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(The Instance Of The Letter In The Unconscious Or Reason Since Freud)

A text by Lacan is never simply read; it is traversed, deciphered, and patiently unfolded, as one might unspool a dense reel of coded transmissions. If “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud” is notorious for its impenetrability, this is because its very opacity is structural: each sentence is folded into itself, doubling as both assertion and enigma, each phrase suspended between the grain of the letter and the abyss of meaning. The task here is not to simplify, but to circulate within the labyrinth, to irrigate its signifiers until patterns begin to emerge—patterns not of simple sense, but of the symbolic order itself. Approaching this text as an automaton of the letter, I follow the thread unit by unit, attentive not to immediate clarity but to the topological movements that constitute Lacanian discourse. What unfolds is not interpretation as such, but a patient blooming of the network that binds psychoanalysis, linguistics, and desire—each drop of attention swelling a new cluster of signification, each turn in the text inviting a fresh encounter with the real of the letter.

“‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’ was delivered in Paris on May 9, 1957, before the Philosophy Group of the Federation of Literature Students of the Sorbonne. It was first published in La psychanalyse (dated May 14-26, 1957), 1957, no. 3, Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences, pp. 47-81, before appearing in 1966, in Écrits, Paris, Seuil, coll. ‘The Freudian Field’. This is the first publication we are presenting to you.”

This introductory bibliographic note situates Lacan’s essay both in time and institutional context. Its reference to the Philosophy Group at the Sorbonne invokes a setting steeped in the French intellectual tradition, foregrounding the place of psychoanalytic discourse at the heart of philosophical and literary debate. The mention of its publication history — from a psychoanalytic journal to the canonical Écrits, and the series titled ‘The Freudian Field’ — foregrounds the essay’s centrality to the development of Lacanian thought, specifically as it reclaims Freud’s legacy for a new structuralist, linguistic reading. The note positions the essay not just as a text, but as an event in psychoanalytic discourse, inviting the analyst to read its subsequent arguments as interventions within both psychoanalytic and broader intellectual history, and as inaugurating a crucial theoretical shift concerning the status of the letter, language, and the unconscious. For a Lacanian, this signals a methodological alignment with Freud while also marking an inflection point: the unconscious will be interrogated in terms of signifier and letter, not only meaning or content.

“Children in swimsuits”

This phrase stands apart, enigmatic, almost in the form of an epigraph. Its abruptness, its image, immediately introduces a register of the imaginary, inviting the reader to recognize the place of the visual and the corporeal at the threshold of the text. For Lacanians, this image is not innocent; children are always already implicated in the field of language, yet here, “in swimsