’ strips speech of its structural power and misrecognizes the transference as bodily affect rather than symbolic address.

“Must the one who speaks to you testify that he, for his part, has no need to resort to thought in order to understand that if he is speaking to you now about speech, it is because we have in common a technique of speech that renders you able to hear him when he speaks of it to you, and that disposes him to address, through you, those who hear nothing of it?”

Here, the analyst affirms his own position as speaker within a shared symbolic order. He speaks of speech not through introspection or ‘thought’ as understood in cognitive terms, but through participation in the pacte symbolique—the intersubjective structure that allows the subject to be heard, not merely listened to. The analyst speaks because both he and the listener inhabit the same formal field: the field of speech as structure. And this address, though aimed at an interlocutor, is always mediated by the third: the Other. This triadic logic is intrinsic to all speech in psychoanalysis.

“For if we perceive in speech only a reflection of thought hidden behind the wall of language, we will soon want to hear only the knocks struck behind the wall, to seek them not in punctuation but in the holes of discourse.”

To reduce speech to a mere expression of a concealed thought is to reintroduce a Cartesian dualism that severs signifier from signified. In doing so, the analyst disavows the symbolic nature of speech and chases after meaning as if it were behind or beneath words—as if hidden in gaps rather than structured in their articulation. The shift from parole pleine (full speech) to an obsessive decoding of absence is a return to the imaginary, where meaning must be unveiled rather than read.

“From then on, we will be occupied solely with decoding this mode of communication and, as we must admit that we have not placed ourselves in the best conditions to receive its message, we will have to make it repeat itself a few times to be sure we understand it—perhaps even to make the subject understand that we understand—and it may happen that after a sufficient number of such back-and-forths the subject will have simply learned from us how to strike his beats in rhythm, a form of ‘marching in step’ that is as good as any other.”

The consequences of misapprehending speech as mere signal transmission are severe. The analyst begins to interpret the subject’s speech as noise to be decrypted, not as symbolic positioning. The clinical encounter devolves into mimicry, not interpretation. The repetition of “beats” mirrors a military cadence—mechanical, alienated, stripped of subjective address. In this parody, speech no longer aims at truth but becomes a conditioned response: the patient repeats rhythms he believes the analyst wishes to hear. The analytic function is lost; suggestion and compliance take its place.

Lacan is denouncing here the analytic setting in which repetition has become sheer mimicry of expectation, a perversion of what repetition truly is in Freud—a return of the repressed, a signifier seeking articulation in the Other’s field. To mistake this for mere rhythmic training is to lose the very kernel of psychoanalysis as speech in search of truth.

“Halfway to this extreme, the question arises: does psychoanalysis remain a dialectical relationship in which the non-action of the analyst guides the subject’s discourse toward the realization of his truth, or will it be reduced to a fantasmatic relation where ‘two abysses brush past each other’ without touching, until the gamut of imaginary regressions is exhausted—a kind of bundling [a reference to a puritanical courting custom involving non-sexual bed-sharing], pushed to its furthest limits as a psychological trial?”

This sentence presents a stark choice about the clinical direction of psychoanalysis. Lacan contrasts the analytic act as dialectical non-action—a position from which the analyst enables the subject’s speech to unfold toward truth—with a degraded fantasy scene where two subjects remain suspended in parallel solitudes, engaging only at the level of their imaginary identifications. The metaphor of “two abysses” evokes the impassable gap that results from foreclosure of symbolic mediation. The image of “bundling,” evoking repressed yet sanctioned proximity, ironizes the neutral abstention of the analyst when it lapses into collusive passivity—an intimate non-engagement that allows fantasy to run its course without interpretation. This “psychological trial” would be an endless mise-en-scène of imaginary jouissance, without symbolic consequence.

“In fact, this illusion that drives us to seek the subject’s reality beyond the wall of language is the same one by which the subject believes that his truth is already known to us, that we know it in advance—and it is by this very illusion that he is wide open to our objectivating intervention.”

The analyst’s temptation to grasp “reality” behind the patient’s words—assuming some referent behind the signifier—is mirrored by the subject’s own illusion that the analyst already knows his truth. This is the structural mirage of transference: the analyst is taken as the one who knows (le sujet supposé savoir). And yet, paradoxically, this illusion is what enables the subject to surrender to the process. The risk, however, is that the analyst, seduced by this supposition, begins to act from it—to interpret prematurely, to objectify the subject rather than letting their truth emerge from within speech itself. This is the danger of analytic suggestion dressed up as interpretation.

“No doubt he himself is not accountable for this subjective error which, whether acknowledged or not in his discourse, is immanent in the fact that he has entered into analysis and concluded its fundamental pact.”

The illusion of the subject—namely, that the analyst already knows—cannot be attributed to the subject as a personal mistake. Rather, it is built into the structure of the analytic setting itself. To enter analysis is to presuppose that the analyst possesses some knowledge of the subject’s desire or symptom. This is the “pact” of analysis: the subject offers speech under the condition that it will be heard meaningfully. The error, then, is structural, not personal—it belongs to the logic of transference, not to misrecognition in a moral sense.

“And all the less can we neglect the subjectivity of that moment, since it is there that we find the reason for what may be called the constitutive effects of the transference, inasmuch as they are distinguished, by a mark of reality, from the constituted effects that follow them.”

This moment—the entrance into transference—must not be overlooked, because it inaugurates effects that are constitutive rather than constituted. The constitutive effects are those that condition the subject’s entry into speech under the signifier’s rule: they concern how the subject emerges as divided, barred, and speaking. These are distinct from the constituted effects—such as symptomatic formations or defensive elaborations—that are already part of the subject’s psychic reality. The constitutive moment involves a sort of symbolic anchoring, which the analyst must recognize and preserve.

“Let us recall that Freud, when speaking of the feelings associated with transference, insisted on the necessity of distinguishing a factor of reality in them, and he concluded that it would be an abuse of the subject’s docility to want to persuade him in all cases that these feelings are a simple transferred repetition of the neurosis.”

Lacan here affirms a crucial nuance in Freud’s treatment of transference: the affects expressed in the transference are not always reducible to mere displacement from early childhood figures. Freud, aware of the ethical stakes of interpretation, warns against using theory to dismiss the real effects of the analytic situation. To tell a subject that their love, hate, or attachment is merely a projection of earlier conflicts can itself be an enactment of symbolic violence, especially if it fails to recognize how the analytic setting may have produced novel, real attachments.

“From then on, since these real feelings manifest themselves as primary and the particular charm of our persons remains a random factor, it may seem that some mystery is involved.”

That transference affects the subject so profoundly—despite the fact that the analyst’s personality may be quite ordinary—indicates a structural cause, not a personal one. This is where Lacan detects a kind of “mystery”: not a mystical unknowability, but the symbolic logic by which the analyst occupies the position of the Other in the transference. The subject’s libidinal investment is not determined by the analyst’s actual traits, but by the place the analyst occupies in the subject’s speech—a structural position made possible by the setup of the analytic encounter. The affect is real, but the cause is symbolic.

“But this mystery becomes clearer when viewed within the phenomenology of the subject, insofar as the subject constitutes himself in the pursuit of truth.”

When Lacan speaks of a “mystery,” he refers to the real, inexplicable quality of the affects experienced in transference. But the opacity of this mystery is not absolute; it is clarified when approached through the lens of the subject’s phenomenological constitution—that is, how the subject emerges in his own relation to truth. The subject is not merely a container of facts or experiences; he is constituted through his desire for truth, which is itself mediated by the symbolic order. In this sense, the transference—rather than being a contingency or interference—becomes the very terrain on which this desire takes form.

“One need only turn to traditional data—which Buddhists are not the only ones to provide—to recognize in this form of transference the proper error of existence, under three headings which they enumerate as follows: love, hate, and ignorance.”

Lacan points to Buddhist psychology, which names the three “poisons” of existence: attachment (love), aversion (hate), and delusion (ignorance). These are not seen as mere moral flaws but as fundamental misorientations in how the subject relates to reality. Within the analytic frame, Lacan identifies these same affective structures—love, hate, and ignorance—as the key modalities of transference. They are not incidental; they structure the subject’s speech, especially as it engages the supposed knowledge of the Other. In Freud’s terms, transference love and transference resistance already imply this trinity.

“It is therefore as a counter-effect of the analytic movement that we understand their equivalence in what is called an initially positive transference—each becoming clarified by the other two under this existential aspect, especially when we do not exclude the third, generally omitted due to its proximity to the subject.”

These three positions—love, hate, ignorance—are not merely discrete attitudes but co-determine each other within the subject’s relation to the analyst. Even what is called a “positive” transference (typically manifest as affection or idealization) cannot be understood without seeing how it is entangled with hate (ambivalence, rivalry) and ignorance (resistance to knowing). The third term, ignorance, is often omitted precisely because it is most intimate with the subject—it defines the structure of the unconscious. Ignorance is not mere lack of knowledge but an active refusal, a defense.

“We refer here to the invective whereby someone—whose debt to us is recognizable by the proper use made of the term ‘real’—took us as witnesses to the lack of restraint shown by a certain work (already too often cited by us) in its senseless objectivation of the play of drives in analysis.”

Lacan refers to a critique (likely of a contemporary analyst) that objected to the reification of the drives in analytic theory—treating them as empirical “things” rather than symbolic articulations. He emphasizes that this critic’s use of the term “real” actually shows fidelity to Lacan’s own conceptual distinctions. The “real” here is not to be confused with objective facts or somatic drives but is to be situated within the triad of symbolic, imaginary, and real that structure analytic experience.

“It was in these words that he ‘unburdened,’ as they say, ‘his heart’: ‘It is high time this swindle ends, which tries to make people believe that anything real happens in treatment.’ Let us set aside what became of it, for alas! if analysis did not cure the oral vice of the dog of Scripture, its condition is worse than before: it is now the vomit of others that it laps up.”

The quote is a sarcastic provocation meant to challenge the idea that psychoanalysis produces any real transformation. Lacan responds not with moral outrage but with irony: the speaker’s denial of the “real” in analysis is itself symptomatic, a sign that the real is very much at stake. The biblical allusion (from 2 Peter 2:22, “the dog returns to its vomit”) satirically critiques analysts who recycle the errors of others—those who, in refusing symbolic rigor, end up reinforcing analytic degeneration.

“But if the question posed in this jest—better inspired than well-intentioned—does indeed have meaning, we believe it must be considered through the fundamental distinction between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real.”

Even though the invective was delivered with bad faith, Lacan concedes that it touches on a valid question: what does happen in analysis that is real? His answer is that the question can only be resolved by invoking the three registers—symbolic, imaginary, and real—which define the field of analytic experience. These are not ontological domains but structural coordinates that shape the subject’s position and the nature of transformation.

“Indeed, reality in analytic experience often remains veiled in negative forms, but it is not too difficult to locate it.”

The real in psychoanalysis is not the empirical real of science or bodily drives; it often appears negatively—through gaps, contradictions, ruptures. In dreams, parapraxes, resistances, and failures of speech, the real asserts itself not as presence but as a limit. While veiled, it is nonetheless legible to the analyst trained to hear the symbolic dimension of speech.

“It appears, for example, in what we usually disapprove of as active interventions; but it would be an error to define its limit thereby.”

Active interventions—such as confrontations or interpretive provocations—sometimes give rise to effects that touch on the real. Yet to equate the real solely with these moments is a mistake. The real is not reducible to strong emotional reactions or dramatic events in the treatment. Rather, it emerges at the point where the symbolic order fails to mediate meaning—where signification breaks down. The real is encountered when the subject is confronted with the impossible object of desire, the non-integratable kernel around which the symptom is organized.

“For it is clear, on the other hand, that the analyst’s abstention, his refusal to respond, is an element of reality in the analysis.”

Lacan points here to the real function of the analyst’s silence—not as a void, but as a presence in the field of the transference. This abstention is not a passive omission but a structural act. Within the analytic frame, this silence is a marker of the analyst’s position as cause of desire: not satisfying demand, not being seduced into reciprocity. This withholding is itself real insofar as it introduces a cut, a non-response that compels the subject to confront the gap of his desire.

“More precisely, it is in this negativity, insofar as it is pure—that is, detached from any particular motive—that the junction between the symbolic and the real resides.”

The purity of this negativity lies in its refusal to be reduced to a particular, psychological explanation or intention. It is not that the analyst withholds because of judgment, anger, or technique in the conventional sense, but because he occupies the place of the objet a—the object-cause of desire. The silence, or suspension of response, is where the symbolic operation (structured around the lack in the Other) meets the real (as what resists symbolization). The subject, in the absence of response, encounters the real of their own division.

“This is understood in that this non-action is grounded in our affirmed knowledge of the principle that all that is real is rational, and in the motive that follows: that it is up to the subject to rediscover his own measure.”

This Hegelian axiom—“all that is real is rational”—when filtered through the analytic field, no longer suggests a mastery of meaning but insists that even the most senseless experiences of the subject are structured, subject to the order of the signifier. The analyst’s abstention presumes the subject’s capacity to retroactively inscribe meaning into the real. In other words, the analyst does not interpret for the subject but facilitates the conditions for the subject to produce their own speech as truth.

“It remains that this abstention is not indefinitely sustained; when the subject’s question has taken the form of true speech, we sanction it with our response—but we have also shown that true speech already contains its own response and that we merely echo its refrain with our lay.”

The analyst does eventually respond—but only in response to true speech: that is, speech where the subject implicates himself in what he says, where he assumes the enunciation behind the enunciated. Lacan stresses that this kind of speech always contains within it a structure of auto-response. The analyst’s intervention is not one of adding information or correction but of offering a punctuation—a kind of resonance that marks the subject’s moment of assuming his desire. The analyst speaks only to underline a truth that has already emerged in the subject’s discourse.

“What does this mean? Nothing other than that we do nothing but provide the subject’s speech with its dialectical punctuation.”

To “punctuate” the subject’s speech is to make a cut—not merely to interpret in the classical sense, but to situate the subject’s statement in a sequence that gives it structure and consequence. The analyst’s word retroactively confers status upon the subject’s utterance. This dialectical moment, properly timed, allows the subject’s speech to be heard as such, by himself as much as by the analyst.

“From there, we see the other moment where the symbolic and the real converge, and we had already theoretically marked it: in the function of time, and this is worth pausing over for its technical effects.”

This other point of junction between the symbolic and the real is time, understood not chronologically but structurally—as a function in discourse. Time in analysis is not a neutral container but a vector of interpretation. The subject’s speech unfolds not in linear time but in a temporal structure where retroactivity (nachträglichkeit) dominates. That is, meaning is often constituted after the fact, which is why interpretation can transform the sense of something previously said or done.

“Time plays its role in technique under several aspects.”

Lacan now introduces a series of dimensions in which time functions technically in the analytic process. These are not secondary considerations but fundamental structural elements of how the analytic experience is shaped.

“It first appears in the total duration of analysis, and implies the meaning to be given to the termination of the analysis, which is the preliminary question to that of the signs of its end.”

The “duration” of analysis cannot be predetermined. Unlike medical treatment plans, there is no standard length. What matters is not how long the analysis takes, but what meaning the termination has for the subject. The end is not marked by symptom cessation but by the subject’s traversal of fantasy, a reconfiguration of his position in relation to desire and the Other.

“We shall touch upon the problem of fixing its endpoint. But already it is clear that this duration can only be anticipated by the subject as indefinite.”

The endpoint of analysis cannot be prescribed, and for the subject, it must remain indefinite. This indeterminacy is crucial—it is precisely what allows desire to function. A known endpoint would risk transforming the process into a teleological, goal-directed enterprise, when what is at stake is the subject’s unfolding confrontation with lack. Analysis ends not with completion but with the shift in the subject’s relation to the signifier and to the cause of his desire.

“This for two reasons, which can only be distinguished from a dialectical perspective:”

The impossibility of predetermining the end of analysis is grounded in the dialectical nature of psychoanalytic temporality. Only from a dialectical point of view can one tease apart the implications of time as it plays out within the analytic process—not as linear progression, but as the unfolding of meaning retroactively produced through speech and interpretation.

“– the first pertains to the limits of our field and confirms our proposition on the definition of its boundaries: we cannot foresee for the subject what his time for understanding will be, insofar as it includes a psychological factor that eludes us as such;”

This first reason addresses the structure of time for understanding (temps pour comprendre), which, for Lacan, is a fundamental moment in the tripartite structure of the instant of seeing, time for understanding, and moment of concluding. This subjective time is not measurable or foreseeable by the analyst, because it is determined by the subject’s singular path of sense-making within the field of speech. It is not a psychological variable in the empirical sense, but a structural one: the analyst cannot predict when or how the subject will be ready to formulate or assume a truth.

“– the second is properly that of the subject himself, and through it, the fixing of a term amounts to a spatializing projection, whereby he finds himself already alienated from himself: from the moment the conclusion of his truth can be foreseen—whatever might occur in the intervallic intersubjectivity—it means the truth is already there, that is, we reestablish in the subject his original mirage in that he places his truth in us and, by sanctioning it with our authority, we install his analysis in an aberration, which will be impossible to rectify in its outcomes.”

Here Lacan identifies the core alienation caused by the imposition of a predetermined endpoint: the subject is made to imagine that his truth is something already known or knowable by the analyst, thus returning him to the imaginary mirage of recognition—his truth is thought to reside in the Other. This is not simply a technical misstep; it structurally corrupts the entire analytic process by reducing it to a transmission of knowledge rather than a dialectical emergence of subjectivity. Fixing the endpoint objectifies the subject’s truth and turns the analyst into a Master-Supposed-to-Know, blocking the very emergence of the subject as such.

“This is precisely what happened in the famous case of the Wolf Man, whose exemplary importance was so well understood by Freud that he returned to it in his article on finite or infinite analysis[28].”

Lacan reads Freud’s later reflections on the case of the Wolf Man as Freud’s own ambivalent attempt to grapple with the limitations of terminating analysis too early. The Wolf Man becomes a key illustration of what happens when the process is closed prematurely—before the subject has traversed the fantasy and located himself as divided within the symbolic order.

“The anticipatory setting of a termination point, the first form of active intervention, inaugurated (proh pudor!) by Freud himself—no matter the divinatory assurance (in the proper sense of the word[29]) the analyst may demonstrate in following his example—will always leave the subject in the alienation of his truth.”

Lacan critiques Freud’s act of setting the endpoint in the Wolf Man’s analysis as a foundational error in analytic practice. However intuitive or “divinatory” the decision may seem, it constitutes an active intervention that violates the principle of non-suggestion. In essence, the analyst’s imposition of closure substitutes his authority for the subject’s speech. Even when guided by the best of instincts, such action risks affirming the analyst’s knowledge over the subject’s truth, reinforcing transference dependence and leaving the subject structurally uncompleted.

“And we find confirmation of this in two facts from Freud’s case:”

Lacan now points to specific features of the Wolf Man case to demonstrate how the subject’s alienation persisted due to this imposed endpoint. These facts don’t simply “prove” Freud’s failure but show the structural consequences of misrecognition at the symbolic level.

“Firstly, the Wolf Man—despite the whole body of evidence demonstrating the historicity of the primal scene, despite the conviction he expresses about it, undisturbed by the methodical doubts that Freud imposes as a test—never manages to integrate its recollection into his history.”

The subject’s insistence on the primal scene (witnessing the parental coitus a tergo) as something he believes and Freud treats with methodological skepticism does not lead to its integration. This is because it remains external to his symbolic history—it stays in the register of the real, not re-inscribed as a retroactively meaningful event in the subject’s speech. The scene, even as a constructed memory, does not achieve historicization; it remains an enigmatic trauma.

“Secondly, the Wolf Man later demonstrates his alienation in the most categorical way, in a paranoiac form.”

This clinical outcome—paranoia—confirms the structural error of foreclosing the analysis. Rather than traversing the fantasy, the subject is left caught within it. The symbolic debt remains unpaid, and the foreclosure of truth generates a psychotic structure. This paranoia is not a regression but a consequence of having his desire falsely interpreted or closed off by an Other presumed to know. The analytic cut did not occur at the level of speech, and the subject’s truth was never assumed in his own name. Thus, the analysis becomes not an emancipation, but a misrecognition crystallized in psychotic certainty.

“It is true that another factor enters in here, by which reality intervenes in analysis: the gift of money, whose symbolic value we reserve to treat elsewhere, though its significance is already indicated in what we have previously evoked about the link between speech and the constitutive gift of the primordial exchange.”

The payment for analysis is not a mere practical transaction, but partakes in the symbolic economy that governs all human exchange. Just as the first gift in symbolic exchange institutes the law of reciprocity and recognition, the fee given for analysis marks the subject’s entry into the analytic bond through a gesture that is irreducible to utility. It is this gesture—of a gift—that roots analysis in the logic of the signifier: the analyst’s time is not purchased, but symbolically acknowledged. Its nature is homologous with the gift of speech itself—both are constitutive of the subject’s position within the symbolic.

“Here, the monetary gift is reversed by an initiative of Freud, in which we may recognize—no less than in his insistence on returning to this case—the unresolved subjectivation in him of the problems the case leaves suspended.”

Lacan reads Freud’s decision to subsidize the Wolf Man as a retroactive distortion of this symbolic structure. In offering money to the analysand from a group fund—essentially feeding him from the institutional prytaneum—Freud unconsciously disrupts the symbolic order of the analytic exchange, inverting the gift and thereby confusing its function. This reversal does not resolve the transference but absorbs it, fusing the subject’s symbolic debt with the material debt of remuneration. It also reveals Freud’s own unresolved place in the case—a repetition, at the level of the Real, of an impasse left unelaborated symbolically.

“And no one doubts that this was a triggering factor of the psychosis, even if one cannot quite say why.”

While the link between this reversal and the subject’s later psychotic break cannot be strictly determined in a causal sense, it is structurally significant. The analyst’s intervention—by filling in the subject’s lack, symbolically and materially—forecloses the place of desire. Rather than sustaining the function of lack as constitutive of subjectivity, Freud’s gesture supplants it, and thereby forecloses the possibility for the subject to constitute himself via speech. The result is not healing, but psychotic collapse: the subject is saturated by the analyst’s signifier.

“Can one not understand, however, that to admit a subject to be fed in the prytaneum of psychoanalysis (for it was in fact from a group collection that he received his stipend), as a reward for the service rendered to psychoanalysis by the observation of his case, is to precipitate definitively in him the alienation of his truth?”

The ancient reference to the prytaneum—where exemplary citizens were fed at the public’s expense—emphasizes how the symbolic debt of the Wolf Man is not merely discharged, but repurposed by the institution. Rather than being allowed to subjectivize his truth through speech, he is reified into an exemplary case: the observed rather than the speaking subject. This instrumentalization of his narrative renders his truth alien to him, locating it now in the Other of the psychoanalytic community. He is no longer a speaking being (parlêtre), but a specimen—his symptom becomes a legacy, not a process.

“A dream of the subject during the supplementary analysis conducted by Mrs. Ruth Mac Brunswick demonstrates beyond all desirable rigor what we are asserting—its images symbolizing even the very wall of our metaphor, behind which the wolves of the primal scene press in vain until they manage to turn it with the help of the analyst, who here intervenes only in a secondary function.”

The dream referenced functions as a precise metaphorical cipher for the analytic structure. The wolves pressing against a wall represent the Real as it presses on the subject, a Real which remains unassimilable. The “wall” is language, and only through analytic intervention—a symbolic act—can the subject turn this wall, thereby rediscovering his position as desiring subject. Mrs. Mac Brunswick’s role as “secondary” is key: she is not the one who interprets or intervenes directly, but rather facilitates the subject’s own symbolic labor. This is a model for analytic neutrality in Lacan’s sense: the analyst does not guide, but sustains the place where the subject can speak.

“Nothing would be more instructive for our discussion than to show how Mrs. Mac Brunswick fulfilled this secondary role. The identification of the entire discourse of the first analysis with that very wall to be turned would be the most beautiful illustration of the reciprocal roles of speech and language in analytic mediation—but we lack the space here to elaborate.”

Lacan here gestures to a crucial point in analytic theory: the distinction between speech (subjectively enunciated) and language (the structure that allows speech to take form). Mrs. Mac Brunswick’s silent role lets the Wolf Man’s speech resonate against the structure of the earlier analysis—structured like a wall. To “turn the wall” is to symbolically re-translate that first analysis, not by negating it but by entering it anew from the subject’s place. This turning gesture mirrors the work of the signifier: it is not new content that matters, but a reorganization of the symbolic coordinates.

“Those who follow our teaching already know this, and those who have followed us thus far may surely rediscover it by their own means.”

The implicit invitation is addressed to Lacan’s audience: the interpretation is not to be handed over as an object but rediscovered in each analyst’s relation to their own praxis. As with the analysand, so with the reader: Lacan does not offer doctrine, but conditions for symbolic engagement. In this gesture, he positions his readers as subjects of desire—inviting them to enter the field of interpretation not as consumers, but as interlocutors.

“Indeed, we wish to address another aspect, particularly burning in current times, of the function of time in technique. We wish to speak of the duration of the session.”

The analytical session, as structured temporally, is not neutral. Its duration is one of the key technical elements in the analytic framework and touches on the intersection of symbolic structuring and the real of clinical practice. That this issue is “burning” today reflects precisely how little neutral this time really is: its form—whether fixed, flexible, variable—reveals the analyst’s own position within the symbolic economy of the analytic act.

“Here again we are dealing with an element that clearly belongs to reality, since it represents our working time and, from this angle, falls under a professional regulation that may be considered prevalent.”

The duration of the session is an institutionalized norm, and as such, reflects a reality in the sense Lacan distinguishes from the symbolic and the imaginary: it pertains to the material order of scheduling, payment, organizational policies. But these institutional norms also form part of the symbolic order to the extent they are codified and collectively upheld, though they obscure the question of what function time actually plays for the subject.

“But its subjective incidences are no less important. And first of all for the analyst. The taboo character under which it has been raised in recent debates proves well enough that the group’s subjectivity is far from being liberated in this regard, and the scrupulous, not to say obsessive, character that adherence to a standard takes on for certain, if not most—whose historical and geographical variations, moreover, seem to concern no one—is indeed the sign of the existence of a problem that one is all the less inclined to confront insofar as one senses that it would lead very far in questioning the analyst’s function.”

What is revealed in the defensiveness around session duration is the analyst’s resistance. It is not simply a matter of external rules but of how the analyst situates their own desire and authority in the frame of the session. The standardization of time—twenty minutes, forty-five minutes, etc.—becomes a fetish, masking the anxiety provoked by the structural undecidability of when a session should end. If this technical question leads “very far,” it is because it touches on the real function of the analyst as cause of the analysand’s desire. The session must end not at a temporal endpoint dictated by habit, but at a point where symbolic work is structurally punctuated.

“As for the subject in analysis, its importance is no less undeniable. ‘The unconscious,’ one proclaims with greater conviction the less one is capable of justifying the claim, ‘the unconscious takes time to reveal itself.’ We quite agree. But we ask: what is its measure?”

The cliché about the unconscious requiring time assumes a continuity that might seem self-evident. But Lacanian psychoanalysis insists on questioning this assumption. The unconscious is not a linear unfolding but an encounter—its “time” is not chronometric but logical time, structured by retroaction and scansion. To ask for its “measure” is not to look for a quantitative standard but to inquire into the qualitative structure of the analytic act.

“Is it that of the universe of precision, to use the expression of Mr. Alexandre Koyré? Certainly, we live in this universe, but its advent for man is recent, dating precisely to the clock of Huyghens, that is to the year 1659, and the malaise of modern man does not indicate exactly that this precision is in itself a factor of liberation for him.”

Modernity’s obsession with exact measurement—time above all—emerges from a symbolic transformation of the world, one that, paradoxically, installs alienation rather than mastery. The precision of Huyghens’ clock introduces not merely efficiency but a symbolic regime in which time is external to the subject. This reflects how alienated the subject becomes when symbolic time is reduced to mechanical duration, losing its link to desire and speech.

“Is this time of the fall of heavy bodies sacred in that it corresponds to the time of the stars, as posited in eternity by God, who—as Lichtenberg told us—winds our sundials?”

This ironic reference to divine metaphysics questions the naturalization of time. If the order of physical phenomena—the fall of bodies, the cycles of stars—is taken as a model for analytic temporality, then we fall back into an imaginary projection of eternity, foreign to the subject’s experience of time as fractured, split, and determined retroactively. The time of the subject is not the time of the stars, nor the Newtonian continuum.

“Perhaps we will form a better idea of it by comparing the time of creation of a symbolic object with the moment of inattention in which we let it fall?”

Here we find a crucial suggestion: the measure of analytic time may lie not in mechanical duration, but in the structure of creation and loss—a symbolic process where what matters is not how long something is held, but how it emerges and vanishes. The time of the session must be thought as the time of the act, not of the clock. A signifier is produced, a chain disrupted or completed; and perhaps the most fruitful moment—the slip, the silence, the stumble—is what occurs in the interval of inattention, not in the duration itself. This is the temporality Lacan privileges: not a linear unfolding, but a moment of kairos, where the Real punctuates the Symbolic.

“Be that as it may, if the work of our function during this time remains problematic, we believe we have sufficiently highlighted the working function of what the patient accomplishes during it.”

The analyst’s position remains enigmatic insofar as his fonction de cause, his function as cause of the analysand’s desire, resists full definition. Nonetheless, the subject’s productive work in the session—travail du sujet—can be circumscribed with more certainty. What is being emphasized is the transferential investment of time on the side of the analysand: the symbolic labor through which his truth is pieced together, driven by the rhythm of speech and the structure of language. The session gives space for this work, though its fruits are not reducible to the passage of chronological time.

“But the reality, whatever it may be, of this time then assumes a particular value: that of a sanction of the quality within this work.”

The time of the session, as a reality, becomes inscribed as a symbolic evaluation—a sanctioning not of quantity (duration), but of quality. The “cut” of the session—the moment of interruption or ending—retroactively endows the speech that preceded it with value, functioning as a punctuation. This is what Lacan will later formalize as the scansion: it is not time that ends the session, but a moment of significance. The end marks a reading of the subject’s own enunciation.

“Undoubtedly, on our side we also play a role of recording, assuming the function—fundamental in every symbolic exchange—of collecting what do kamo, man in his authenticity, calls ‘the speech that endures.'”

The analyst becomes the silent custodian of the subject’s enunciated truth. The reference to the do kamo—from Maurice Leenhardt’s ethnographic studies in New Caledonia—highlights the place of authentic speech in communal life: parole tenue, enduring speech, is that which is kept, recorded, not only uttered but heard and remembered. In psychoanalysis, this symbolic responsibility lies with the analyst, who registers and testifies to the permanence of what emerges from the subject’s transient discourse.

“Witness called to account for the sincerity of the subject, depository of the minutes of his discourse, reference for its accuracy, guarantor of its rectitude, guardian of his testament, notary of his codicils—the analyst participates as a scribe.”

This image of the analyst as a kind of symbolic scribe situates his function not in interpretation alone, but in witnessing. The emphasis on “testament” and “codicils” underlines the sacred and juridical dimension of the analytic act: what the subject says is inscribed with lasting consequences. The analyst’s role here recalls that of the autre, the Other of the Symbolic, to whom the subject addresses himself in hopes of recognition, confirmation, or even redemption. To record is to confirm that the subject has indeed spoken in the register of truth.

“But he remains above all the master of the truth of which this discourse is the unfolding. He is, above all, the one who punctuates its dialectic, as we have said. And here he is apprehended as the judge of the value of this discourse. This has two consequences.”

The analyst is not master in the sense of domination, but in the Hegelian dialectical sense: he holds the place from which the truth of the subject’s discourse can be measured, through its structure rather than its content. To punctuate is to determine the moment of the act—when the truth appears, when it fails, when it cuts. This function—of deciding when to intervene or end the session—thus wields considerable symbolic power, and carries two main consequences for the subject’s experience of the session.

“The suspension of the session cannot fail to be experienced by the subject as a punctuation in his progress. We know how he calculates its timing in order to articulate it with his own delays, or even his evasions; how he anticipates it, weighing it like a weapon, watching for it like a shelter.”

This sentence highlights the unconscious strategies the subject deploys in response to the end of the session. The patient may maneuver around this cut, whether by using it to delay (as resistance), to dodge confrontation (as evasion), or to extract meaning (as a plea for recognition). The cut is thus interpreted by the subject as a response, whether punitive, protective, or illuminating—it never remains neutral. It bears the weight of the transference.

“The indifference with which the cut of timing interrupts moments of urgency in the subject may be fatal to the conclusion toward which his discourse was rushing—if not fixing a misunderstanding, at least providing a pretext for a retaliatory ruse.”

An abrupt or indifferent termination can solidify misunderstanding into meaning. If the analyst cuts without regard for the symbolic function of the subject’s discourse, the subject may perceive it as betrayal, judgment, or withdrawal, and interpret it within the structure of fantasy. This becomes a scene, replayed in the economy of resistance, or converted into a demand addressed to an imaginary Other. The missed punctuation becomes a misrecognition.

“It is remarkable that beginners seem more struck than we are by the effects of this factor.”

Those new to analytic practice are often more attuned to the power of the session’s ending, precisely because they have not yet developed the defenses of routine or theoretical rationalization. Their unease points to the real at stake in the timing of the cut, to the symbolic violence it can enact, and to the burden of the analyst’s role in managing its function as part of the structure of transference.

“It is a fact well known in the practice of texts of symbolic writing, whether biblical or Chinese canonical: the absence of punctuation is a source of ambiguity, punctuation once imposed fixes meaning, its change renews or overturns it, and, when faulty, it amounts to altering it.”

In sacred and canonical texts, which operate under the regime of the Symbolic, punctuation—or its absence—is not a mere technicality but a structural condition that determines the meaning retroactively. The signifier’s chain, when left open or undecided, leaves the field of interpretation fluid, thus enabling ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning, or even revelation. But once the punctuation is inserted, it sutures the enunciated and halts the movement of the signifying chain. In analytic terms, this mirrors the analyst’s role in interpreting—or not—at a given moment: a misstep can fix a meaning prematurely or falsely, whereas a timely punctuation can open the path to truth.

“Certainly, the neutrality we show by strictly applying this rule maintains the path of our non-action.”

By adhering to the structural neutrality of non-intervention—what Lacan terms the analyst’s non-action—the function of the analyst resists the temptation to insert himself as master-signifier. This non-action corresponds not to a lack of engagement but to the strategic withholding of intervention, so as to preserve the space of enunciation for the subject. It is in that void, or gap, that desire circulates and the subject emerges.

“But this non-action itself has its limit—otherwise we would never intervene. And pushing it to the extreme on this single point does not maintain that path.”

Non-action, if absolutized, becomes counterproductive. The analyst must know when to act—when to punctuate, interpret, or silence—in resonance with the structure of the subject’s discourse. Refusing intervention in the name of theoretical purity risks becoming a defensive posture, one that forecloses the dialectic rather than sustaining it. Non-action thus has a limit: it exists not as a passive stance but as a strategic principle articulated within transference.

“The danger announced at the mere mention of an obsessive formation on this subject is that of encountering the subject’s complicity. And this will find occasion to operate in types other than the obsessive himself.”

The obsessive subject, due to his structural relation to knowledge and the Other, is especially prone to using analytic silence or neutrality to reinforce his own defenses. The analyst’s excessive abstention risks becoming co-opted by the subject’s fantasy, reinforcing avoidance and deferral. Complicity is thus not a conscious collusion but a structural resonance between the analyst’s inactivity and the obsessive’s enjoyment of delay. Yet this dynamic extends beyond the obsessive structure; it illustrates a generalizable function of resistance that masquerades as compliance.

“Nowhere, however, is it more clearly demonstrated than in understanding the meaning that ‘work’ takes on for the obsessive. A meaning of forced labor that imposes itself even on his leisure.”

For the obsessive, work is not a practical necessity but a libidinal imperative, a form of jouissance in disguise. Even leisure is subsumed under the signifier of duty or obligation. The obsessive finds enjoyment in toil precisely where others would locate burden. This forced labor reflects the structure of the drive, where the repetition itself—working as if in service of an Other—becomes the site of satisfaction. The term “work” thus becomes overdetermined, saturated with unconscious investment.

“This meaning is supported by his subjective relation to the master, in that it is the master’s death he awaits.”

The obsessive’s entire libidinal economy is oriented around the figure of the master, understood in the Hegelian sense as the locus of the Other’s command. But unlike the slave in Hegel who rebels or submits, the obsessive suspends his own desire by deferring its realization until the master’s disappearance. He maintains his submission while secretly anticipating the moment of reversal, where he will inherit mastery without risk. In this fantasy, the death of the master is a condition for the subject’s enjoyment and liberation.

“The obsessive manifests, in effect, one of the attitudes that Hegel did not develop in his dialectic of the master and the slave. The slave shrank from the risk of death, where the opportunity for mastery was offered him in a contest of pure prestige. But since he knows he is mortal, he also knows that the master can die. From then on, he can accept to work for the master and to renounce enjoyment in the meantime—and, in the uncertainty of when the master will die, he waits.”

The obsessive introduces a third position into the Hegelian schema: he refuses both the direct confrontation of prestige and the full submission of the slave. He enters the dialectic through deferral—Aufschub—waiting out the master’s mortality. This structural temporization is essential to the obsessive’s relation to the Other: he serves, but only until the power relation can be reversed. His refusal to enjoy is not ascetic but strategic; his sacrifice is instrumentalized for a future reckoning.

“Such is the intersubjective reason for the doubt and procrastination that are character traits in the obsessive.”

The obsessive’s delay is not merely neurotic indecision but a function of his intersubjective relation to the Other. Doubt and hesitation express not a deficit of will but the logic of displacement and waiting. The obsessive cannot act because to act would mean to foreclose the fantasy of the master’s eventual collapse. Hence, his neurosis is organized around the suspended act, and his subjectivity is woven through the temporal logic of not yet, of one day, of the Other’s eventual failure.

“However, all his work is carried out under the heading of this intention, and is thereby doubly alienating. For not only is the subject’s labor seized by another—which is the constitutive relation of all labor—but the subject’s recognition of his own essence in his work, in which this labor finds its reason, escapes him no less, for he himself ‘is not there’; he is in the anticipated moment of the master’s death, from which he will live, but pending which he identifies with the master as dead, and thus he is himself already dead.”

The subject’s activity, particularly in obsessional neurosis, is structured around a fantasy that makes his labor fundamentally alienating. Not only is the product of his effort always already inscribed in the field of the Other, claimed by the discourse of the master, but even his identification with his own desire is suspended. The subject projects himself into a deferred temporality—beyond the Other’s demise—thus relating to his own existence only through a phantasmatic identification with death. In this way, the obsessional’s jouissance is tied to the enjoyment of not-being, of working toward a moment he never occupies, of “living” in anticipation of a time that structurally excludes him.

“Nevertheless, he strives to deceive the master by demonstrating the good intentions shown in his work. This is what the good children of the analytic catechism express in their blunt language when they say that the subject’s ego seeks to seduce his superego.”

The subject, bound to the law of the Other, nevertheless attempts to maneuver within it, staging a performance of docility and “good intentions” that masks a deeper ambivalence. The expression that the ego seduces the superego crudely translates a more refined intersubjective logic: the subject’s efforts are not simply aimed at moral approval but are designed to manage the gaze of the Other. In psychoanalytic treatment, this surfaces in the transference as the subject’s attempt to appear good before the analyst—turning his very submission into a form of control.

“This intra-subjective formulation is immediately demystified when understood in the analytic relationship, where the subject’s working-through is in fact used to seduce the analyst.”

What appears, within ego psychology, as an internal ego-superego conflict is revealed, in a Lacanian framework, as structured around the intersubjective dimension of transference. The patient’s analysis, far from being a neutral working-through, becomes a performance directed toward the analyst, whose supposed knowledge must be seduced, convinced, or appeased. The subject uses his speech to capture the Other’s desire, transforming even resistance or symptomatology into offerings meant to regulate the analyst’s gaze.

“It is no accident either that as soon as the dialectical progress approaches the questioning of the ego’s intentions in our subjects, the fantasy of the analyst’s death—often felt as fear, even anguish—never fails to arise.”

The fantasy of the master’s—or analyst’s—death emerges at the moment when the structure sustaining the subject’s deferral collapses. When the subject confronts his own position as the one who speaks, rather than as the one spoken about, he is forced to see the analyst not as omniscient but as a fallible other. This destabilizes the structure of transference and elicits anguish: the collapse of the fantasy that the Other holds the truth. The death of the analyst, then, is not a literal wish but the structural loss of the position that allowed the subject to hide from his own question.

“And the subject then sets out again into an even more demonstrative elaboration of his ‘good will.'”

In response to this anxiety, the subject intensifies his effort to “be good,” returning to a redoubled activity of seduction. This is not sincerity but a defense—an attempt to restore the fantasy structure in which the Other’s desire remains intact and benevolent. The more the master’s symbolic function is seen to waver, the more the subject attempts to stabilize it by offering proof of his loyalty, usefulness, and compliance.

“How, then, could one doubt the effect of a marked disdain by the master for the product of such labor? The subject’s resistance may be utterly disconcerted by it.”

When the analyst punctuates this economy with a gesture that refuses to ratify the subject’s performance—when he marks a separation, a disdain for the product—the obsessive structure is shaken. This cut can act as a scansion that reveals the underlying void of the Other’s desire. The subject, expecting confirmation, is confronted instead with silence or rejection, which no longer sustains his fantasy. At that moment, resistance loses its justification and function; the subject stands before the Real of his own question.

“From that moment, the alibi which had hitherto remained unconscious begins to be revealed to him, and he is seen passionately seeking the reason for so much effort.”

This disruption opens the path to a subjective repositioning. What had been disavowed—the true cause of the subject’s investment in the analytic labor—now emerges as a question: why has he spoken, worked, suffered? The alibi of “good will” is stripped away, and the subject must now account for the desire that sustained his repetitions. This is the turning point where analysis enters a more authentic phase, in which the subject, freed from imaginary seduction, may confront the symbolic debt of his desire.

“We would not speak so boldly if we were not convinced that by experimenting—at a moment now brought to conclusion in our experience—with what have been called our short sessions, we have been able to bring to light in a particular male subject fantasies of anal pregnancy, with the dream of its resolution by cesarean section, within a timeframe where otherwise we would still be listening to his speculations on the art of Dostoevsky.”

Here Lacan reaffirms that analytic interventions—particularly the temporality of the session—have a dialectical effect on the subject’s unconscious structure. The reference to the “short session” is not merely a procedural note but a methodological break with the fixed temporal standard of the fifty-minute hour. By interrupting the flow of discourse at a critical point, a properly timed cut can cause a rupture in the chain of signifiers that allows something repressed to emerge into symbolic articulation. The example of anal pregnancy and the associated fantasy of cesarean delivery is not trivial: it demonstrates how the body as imagined object is caught in the net of symbolic language. In obsessional neurosis, such a fantasy makes manifest the subject’s attempt to localize and control the locus of the Other’s desire—through a bodily metaphor for a discourse not yet delivered. Without the cut, the discourse risks meandering into intellectualization (e.g., Dostoevsky), a detour around the Real.

“In any case, we are not here to defend this procedure, but to show that it has a precise dialectical meaning in its technical application.”

Lacan clarifies that the point is not to advocate for the short session per se as a dogmatic technique but to indicate that its function is dialectical: it is designed to intervene in the speech structure at the moment of maximum tension. It is not a behavioral manipulation but an operation on the symbolic register. The interruption functions as punctuation, analogous to the function of cut in the signifying chain, forcing a moment of subjective division.

“And we are not alone in having noted that it ultimately converges with the technique designated under the name of Zen, which is applied as a means of revelation of the subject in the traditional asceticism of certain Far Eastern schools.”

By invoking Zen, Lacan draws a parallel between the analytic act and the logic of satori—an abrupt illumination or awakening that occurs not through explanation but through rupture. Zen koans, like analytic interpretations, are not didactic messages but provocations that aim at cracking the subject’s symbolic framework. The analogy is not mystical but structural: both techniques revolve around cutting the flow of the Imaginary to expose the Real of the subject’s desire. Lacan emphasizes convergence, not equivalence, since Zen proceeds from a wholly different cultural episteme.

“Without going to the extremes to which this technique leads—for they would contradict certain limitations that ours imposes on itself—a discreet application of its principle in analysis seems to us far more acceptable than some methods known as resistance analysis, insofar as it carries within itself no danger of alienating the subject.”

Lacan distances analytic technique from Zen’s radical practices, which dissolve the ego through disciplinary methods incompatible with analytic ethics. Nonetheless, he suggests that the Zen model’s logic—where intervention cuts through imaginary mastery—offers a more valid analytic orientation than ego psychology’s resistance analysis. Whereas resistance analysis risks reinforcing the subject’s identification with the ego and deepening alienation, the properly timed cut—by evoking the unconscious signifier—preserves the subject’s engagement with his own truth.

“For it breaks discourse only to deliver speech.”

This sentence captures a fundamental distinction in Lacan’s theory between parole (speech) and discours (discourse). Discourse as a chain of signifiers can serve to cover the subject’s division. A rupture—such as the cut introduced by the analyst—interrupts this defensive discursive continuity and makes possible the emergence of parole, which is where the subject is implicated in the truth of his unconscious. The cut serves not to silence the subject but to summon a more authentic speech, one that is oriented by the Real.

“We are thus at the foot of the wall, the wall of language. We are in our place here—that is, on the same side as the patient—and it is on this wall, which is the same for both him and us, that we will try to respond to the echo of his speech.”

The metaphor of the “wall of language” evokes the limit imposed by the symbolic order. Analyst and analysand both speak from within language, and it is this shared structure that conditions the possibility of analysis. The “echo of his speech” signals that what the analyst listens for is not meaning in the usual communicative sense but the return of the repressed signifier, the Real embedded in symbolic formations. The analyst is not positioned as one who knows, but as one who hears—who responds not with interpretation as explanation but with interpretation as intervention into the chain.

“Beyond this wall, there is nothing for us but outer darkness. Does this mean we are entirely masters of the situation? Certainly not, and on this point Freud has left us his testament concerning the negative therapeutic reaction.”

Lacan warns against any triumphalist fantasy of analytic mastery. Beyond the symbolic structure, there is the Real—an irreducible opacity that cannot be domesticated by technique. The “outer darkness” names the dimension of the drive and jouissance that resists symbolization. Freud’s notion of the negative therapeutic reaction reminds us that even the most accurate interpretation can provoke resistance, hatred of healing, or a backlash of guilt. The Real cannot be commanded. The subject’s confrontation with castration, with loss, with the truth of their own division, is not a guarantee of cure. The analyst, then, works not as master of knowledge but as an agent of the symbolic, traversing this darkness alongside the subject.

“The key to this mystery, it is said, lies in the instance of a primordial masochism—in other words, in a pure manifestation of that death instinct of which Freud proposed the enigma at the peak of his experience.”

This sentence refers to the notion Freud formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he posited the Todestrieb (death drive) as a force that works in opposition to Eros. Lacan draws attention to how the so-called “negative therapeutic reaction”—where the subject seems to respond to progress with increased suffering or resistance—cannot be fully understood without invoking this enigmatic drive. To reduce such resistance to ego-based defenses or miscommunications is to miss what is at stake structurally: a push beyond the pleasure principle, where repetition serves not mastery but the return to a zero point. The term “primordial masochism” here must be read in its Lacanian value: not as a perversion but as a structure rooted in the Real.

“We cannot dismiss it, nor can we here postpone its examination.”

Lacan insists that this concept cannot be avoided in analytic theory and technique. The refusal to consider the death drive risks a naive optimism in the efficacy of speech. Yet what psychoanalysis encounters in the clinic is not simply resistance to truth but something more fundamental: a resistance to being.

“For we may observe that a shared refusal of this doctrinal completion is found both in those who conduct analysis around a conception of the ego whose error we have denounced, and in those like Reich who go so far in the principle of seeking beyond speech the ineffable organic expression that, in order to free it from its armor as he does, might like him symbolize in the superposition of two wormlike forms—the astonishing diagram of which may be seen in his Character Analysis—the orgasmic induction he expects, as he does, from analysis.”

In this critique, Lacan groups together both ego psychology and Wilhelm Reich as forms of analytic deviation that, in their own ways, bypass the death drive. Ego psychologists anchor themselves in adaptation and coherence—failing to grasp that the ego is already an effect of misrecognition. Reich, on the other hand, bypasses the symbolic altogether, attempting to return to the body through an energetic paradigm that seeks release via “orgasmic potency.” His diagram—superimposed worm-like shapes meant to depict the energetic flows of the orgasm—stands in for a theoretical regression, seeking the Real of jouissance directly rather than mediating it through language. Both schools, despite appearing in opposition, share a refusal to confront the structural negativity at the heart of subjectivity: the death drive.

“A conjunction that may well allow us to augur favorably about the rigor of mental formations, once we have shown the profound connection between the notion of the death instinct and the problems of speech.”

Here Lacan offers a dialectical reversal: the convergence of two errors—the ego’s overestimation of adaptation and Reich’s biologizing of desire—reveals a deeper necessity. If both miss the mark in symmetrical ways, it confirms the centrality of that which they repress: the death drive as articulated through the impasses of speech. That is, it is precisely in speech that death finds its structure—not as mere content but as the limit of articulation, the Real that resists symbolization. The rigor of mental formations is not found in theory’s positivity but in how it confronts the contradictions that speech reveals in the subject’s relation to truth and jouissance.

“The notion of the death instinct, as soon as one considers it, presents itself as ironic, its meaning to be sought in the conjunction of two contradictory terms: instinct, in its most comprehensive sense, is the law that regulates in succession a cycle of behavior for the accomplishment of a vital function, and death appears first as the destruction of life.”

Lacan frames the death instinct as a conceptual paradox. An “instinct” is by definition a teleological process oriented toward survival and reproduction. To posit a death instinct is to invert that teleology. In classical biological discourse, instinct never aims at death. Yet in Freud’s postulation, this drive—often silent, repetitive, and inassimilable—operates precisely beyond any economy of adaptation. It is this contradiction that opens the death drive as a properly structural problem, one that can only be approached through a logic internal to speech and signification.

“Yet the definition given by Bichat, at the dawn of biology, of life as the set of forces resisting death, no less than the most modern conception found in Cannon’s notion of homeostasis as a function of a system maintaining its own equilibrium, are there to remind us that life and death are composed in a polar relation within the very phenomena attributed to life.”

Bichat’s classical definition and Cannon’s homeostatic model both establish life as a negation of death—life as that which organizes itself against entropy. But Lacan reads this polarity structurally rather than biologically. If life is the resistance to death, it is already predicated on a tension—a negativity that inhabits it from within. This leads to an understanding of the subject not as a biological being but as a speaking being (parlêtre), whose symbolic structure is already inscribed by the Real of death. The death drive, then, is not a metaphysical force but the structural excess that speech cannot sublate, that which insists in repetition, in fixation, in compulsion. Speech delays death, but it also stages it.

“Hence, the congruence of the contrasting terms in ‘death instinct’ with the phenomena of repetition to which Freud connects them under the label of automatism should not pose difficulty if this were a biological notion.”

This sentence situates the internal tension of the Freudian death drive at the level of its conceptual structure. Freud’s linkage of the death instinct with compulsive repetition—seen notably in traumatic neurosis—should be unproblematic if the drive were purely biological: repetition, as a function of neurological circuits or survival reflexes, could be easily subsumed under the logic of natural life. However, in psychoanalysis, repetition goes beyond adaptation; it is not regulatory but disruptive. What repeats is not a behavior pattern but a signifier—detached from any somatic justification.

“Everyone senses that this is not the case, and this is what makes many of us stumble over its problem.”

There is an implicit Real here—something that resists symbolization. The unease that analysts experience when confronting the death drive points to its structural role: it cannot be understood as a function within the ego or the organism. Instead, it is the kernel of negativity that structures the subject. It is precisely because it is not biological that it is scandalous: it names what is inassimilable to adaptation or meaning.

“The fact that many stop at the apparent incompatibility of these terms might even hold our attention, in that it manifests a dialectical innocence that would surely be disconcerted by the classically posed semantic problem in the determinative expression: ‘a hamlet on the Ganges,’ by which Hindu aesthetics illustrates the second form of the resonances of language[30].”

Lacan here invokes the semantic paradox that arises in compound expressions where one term retroactively modifies the other in an unexpected way. In Hindu poetics, dhvani (suggestion) reveals how meaning is not fixed but emerges in tension. The phrase “a hamlet on the Ganges” does not merely denote a geographic location—it evokes an affective and symbolic aura. In the same way, “death instinct” is not a concept to be logically resolved but a poetic construction whose truth resides in its resonance. The analyst must hear the dhvani of Freud’s text—what it says beyond what it says.

“We must approach this notion through its resonances in what we will call the poetics of the Freudian work—the first avenue for penetrating its meaning, and an essential dimension for understanding the dialectical reverberation from the origins of the work to the apex it marks.”

Lacan’s call to a poetics of Freud’s corpus is a methodological injunction. Rather than dissecting Freud with clinical literalism, one must read him as a writer—sensitive to the symbolic, to the structure of myth, to metaphor, metonymy, and their condensation in dreams, slips, and symptoms. The death drive, in this sense, functions like a poetic metaphor: structurally necessary, semantically dense, and irreducible to biology or pathology.

“We must recall, for example, that Freud testifies to having found his medical vocation in the call he heard during a public reading of Goethe’s famous Hymn to Nature, that is, in this text rediscovered by a friend, where the poet, at the decline of his life, accepted recognition of a putative child from the earliest effusions of his pen.”

Freud’s entry into medicine, and eventually psychoanalysis, is grounded in a symbolic moment. The Hymn to Nature represents not only a literary awakening but an identificatory scene—one in which Freud hears the voice of destiny in poetic form. This origin scene must be read like a primal fantasy: it tells us that Freud was summoned not by science, but by the Real of nature imagined as symbolic maternity. The “putative child” is Freud himself, claimed retroactively by the poetic logos. Such a scene positions psychoanalysis within the tradition of literary vocation, not scientific detachment.

“At the other end of Freud’s life, we find in the article on analysis as finite or infinite, the explicit reference of his new conception to the conflict of the two principles to which Empedocles of Agrigento, in the 5th century B.C.—within the Presocratic indistinction of nature and spirit—subjected the alternations of universal life.”

Freud’s late reference to Empedocles reinforces the death drive’s status as a cosmological principle. Love (philia) and strife (neikos) govern the cycles of life and death in Empedocles’ cosmogony. Freud transposes this to psychic life, positing Eros and the death drive as fundamental forces beyond pleasure and unpleasure. That he turns to a pre-Socratic thinker—where nature and spirit are undivided—signals that the death drive functions in the register of the Real: irreducible, non-localizable, and not symbolic in itself, but the condition of the symbolic’s breakdown. The Freudian field thus closes on the same ambiguity it opened with: a poetic invocation of Nature, now resituated as the limit of discourse itself.

“These two facts are sufficient indication to us that this is a myth of the dyad, the promotion of which in Plato is in fact evoked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a myth that cannot be understood in the subjectivity of modern man except by elevating it to the negativity of the judgment in which it is inscribed.”

The dyad here refers to the Platonic schema of opposed principles, such as Love and Strife, or life and death, which Freud draws upon in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Rather than taking this as a metaphysical proposition, it must be reinterpreted within the modern subject’s relation to negativity—that is, not as a synthesis or reconciliation, but as the structuring function of lack. The judgment that emerges from this dyad is not simply evaluative, but a dialectical split—like Freud’s own positing of Eros and Thanatos—that requires negativity as its motor. It is only by inscribing this dyad within a Hegelian logic of contradiction that it becomes legible within psychoanalytic experience.

“That is to say, just as the automatism of repetition—which is equally misrecognized when one attempts to divide its terms—aims at nothing other than the temporalizing historicity of the transference experience, so too the death instinct essentially expresses the limit of the subject’s historical function.”

Repetition, in Lacanian terms, is not a simple recurrence but a structure that stages the failure of full symbolization. It is not the repetition of content, but of the missed encounter—the Tuché, the real that cannot be integrated into the symbolic. Similarly, the death drive marks the limit at which the subject’s narrative coherence collapses. This is not a limit that comes at the end of time, but one that retroactively conditions meaning at every point in the subject’s history. The real of death structures the subject’s relation to time, to meaning, to desire.

“This limit is death—not as the eventual termination of an individual’s life, nor as an empirical certainty for the subject, but, in the formulation given by Heidegger, as ‘the possibility most proper, unconditional, unsurpassable, certain, and as such indeterminate of the subject,’ understood as the subject defined by its historicity.”

Lacan aligns Freud’s notion of the death drive with Heidegger’s Sein-zum-Tode (being-toward-death). Death, in this formulation, is not a future event but a structural condition of subjectivity—it is the real that shadows the symbolic. It introduces an essential asymmetry into the temporalization of the subject, an impossibility that forces the subject to speak, to symbolically mediate his being through lack. This aligns with the Freudian insight that at the heart of every drive is a tension that exceeds homeostasis: an insistence beyond satisfaction.

“Indeed, this limit is present at every moment in the accomplished aspect of that history. It represents the past in its absolutely real form—that is, not the physical past whose existence is abolished, nor the epic past perfected in the work of memory, nor the historical past where man finds the guarantor of his future, but the past that is always present in the eternal return.”

Here Lacan distinguishes several registers of the past. The Real past is not something remembered, not an event archived in the symbolic, but something that insists—returning as symptom, as repetition, as compulsion. It is not available to conscious recollection or reconstruction, because it is bound to the traumatic kernel that evades symbolization. This is why the past returns “eternally”: not through memory, but as the missed encounter—ce qui ne cesse pas de ne pas s’écrire.

“Such is the dead, whom subjectivity makes its partner in the triad instituted by its mediation within the universal conflict of Philia, love, and Neikos, discord.”

The dead, in this schema, are not merely those who have biologically died, but those who remain within the symbolic field as figures of absence. They are the Others to whom the subject owes a debt—the father, the lover, the analyst, all those whose symbolic function continues to shape the subject’s structure. Philia and Neikos, as drawn from Empedocles, provide a mythic frame: the subject mediates its being through love and discord, through identification and division, always in relation to what cannot be incorporated—the dead.

“There is then no longer any need to resort to the outdated notion of primordial masochism to understand the reason for the repetitive games in which subjectivity simultaneously forges the mastery of its dereliction and the birth of the symbol.”

Rather than falling back on the biologically rooted concept of masochism as the foundation of repetition, Lacan insists on repetition as a structural operation of the signifier. The subject does not suffer because it wants to; it suffers because it is caught in the loop of the signifier, where desire and castration are inscribed. It is in and through repetition that the subject attempts to master its alienation, and this very attempt is what gives rise to the symbol: speech emerges at the site of loss. The death drive is not a pathology—it is the necessary condition of symbolic life.

“These are the games of concealment that Freud, in a moment of genius, brought into view so that we might recognize in them that the moment desire becomes human is also the moment the child is born into language.”

Freud’s observation of the child’s game with the reel in the Fort-Da episode offers a crystallization of the entry of desire into the symbolic order. The child stages the absence and return of the mother not merely as affective loss but as a symbolic structure. With this, the instinctual domain is surpassed: the child no longer simply suffers absence but represents it, formalizes it. Desire thus becomes human—no longer a biological need but mediated through the signifier. The object is lost in reality but found in language, where the subject is constituted through lack.

“We may now grasp that the subject not only masters its deprivation by assuming it, but also elevates its desire to a secondary power.”

By symbolizing the loss, the subject does not simply suffer it passively. The child doesn’t only endure the mother’s absence; he produces it as Fort, and thereby institutes himself as the agent of the signifying operation. In doing so, the subject retroactively inscribes his own desire into the structure of language, a desire that is now no longer directed toward a particular object, but is instead structured by the function of lack. This elevation of desire to a “secondary power” is its transformation into a function of symbolic mediation—desire as structured around the Other’s desire.

“For its action destroys the object that it makes appear and disappear in the anticipatory provocation of its absence and presence.”

The symbolic operation inaugurated in the Fort-Da game is one of simultaneous destruction and production. The object is not merely lost; it is put into play by the subject. What is reintroduced in the return (Da) is not the same object, but its symbolically determined value: the child’s own positioning in relation to the Other. The movement of disappearance and reappearance thus stages the dialectic of presence and absence, not to return to the object, but to install the subject in relation to the lack within the field of the Other.

“It thus negates the field of forces of desire in order to become its own object.”

This act doesn’t aim at satisfaction but at representation. The object becomes subordinated to the signifier. Desire is no longer oriented toward a real thing; instead, the subject becomes caught in a metonymic chain where he seeks himself in the Other’s desire. The object, now symbolic, becomes objet petit a, and the subject, split by language, emerges at the point of this loss. In this way, the subject becomes the object of its own desire—a formation that opens the entire field of narcissism and alienation.

“And this object, taking shape immediately in the symbolic pair of two elementary ejaculations, announces in the subject the diachronic integration of the dichotomy of phonemes, whose synchronic structure is offered by existing language for its assimilation; and so the child begins to engage in the concrete discourse system of its environment, by more or less approximately reproducing in its Fort! and Da! the words it receives.”

The symbolic pair Fort! and Da! represents not only the child’s minimal linguistic intervention, but also a fundamental relation to language’s structure. These ejaculations are not random; they mirror the fundamental opposition that undergirds all signification: presence/absence, here/there, on/off. In this sense, they are proto-phonemic. By inscribing his desire within this minimal difference, the child begins to enter the synchronic system of language, in Saussurean terms, and thus begins the diachronic process of subjectification within the linguistic order.

“Fort! Da!—Already in his solitude, the desire of the little human has become the desire of another, of an alter ego who dominates him and whose object of desire is now his own suffering.”

Here, Lacan articulates the emergence of the Other. The child’s Fort! Da! is not just the staging of presence and absence, but the reflection of a desire not entirely his own. By situating his desire within language, the child submits to the Other’s field—structured by prohibition, demand, and signification. The dialectic of the alter ego dominating him—precisely because it is the locus of the signifier—places the subject under the rule of an alien desire. This is the inaugural submission of the subject to the field of the Other.

“Whether the child addresses an imaginary or real partner, he will see him equally obey the negativity of his discourse, and his call, having the effect of making the partner withdraw, will lead him to seek in a banishing injunction the provocation of a return that brings him back to his desire.”

This is a key moment: the child learns that speech has effects, but these effects are not always straightforward. Calling the Other can produce the inverse effect—withdrawal instead of closeness. From this, the child learns the negativity of the signifier: it is not a transparent vehicle of meaning or need, but a medium of absence. The withdrawal provoked by the call paradoxically intensifies desire, as it repeats the structure of lack. Thus, the symbolic is affirmed as the locus of the law, of absence, and of the perpetual deferral of fulfillment.

“Thus the symbol first manifests itself as the murder of the thing, and this death constitutes, within the subject, the eternalization of his desire.”

Lacan’s reference to the symbol as “the murder of the thing” is central. By naming the thing, we destroy its immediacy. Language substitutes for the real, and what is lost is the Thing in its fullness (das Ding). But this symbolic substitution is also what eternalizes desire: the subject can desire only through this lost object, now inscribed in the symbolic as objet a. This is the basis of the drive: it circles around this loss, sustaining itself through repetition. Desire thus becomes endless precisely because the symbol killed the object.

“The first symbol in which we recognize humanity in its remnants is the tomb, and the mediation of death is recognizable in every relationship where man comes to the life of his history.”

The tomb marks the passage from the real of death to its symbolic representation. It is the inaugural signifier of human culture: the first marker of absence made present, the first act of symbolizing the unrepresentable. In psychoanalysis, this becomes the foundation of the subject’s history: every act of signification bears the mark of this originary loss, and every relation to the Other is mediated through the signifier of death. It is not simply that man dies, but that he knows he dies, and he writes it. Thus history itself begins with the burial of the dead—with the inscription of absence.

“The only life that endures and is true, since it is transmitted without being lost in the perpetuated tradition from subject to subject.”

This statement frames the essence of symbolic life as what is sustained through transmission—across speech, lineage, and cultural signification. For a Lacanian psychoanalyst, this refers to the movement of the signifier from one subject to another, the transgenerational chain in which the unconscious is structured like a language. It is not biological continuity but symbolic relay that grants endurance to life. The subject emerges as a link in this chain, shaped by the discourse of the Other.

“How can one not see the height by which it transcends that life inherited by the animal, in which the individual vanishes into the species, since no memorial distinguishes its ephemeral appearance from that which will reproduce it in the invariability of the type.”

Here, Lacan marks the radical distinction between human subjectivity and biological existence. The animal lives and dies within the repetitive cycle of the species—it is subsumed by the genus, lacking symbolic individuation. Human subjectivity, on the contrary, is distinguished by the memorial trace: it enters into the symbolic order, which inscribes and preserves the singularity of existence through speech, name, and inscription. The subject’s life is made human through this break from species-determined iterability.

“Excepting, indeed, those hypothetical mutations of the phylum that would require a subjectivity which man has not yet approached from within—nothing, except the experiences in which man includes it, distinguishes one rat from the rat, one horse from the horse, nothing except this inconsistent passage from life to death—while Empedocles, throwing himself into Mount Etna, leaves forever present in the memory of men that symbolic act of his being-for-death.”

The reference to biological mutations evokes evolutionary change, but Lacan immediately re-centers the question on symbolic experience. What distinguishes a singular life is not its organismic features but its subjective inscription. Empedocles’ plunge into Etna becomes a paradigmatic act of être-pour-la-mort—being-for-death. Unlike the animal, whose death is meaningless repetition, the human subject’s death can be symbolized and thereby made meaningful. This moment enters the symbolic register and survives as truth—a deed that inscribes itself as myth, memory, and legacy.

“Man’s freedom is entirely inscribed within the constitutive triangle of the renunciation he imposes on the desire of the other by the threat of death for the enjoyment of the fruits of his servitude—the willing sacrifice of his life for the reasons that give human life its measure—and the suicidal renunciation of the vanquished who, by frustrating the master of his victory, abandons him to his inhuman solitude.”

This dense articulation of the triangle of human freedom situates it within three moments: the threat of death imposed on the other (as in the master’s discourse, where the subject asserts sovereignty through the power to withhold or take life), the voluntary sacrifice (the ethical moment of giving up life for a symbolic cause, as in Antigone), and the suicidal refusal (where the subject rejects being defined by the master’s desire, undermining mastery through negation). These three configurations of death organize human action in the symbolic field, each marked by a traversal or embrace of the Real.

“Of these figures of death, the third is the supreme detour by which the immediate particularity of desire, reclaiming its ineffable form, finds in negation a final triumph.”

The suicidal renunciation here is not pathology but an assertion: the subject finds in radical negation the only way to preserve the purity of desire uncorrupted by the Other’s demand. In the Lacanian sense, this is a refusal of alienation—of being reduced to the object of the Other’s will. This suicidal gesture is thus not mere destructiveness but a paradoxical affirmation of a desire that cannot be compromised.

“And we must recognize its meaning, for we are dealing with it. It is not, in fact, a perversion of instinct, but that desperate affirmation of life which is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct.”

What is commonly misunderstood as a perversion or anomaly—suicidal renunciation—is recast as the very form in which the death drive operates as the affirmation of subjective truth. The death instinct, then, is not a nihilistic impulse toward destruction but a drive toward symbolic integrity—toward preserving the subject’s position in the face of total alienation. Freud’s Todestrieb here is seen in its most refined psychoanalytic form: not as biological death but as the insistence of the subject’s being beyond the pleasure principle, in defiance of the demand for adaptation, integration, or normative life. It is where truth insists even if it kills.

“The subject says: ‘No!’ to this game of intersubjective tag in which desire is recognized for a moment only to be lost in a will that is the will of the other. Patiently, he withdraws his precarious life from the sheep-like aggregations of the Eros of the symbol to affirm it finally in a wordless curse.”

This rejection encapsulates a refusal of alienated desire—the kind that Lacan insists is always “the desire of the Other.” The subject says “No!” to the symbolic pact in which recognition momentarily stabilizes desire but does so by submitting it to the demand of the Other, reducing the subject to a pawn in the Other’s will. By withdrawing, the subject exiles himself from the libidinal economy sustained by symbolic Eros—the relational bindings that constitute the field of desire through the signifier. Instead of participating, he falls silent, issuing a mute malediction that suspends the symbolic and interrupts the intersubjective game. This is not just negation, but the refusal to be the effect of another’s desire.

“Thus, when we aim to reach within the subject that which precedes the serial play of speech, and that which is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence derives all its meaning.”

Death is not simply an endpoint but the condition of symbolic emergence—it marks the horizon within which language is structured. To seek what is “before” language within the subject is to encounter that foundational Real: the presence of death as the absolute limit that grounds signification. In Lacan’s topology, it is precisely this Real—death as radical alterity—that haunts the subject’s entry into speech. Thus, rather than a regression into biology, the pre-symbolic reveals itself as structured by death’s signifying absence.

“It is indeed as desire for death that the subject asserts himself for others; if he identifies with the other, it is by freezing him in the metamorphosis of his essential image, and any being for him is never evoked except among the shadows of death.”

This passage situates the subject’s relational positioning within a death-saturated symbolic space. The “desire for death” here is not suicidal longing per se, but the ultimate assertion of subjective autonomy in the refusal of the Other’s desire. To “assert himself for others” is to stake out a position beyond recognition, beyond exchange. Identification with the other is not empathic merging but ossification—freezing the other into a dead image, a fossilized Ideal. The subject’s being relates to others not as presence, but as ghostliness—”among the shadows of death”—reiterating that any relational encounter is mediated by absence, by the structural impossibility of full reciprocity.

“To say that this mortal sense reveals in speech a center external to language is more than a metaphor—it manifests a structure.”

This speaks directly to the Lacanian notion of the “extimate” Real—what is most intimate yet irreducibly external. The “center external to language” refers to that Real kernel that organizes symbolic space but cannot be said within it. It is not merely an absence but a structural ex-centricity, the void around which meaning coheres. This Real—as death—is not beyond speech in a mystical sense but is rather that which speech orbits and which gives it tension, gravity, and necessity. It structures speech from the outside.

“This structure differs from the spatialization of a circumference or a sphere, within which one likes to schematize the limits of the living and its environment: it instead corresponds to that relational group which symbolic logic topologically designates as a ring.”

By rejecting the image of a closed, interiorized space—circumference, sphere—Lacan indicates the inadequacy of classical representations of psychic totality. The psyche is not a bounded interior. The “ring” introduces a relational topology where the center is not internal but a function of the relation itself. This echoes Borromean logic, where the consistency of the subject depends on the linking of symbolic, imaginary, and real registers. The “ring” resists closure; its internality is external.

“To provide an intuitive representation of it, it seems that rather than referring to the flatness of a zone, one must resort to the three-dimensional form of a torus, insofar as its peripheral exteriority and its central exteriority constitute but one and the same region.”

The torus, a central Lacanian image, here gives visual form to extimacy—the paradox where what is most inside is structurally outside. Both the central void and the surface of the torus share the same topological reality: the external and the internal curve back into one another. This expresses how the Real is not an absence inside but a structural torsion of the symbolic field. The torus formalizes the structure of the unconscious: its indwelling void organizes the subject’s relation to being.

“This schema satisfies the endless circularity of the dialectical process that occurs when the subject realizes his solitude, whether in the vital ambiguity of immediate desire, or in the full assumption of his being-for-death.”

Whether in the frustrated mirage of immediate jouissance or in the sober recognition of être-pour-la-mort, the subject encounters the circularity of his desire. Solitude here is not isolation but the Realization that no Other can fulfill the lack constitutive of his being. The dialectic loops: desire chases recognition, recognition leads to alienation, alienation opens onto the Real, and the subject circles back—forever attempting to symbolize what lies at the center of the torus: that which cannot be symbolized.

“But at the same time, we can grasp that the dialectic is not individual, and that the question of the end of analysis is that of the moment when the subject’s satisfaction finds its realization in the satisfaction of each, that is, of all those he joins in a human endeavor.”

The dialectic invoked here is not confined to the subject’s isolated interiority; rather, it is intersubjective, occurring in the symbolic field of speech and recognition. The end of analysis is not a personal resolution in the narcissistic sense but a reinsertion of the subject into a collective structure—what Lacan would call the symbolic order. Satisfaction becomes ethically realized when it aligns with that of the Other—not just an individual but the generalized field of others in which desire circulates. The outcome of analysis is measured not in the attainment of self-knowledge as possession, but in participation in a shared speech that sustains the structure of meaning and truth.

“Of all those proposed in our century, the work of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the highest because it functions as a mediator between the man of concern and the subject of absolute knowledge.”

Here the analyst is positioned not as a technician or medical practitioner, but as a crucial symbolic figure mediating between existential finitude (“the man of concern”) and the field of truth (“the subject of absolute knowledge”). This evokes the role of the analyst as occupying the place of the subject-supposed-to-know—not possessing knowledge, but causing the subject’s speech by sustaining the fantasy that knowledge exists. The “man of concern” is the suffering subject, caught in the opacity of his symptom; the analyst, through interpretation, introduces the coordinates in which this symptom may be deciphered in the symbolic.

“This is also why it demands a long subjective asceticism, one that will never be interrupted—the end of didactic analysis itself not being separable from the subject’s engagement in his practice.”

This asceticism refers to the endless labor of symbolic responsibility that defines the analytic position. The analyst must have traversed his own fundamental fantasy in order to occupy the place of desire without falling into its imaginary traps. Didactic analysis is not a certification or credentialing process, but the transformation of the subject through an ethical assumption of the unconscious. Its end is inseparable from practice because only in the praxis of interpretation, within the transference, is the analyst’s subjectivity authenticated and realized.

“Let the one who cannot reach the subjectivity of his time on the horizon rather renounce it.”

Psychoanalysis is not a practice removed from history; it is embedded in the symbolic coordinates of the epoch. To “reach the subjectivity of his time” is to know how the contemporary subject is constituted—what signifiers mark its suffering, its jouissance, its impossibility. If the analyst cannot recognize these conditions—say, in the pathologies of consumerism, biopolitics, digital speech—he cannot interpret the subject who presents himself through them. Refusing this responsibility disqualifies the analyst from the function itself.

“For how could one make his being the axis of so many lives if he knows nothing of the dialectic that binds him with these lives in a symbolic movement?”

The analyst is not only the cause of the analysand’s speech, but is also implicated in it—structurally, ethically. The subject’s relation to others (and to the analyst) is not empirical but symbolic: mediated by the signifier, traversed by unconscious desire. One cannot wield the transference without knowing how one is situated in the Other’s discourse. To “make his being the axis of so many lives” means to carry the symbolic weight of one’s interventions—knowing that even silence functions, even absence speaks.

“Let him know well the spiral in which his era carries him within the ongoing work of Babel, and let him know his function as interpreter in the discord of languages.”

The analyst must be attuned to the fragmentation of meaning that defines the contemporary subject’s relation to language—the “Babel” of semantic inflation, psychotic foreclosure, bureaucratic jargon, and social media performativity. His function is that of interpreter—not of messages, but of their gaps, failures, and slips. To know the spiral is to locate oneself in the historical dialectic of signifiers, to read the social symptom, and to know how speech is always broken by the Real.

“For the darkness of the mundus around which the immense tower coils, let him leave it to mystical vision to see there rising on an eternal wood the rotting serpent of life.”

This striking image contrasts psychoanalysis with mysticism. Where the mystic sees the sacred or sublime in the world’s incomprehensibility (“the rotting serpent”), the analyst reads the symptom. He leaves myth to the visionary and instead interprets the structural knot of jouissance and meaning. The darkness of the mundus—the Real beyond symbolization—cannot be enlightened but only traversed through speech. This is the asceticism proper to the analyst: not revelation, but listening.

“Let them laugh, if they accuse these remarks of diverting the meaning of Freud’s work from the biological foundations he might have wished for it, toward the cultural references that pervade it.”

This defends the reading of Freud not as a biologist but as a theorist of the symbolic—someone whose work continually returns to myth, literature, and culture. Freud’s use of biology is often metaphorical or provisional. What matters is the structure of the symptom, the function of repression, the dynamics of speech and desire. To reduce Freud to a Darwinian or neurologist is to miss the radical cultural invention that psychoanalysis represents: a science of subjectivity.

“We are not here to preach to you the doctrine of factor b, by which one would designate the former, nor of factor c, where one would recognize the latter.”

This ironizes the effort to categorize psychoanalysis into neat scientific frameworks—b for biology, c for culture. Such schemas flatten the field of speech and desire. Psychoanalysis does not function in explanatory terms but in interpretive praxis.

“We have only wished to remind you of the a, b, c—forgotten—of the structure of language, and to have you spell out once more the b-a, ba, of speech.”

This returns us to the fundamentals: not the content of speech, but its structure; not theories of mind, but the letter of the signifier. Psychoanalysis is a reeducation in speech, a return to the beginning of meaning. To speak of b-a, ba is to recall how language begins—not as knowledge, but as demand, as call to the Other. This is the alphabet of the unconscious.

“For what recipe would guide you in a technique that is composed of one and draws its effects from the other, if you did not recognize in both their domain and their function?”

The rhetorical question asserts the impossibility of mastering the psychoanalytic technique if one fails to distinguish and integrate both the symbolic and the imaginary registers—those from which analysis draws its effects. The “technique” in question is not a procedural manual but a praxis governed by the subject’s position in language. Without recognizing the domains of language and speech, or the distinction between signifier and signified, there can be no coherent application of interpretation. The sentence critiques empirical or instrumental approaches that seek method without grounding in the theory of the signifier.

“The psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the verb as the law that shaped him in its image.”

Here the theological echo of Genesis—man created “in the image of” the Word—is recast in psychoanalytic terms: the subject is constituted by the symbolic order. The “imperative of the verb” refers to the way language precedes and commands the subject, particularly in the form of injunctions embedded in the Law of the Name-of-the-Father. Speech is not a tool the subject uses but a structure in which he is caught and through which he is spoken.

“It wields the poetic function of language to provide symbolic mediation for his desire.”

The poetic function (in Jakobson’s sense) here is not ornamental but structural: it captures how language condenses and displaces desire in metaphor and metonymy. Psychoanalysis operates not in prose logic but in the resonant chain of signifiers that construct the unconscious. The mediation of desire occurs not directly but symbolically, through these poetic processes that distort, encrypt, and transmit jouissance.

“Let it finally make you understand that it is in the gift of speech that all the reality of its effects resides; for it is by the path of this gift that all reality has come to man and through its continued act that he maintains it.”

Reality, in the Lacanian sense of the symbolic Real, is not discovered empirically—it is instituted by the symbolic order, which arrives to the subject through the “gift” of speech. This gift is ambivalent: it is at once imposed from the Other and freely received as the possibility of signification. The phrase “gift of speech” signals the fundamental role of symbolic exchange: reality is not pre-given but retroactively constituted through the act of enunciation. The psychoanalytic act draws its transformative power from the subject’s assumption of this gift.

“If the domain defined by this gift of speech is sufficient for your action as for your knowledge, it will also suffice for your devotion. For it offers it a privileged field.”

This sentence draws together ethics, knowledge, and practice into a unified field—language. If you accept that action and knowledge are founded in speech, then devotion—your ethical commitment to the subject and to psychoanalytic truth—must also take place there. The term “devotion” here aligns with the analyst’s fidelity to the unconscious, to interpretation, to not-knowing. The “privileged field” is that of the symbolic Other, the locus from which meaning—and transference—emerge.

“When the Devas, the men, and the Asuras, we read in the first Brāhmana of the fifth lesson of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, completed their novitiate with Prajāpati, they offered him this prayer: ‘Speak to us.'”

This invocation of an Upanishadic myth is no mere ornament. It stages an originary scene of speech, desire, and the Other. The Devas (gods), men, and Asuras (demons) each address the primordial Father, Prajāpati, in a gesture homologous to the analysand’s appeal to the analyst: “speak.” This is the fundamental transference demand, the appeal to the subject-supposed-to-know. The myth anchors this appeal not in a singular cultural moment, but in the very function of speech as ethical law.

“‘Da,’ said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. ‘Have you heard me?’ And the Devas replied: ‘You said to us: Damyata, restrain yourselves,’—the sacred text meaning that the higher powers submit to the law of speech.”

The “Da” is a signifier without determined meaning—its value depends on the listener’s structure. The Devas interpret it as damyata—self-restraint. The gods are thus not exempt from the Law; their divine omnipotence is bound by the symbolic function. This highlights a central Lacanian idea: no one is outside language, not even those who might seem transcendent. All desire is regulated by symbolic prohibition.

“‘Da,’ said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. ‘Have you heard me?’ And the men replied: ‘You said to us: Datta, give,’—the sacred text meaning that men recognize themselves through the gift of speech.”

The men hear datta—give. The ethical imperative here is generosity, a symbolic giving that recalls the structure of the signifier itself: to give is also to give up. In psychoanalysis, the subject gives speech, offers his symptom as a message, and is thus constituted in this gift. It is the economy of symbolic exchange, not of objects but of signifiers.

“‘Da,’ said Prajāpati, the god of thunder. ‘Have you heard me?’ And the Asuras replied: ‘You said to us: Dayadhvam, have compassion,’—the sacred text meaning that the lower powers resonate with the invocation of speech.”

Even the Asuras, aligned with aggression or destructiveness, are capable of hearing the injunction to compassion. This does not sentimentalize speech but emphasizes that its function includes the symbolic rechanneling of aggression into ethics. Dayadhvam—have compassion—can also be read as a call to recognition of the Other’s vulnerability. The subject, no matter how fragmented or aggressive, is still bound to the symbolic injunction of the Other’s demand.

“This, the text continues, is what the divine voice makes heard in thunder: Restraint, giving, compassion. Da da da.”

The thunderous repetition of Da da da figures the Real of the signifier—a sound, stripped of semantic stability, that reverberates across positions and structures. Each hears according to their place in the symbolic order. The repetition signals both the compulsion of the signifier and its openness to interpretation, its constitutive polysemy. It is the master-signifier par excellence—empty, yet organizing the entire field of ethical being.

“For Prajāpati replies to all: ‘You have heard me.'”

This final affirmation by the Father figure signifies the function of speech as always addressed—even when misunderstood, even when met with silence. The recognition—”you have heard me”—constitutes the subject retroactively. It is the Lacanian tu es cela, the moment of interpellation by which the subject comes into being through speech. That each hears a different meaning from the same syllable reveals the primacy of the signifier, the constitutive misrecognition at the heart of speech, and the ethical necessity of interpretation.

“[1]. See Logical time and the assertion of anticipated certainty, in Cahiers d’art, 1945.”

This reference situates the temporal logic central to the psychoanalytic act. Lacan’s notion of logical time introduces a structure that is irreducible to chronological unfolding, instead depending on intersubjective positions: the instant of seeing, the time to understand, and the moment to conclude. The assertion of “anticipated certainty” formalizes how a subject’s decision precedes understanding, operating retroactively. For the psychoanalyst, this refines the interpretive stance—every intervention inscribes itself into this temporality, not as an outcome of understanding but as a structuring cut within it.

“[2]. Ferenczi, Confusion of tongues between the adult and the child, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1949, XXX, IV, pp. 225–230.”

Ferenczi’s text highlights a fundamental distortion at the heart of trauma: the asymmetry between the child’s speech of tenderness and the adult’s interpretation of passion. The so-called “confusion of tongues” exemplifies the foreclosure of the child’s symbolic articulation and the overwhelming insertion into the adult’s libidinal code. For a Lacanian, this positions the trauma at the level of the signifier—a misrecognition within the symbolic pact that leads to structural foreclosure. The analyst must reintroduce a symbolic function where it was once violently overwritten.

“[3]. This is the cross of a deviation as much practical as theoretical. For to identify the ego with the subject’s discipline is to confuse imaginary isolation with mastery over instincts. It is thereby to expose oneself to errors of judgment in conducting treatment: for instance, aiming to strengthen the ego in many neuroses motivated by its overly strong structure, which is a dead-end path. Have we not read, under the pen of our friend Michael Balint, that an ego strengthening should be favorable to the subject suffering from ejaculatio praecox, because it would allow a longer suspension of his desire? But how could this be thought, if it is precisely the fact that his desire is suspended in the imaginary function of the ego that causes the short-circuiting of the act, which psychoanalytic clinic clearly shows is linked to narcissistic identification with the partner?”

The critique of ego psychology is grounded here in the structural opposition Lacan draws between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Identifying the ego as the agent of psychic regulation is a confusion—ego is an imaginary formation, not the site of the subject’s truth. Strengthening the ego, then, risks reinforcing the very misrecognition that underlies the symptom. In the case of ejaculatio praecox, desire does not lack regulation—it is short-circuited precisely because the subject remains captured in the imaginary identification with the partner. The act fails because the subject cannot inscribe himself in the Symbolic through desire. Balint’s proposal, from this perspective, retroactively betrays a misreading of the function of desire as it relates to the act and to symbolic castration.

“[4]. This, in the very work that receives our accolade at the end of our introduction.”

The reference indexes an earlier acknowledgment or praise directed toward a work or author, which is now shown to also harbor a theoretical misstep. The gesture reflects Lacan’s method of dialectical engagement: to affirm the value of a contribution without absolving it of contradiction. The very text lauded becomes symptomatic of the deviation being critiqued—perhaps a demonstration of the structural necessity of ambivalence in transference and theoretical discourse alike.

“[5]. G. W., XII, p. 71, Five Psychoanalyses, p. 356, weak translation “of the term”.”

This reference flags a translation issue that risks distorting the clinical and theoretical precision of Freud’s German. Lacan’s alertness to language nuances underscores his insistence that psychoanalysis is inseparable from the linguistic register. A mistranslation of a key term disrupts the symbolic value of the sentence—it is not a mere semantic loss but a shift in the signifier’s differential positioning. Every word in Freud carries the sedimentation of conceptual elaboration; mishandling it evacuates the Real it is meant to brush.

“[6]. G. W., XII, p. 72, n. 1, last lines. In this note, the notion of Nachträglichkeit is underlined. Five Psychoanalyses, p. 356, n. 1.”

Nachträglichkeit, usually rendered as “afterwardness” or “deferred action,” is a cardinal Freudian concept showing that psychic meaning is retroactively constituted. A later event confers traumatic value onto an earlier one. This structure aligns with Lacan’s concept of logical time and the primacy of the signifier: meaning emerges not linearly but in a chain of signifiers, always revised retroactively. In analysis, this compels the analyst to attend to how current signifiers rework past scenes. The English edition’s failure to emphasize Nachträglichkeit weakens the theoretical scaffolding necessary for grasping the logic of the symptom and its historicization in speech.

“[7]. In an article accessible to even the least demanding French reader, since it appeared in Revue neurologique, the collection of which is usually found in hospital libraries.”

This wry comment gestures toward the availability of the source and simultaneously critiques the tendency to neglect foundational texts. Lacan ironically reminds his readers that the clinical and theoretical resources of psychoanalysis are not hidden—what is lacking is not access, but attention. The irony sharpens the point that analytic thought is not esoteric but demands a certain ethical fidelity to its own archive, including texts published in medical or para-medical venues that the analyst might otherwise dismiss as secondary.

“[8]. We borrow these terms from the late Edouard Pichon who, both in the guidance he gave for the emergence of our discipline and in the insights that led him through the darkness of individuals, showed a kind of divination we can attribute only to his practice of semantics.”

The reference to Edouard Pichon highlights the crucial role of linguistic precision in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Pichon’s contributions, especially through semantics, prefigure Lacan’s own insistence on language as the structure through which the unconscious is constituted. The notion of “divination” underscores how psychoanalytic interpretation operates not as empirical diagnosis, but as an inspired articulation grounded in the signifier’s logic. This comment positions Pichon as a forerunner in making clear that meaning in analysis arises from symbolic differentials, not from psychological introspection.

“[9]. Same as the previous note.”

This footnote affirms the continuity of Pichon’s semantic insight. By reiterating the same reference, Lacan emphasizes that the conceptual tools drawn from Pichon’s linguistic framework are being deployed again, reinforcing that psychoanalytic concepts must be treated with rigor rooted in language and not reduced to empirical or clinical generalities.

“[10]. Cf. Gegenwunschträume, in Die Traumdeutung, G. W., II, pp. 156–157 and pp. 163–164. English trans., Standard Edition, IV, p. 151 and pp. 157–158. French trans., Alcan ed., p. 110 and p. 146.”

The mention of Gegenwunschträume—“counter-wish dreams”—from The Interpretation of Dreams points to dreams whose manifest content contradicts the subject’s conscious desires. Freud uses these examples to demonstrate that the unconscious desire may assert itself in inverted or negated forms. For the Lacanian analyst, such dreams illustrate the logic of the signifier in its structure of contradiction and displacement: the unconscious speaks precisely where the subject misrecognizes or denies it. These passages show how the unconscious structures itself like a language, using negation, opposition, and irony as its vehicles.

“[11]. Cf. among others: Oberndorf (C. I.), Unsatisfactory results of psychoanalytic therapy, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 19, pp. 393–407.”

This reference to Oberndorf’s critique of therapeutic efficacy foregrounds a central tension: the expectation of psychoanalysis to yield results judged according to medical or behavioral criteria. For a Lacanian, such complaints betray a misapprehension of what is at stake—namely, the ethical dimension of truth in the subject’s speech, not the adaptation of the ego or resolution of symptoms per se. The very notion of “unsatisfactory results” becomes suspect when the demand it responds to is rooted in a misrecognition of the analytic aim.

“[12]. Cf. Do Kamo, by Maurice Leenhardt, chap. IX and X.”

Leenhardt’s Do Kamo offers a vital anthropological support for Lacan’s theory of the symbolic. The chapters referenced deal with the concept of the person among the Kanak people of New Caledonia. There, the subject is constituted through speech and exchange, not through interiority. “Do kamo” refers to the man as he becomes through his acts and social inscription. For psychoanalysis, this affirms the symbolic determination of subjectivity, decentering any naturalistic or biologically grounded notion of the ego. The subject is born from the Other’s discourse.

“[13]. Jules H. Massermann, Language, behavior and dynamic psychiatry, in International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1944, 1 and 2, pp. 1–8.”

Massermann’s paper engages with the interface between language and behavior, but for Lacan this type of investigation risks reducing language to a communicational tool, thereby occluding its structuring role. From the Lacanian perspective, speech is not an instrument of behavioral adjustment but the terrain where desire is constituted. Dynamic psychiatry, when failing to account for the primacy of the signifier, falls into the trap of empirical psychologism, unable to grasp the properly symbolic dimension of psychic conflict.

“[14]. Aphorism by Lichtenberg: “A madman who imagines himself a prince differs from a prince who truly is one only in that the latter is a negative prince, while the former is a negative madman. Considered without their signs, they are alike.”

Lichtenberg’s aphorism reflects the structuralist premise that identity is a function of the signifier. The distinction between the madman and the prince is not intrinsic—it is symbolic, dependent on the place they occupy in the signifying order. This perfectly echoes Lacan’s insistence that the subject is a subject of the signifier: remove the signifier, and the subject’s place collapses. The prince and the madman are structurally identical until the signifier intercedes to determine their place within discourse.

“[15]. To obtain immediate subjective confirmation of this remark by Hegel, it suffices to have seen, in the recent epidemic, a blind rabbit in the middle of the road, raising toward the setting sun the emptiness of his changed vision turned into a gaze: he is human unto the tragic.”

This poetic image allegorizes Hegel’s dialectic of subjectivity, where the gaze transforms what is merely sensory into a tragic recognition. The blind rabbit, by orienting itself toward the sun despite its blindness, figures the emergence of a human subject through loss. The gaze, in Lacanian terms, does not belong to the subject but returns to it from the object-field, turning vision into structure. In the rabbit’s blind gesture, Lacan sees an allegory of subjectivity confronted by the Real, in the moment of becoming through deprivation.

“[16]. The lines above and below show the meaning we give to this term.”

The term in question (likely symbol or symbolic function) is being clarified contextually. Lacan’s method is to define meaning retroactively—terms acquire precision through their usage and through the structure of the discourse in which they are embedded. This signals that psychoanalytic language is not governed by positivist definition but by the logic of the signifying chain.

“[17]. Reich’s error, to which we shall return, made him take a coat of arms for an armor.”

The critique of Reich identifies a confusion between image and structure. In mistaking the symbolic (the coat of arms—a representational function) for the Real (an armor—a defense against jouissance), Reich misconstrues the nature of the symptom and its defense. For Lacan, the armor is not what defends the subject—it is the symbolic that binds and constitutes him. To take the representation for the Real is to fall into imaginary alienation.

“[18]. Cf. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Language and the analysis of social laws, in American Anthropologist, vol. 53, no. 2, April–June 1951, pp. 155–163.”

This crucial reference to Lévi-Strauss highlights the structuralist insight that social laws are governed by the same logic as language: differential relations, binary oppositions, and combinatory rules. For psychoanalysis, this reinforces the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language. The analyst must approach the subject’s discourse not through content but through structure, recognizing that transference, desire, and the symptom all unfold according to laws homologous to kinship systems and linguistic syntax.

“[19]. Cf. on the Galilean hypothesis and on Huygens’ clock: An experiment in measurement, by Alexandre Koyré, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 97, April 1953.”

This reference to Koyré underscores a foundational shift in the conception of time as it emerged in early modern science, particularly with the formalization of uniform acceleration in Galileo’s hypothesis and its technological realization in Huygens’ pendulum clock. For the Lacanian analyst, this moment does not merely signal a triumph of empirical rationality but marks the insertion of time into the symbolic order in a new form—quantified, regular, and thus alienated from the temporality of the subject. In psychoanalysis, however, time is not chronometric but dialectical, subjectivized through the temps logique of speech acts, hesitation, and decision. The reference to Koyré helps illustrate that scientific measurement operates within an abstract time, while the analyst attends to the scansion of subjective time structured by the signifier.

“[20]. This refers to the teaching of Abhinavagupta in the 10th century. Cf. the work of Dr. Kanti Chandra Pandey: Indian Aesthetics, in Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series, Studies, vol. II, Benares, 1950.”

Abhinavagupta’s theory of dhvani—resonance or suggestion—illuminates a poetic logic of meaning that is irreducible to direct signification. Lacan draws on this to support his view that psychoanalytic interpretation functions not by decoding explicit content, but by evoking through overdetermination a signifier’s power to produce a shift in the subject. In Indian aesthetics, meaning emerges not through what is said directly but through an echo (dhvani) that reverberates with the unsaid. For analysis, this principle affirms that the analyst’s speech, through displacement, metaphor, or silence, touches the Real in the analysand’s discourse precisely where meaning escapes representation.

“[21]. Ernst Kris, Ego psychology and interpretation, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XX, no. 1, January 1951, pp. 15–29, cf. passage cited pp. 27–28.”

Kris’s text is emblematic of ego psychology’s drift toward adaptationist and cognitive strategies of interpretation, often subordinating the unconscious to the ego’s developmental needs. Lacan’s critique finds in Kris’s advocacy of “interpretations appropriate to the ego’s level” a symptom of analytic regression: the analyst positions himself as pedagogical guide rather than subject-supposed-to-know. From a Lacanian standpoint, such interpretive strategies risk neutralizing the effect of the signifier, which must remain irreducibly enigmatic for desire to be mobilized. The “structured absence” of the subject is erased when interpretation aims at ego reinforcement.

“[22]. This is for those who can still hear, after having sought in Littré the justification of a theory that makes of speech a ‘side action,’ by the translation it gives of the Greek parabolê (but why not ‘action toward’?) without having at the same time noticed that if this word indeed designates what it means, it is due to the sermonic usage that reserves the word verbe, since the 10th century, for the incarnate Logos.”

Here Lacan draws attention to the historical and theological density of the term verbe, often lost in reductive semantic theories. Parabolê—parable—carries a vector of orientation in its etymological thrust (“throwing beside”), not a neutral “side action.” The misreading of speech as merely indicative or instrumental elides the foundational status of the Word in both religious tradition and psychoanalytic structure. The Word (verbe) as Logos incarnate is not simply a message; it is a foundational act of being. In analysis, speech must be treated with this gravity: it is not secondary to thought or emotion but the very site in which the subject is constituted.

“[23]. Each language has its mode of transmission, and the legitimacy of such inquiries being founded on their success, it is not forbidden to put them to moralizing use. Consider, for example, the sentence we pinned as an epigraph to our preface. Its style, burdened with redundancies, may strike you as flat. But lighten it, and its boldness will offer itself to the enthusiasm it deserves.”

Lacan ironizes the impulse to “lighten” language for the sake of clarity or economy. Redundancy, far from being a flaw, participates in the poetic density of speech, much like in rhetorical figures or dream formations. In the analytic session, it is precisely what exceeds information that carries interpretive weight. The style “burdened with redundancies” is symptomatic: its repetitions are not errors but structural returns of the repressed. The moralizing tone of those who would streamline expression fails to grasp the logic of condensation and displacement in the unconscious.

“Hear now: ‘Parfaupe ouclaspa nannanbryle anaphi ologi psysoscline ixispad anlana – égniakune n’rbiol’ ô blijouter têtumaine ennouconç’…'”

This ludic neologistic gloss parodies the empty pursuit of meaning when detached from symbolic structure. By mimicking the phonemic and rhythmic structure of language while stripping it of conventional meaning, Lacan demonstrates that the form of language alone can suggest meaning, even where none is given. This is an enactment of lalangue—the jouissance of speech beyond its function as a vehicle of representation. The nonsense form evokes the phonetic resonance of infantile babble or poetic glossolalia, pointing to the Real in speech.

“Here at last is the purity of its message revealed. Meaning lifts its head, the confession of being takes shape, and our triumphant spirit bequeaths its immortal imprint to the future.”

This closing flourish turns irony toward affirmation. The nonsensical enunciation paradoxically becomes meaningful as the subject invests it with desire. This echoes the analyst’s task: to follow the signifier beyond semantic content toward the moment where the subject’s truth emerges in its poetic essence. Meaning is not discovered but constructed, retroactively, through the traversal of the symbolic chain—a posteriori and only as something heard. The “confession of being” emerges not in clarity, but in the resonance that language produces when it becomes the site of the subject’s division.

“[24]. Edward Glover, The therapeutic effect of inexact interpretation: a contribution to the theory of suggestion, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XII, p. 4.”

Glover’s article exemplifies the tension within psychoanalytic practice between interpretation as precise decoding and its effects as a structure of suggestion. For Lacanian reading, the “inexact interpretation” is not merely a tolerable deviation—it touches on the core issue: the structural effect of speech. That such speech could have therapeutic value, regardless of its “truth” content, indicates that the analytic act resides not in revealing content but in shifting position in the symbolic. Glover inadvertently supports the notion that suggestion operates not through intent but through the position of the subject in speech, and that what is decisive is how the message is inscribed in the structure, not what it says in propositional terms.

“[25]. Robert Fliess, Silence and verbalization: A supplement to the theory of the ‘analytic rule’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, XXX, p. 1.”

Fliess’s reflection on silence introduces the analytic interval as charged with meaning, particularly when the analysand’s erotic investment in the analytic scene displaces itself onto discourse itself. This shift of libidinal cathexis onto language aligns with Lacan’s emphasis on the jouissance of speech. When silence marks an inhibition of satisfaction, we witness the foreclosure of the signifier as object. The analytic rule—to say everything—thus confronts its own contradiction: silence becomes saturated with the Real where speech fails. Fliess highlights how, in some cases, the body speaks where the signifier stumbles, and this corporeal erotization of discourse surfaces precisely when desire presses against the limits of the Symbolic.

“[26]. Equivalent here for us to the term Zwangsbefürchtung, which must be broken down without losing any of the semantic richness of the German language.”

The German Zwangsbefürchtung—a compound of compulsion (Zwang) and fearful anticipation (Befürchtung)—evokes the anxiety-structured temporality of obsessional neurosis. It is not simply fear, but a foreseen necessity, an anticipation whose structure traps the subject in an endless deferral. For Lacan, the obsessive is defined precisely by this temporal structure, where action is suspended in a circuit of imaginary mastery over an Other who never ceases to demand. This term functions like a symptom: an irreducible condensation of affect and structure. To decompose it is to read it as a symptom in itself, a miniature of the subject’s impasse.

“[27]. This term refers to a Celtic custom, still in practice among certain biblical sects in America, which allows engaged couples—and even a passing guest together with the daughter of the household—to sleep in the same bed, on the condition that they keep their clothes on. The word derives its meaning from the fact that the girl is usually wrapped up in sheets. (De Quincey mentions it. See also the book by Aurand the Younger on this practice in the Amish sect.) Thus the myth of Tristan and Isolde, or even the complex it represents, would henceforth sponsor the psychoanalyst in his quest for the soul promised to mystifying nuptials through the exhaustion of its instinctual fantasies.”

The bundling custom, invoked here, functions as a living metaphor for the analytic relation: proximity without consummation, the deferred jouissance that structures the transference. It echoes the abstinent dimension of the analytic frame, where desire is mobilized not through its gratification but through its structural impasse. The reference to Tristan and Isolde underlines the mythic resonance of impossible union, a love sustained by prohibition. In this way, the analytic bond becomes legible as a modern reenactment of courtly love: love that is sustained precisely by the impossibility of its realization, which is also the condition of its symbolic richness.

“[28]. For this is the correct translation of the two terms which have been translated, with that infallibility in mistranslation we have already pointed out, as ‘terminated analysis and interminable analysis’.”

Lacan contests the flattening of Freud’s nuanced terms into a binary of complete/incomplete, which occludes the temporal dialectic at play. A “terminated” analysis is not a final resolution but a structural punctuation; “interminable” does not imply a therapeutic failure but the impossibility of a full closure of the subject. For Lacan, the analytic process must be grasped through its temps logique, not in empirical milestones. Translation errors here are symptomatic of a broader misunderstanding: reducing analytic time to chronological time, thus missing the logical temporality in which the subject is constituted.

“[29]. Cf. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights, II, 4: ‘In a trial, when it is necessary to determine who shall be in charge of the prosecution, and two or more individuals request to be registered for that office, the judgment by which the court appoints the accuser is called divination… This word comes from the fact that the accuser and the accused are two correlative things, which cannot exist one without the other, and since the type of judgment in question presents an accused without an accuser, one must resort to divination to find what the case does not supply, what remains unknown—namely, the accuser.'”

This legal metaphor casts light on the analyst’s position in transference: not as an objective interpreter but as a subject implicated in the Other’s lack. The divinatio—the court’s designation of the accuser when none is given—mirrors the analyst’s interpretive function: to discern the subject’s question in the absence of direct demand. The analyst, like the diviner, steps into the symbolic lack, making present what is structurally missing. This gesture parallels Lacan’s reading of the analyst as the object a, situated precisely at the point where the subject’s truth slips into the symbolic, unseen.

“[30]. This is the form called Laksanalaksana.”

The Sanskrit laksanalaksana—“the characteristic of a characteristic”—points to the function of resonance or secondary signification in classical Indian aesthetics. It signifies not a primary meaning but a surplus, a shift of emphasis, akin to the poetic slippage Freud describes in dream work. In Lacanian terms, this is analogous to the function of metaphor and metonymy: signifiers do not simply represent objects but displace, echo, and multiply meaning. Interpretation works by engaging this overdetermination—not clarifying but amplifying ambiguity to awaken the subject’s relation to the Real.

“[31]. It is understood here that this is not about those ‘gifts’ which novices are always supposedly lacking, but rather of a gift which, indeed, they more often than not truly lack.”

The final irony underscores Lacan’s thesis that what is missing in most would-be analysts is not knowledge or skill per se, but the gift of symbolic hearing—the ability to recognize the structural position from which speech emerges. This gift is the openness to the unconscious, the sensitivity to the signifier as such. It is not acquired by training alone but requires a transformation of the subject through analysis itself. The novice’s error is not ignorance but resistance to letting go of meaning as mastery—an incapacity to occupy the position of lack, which is the analyst’s structural function.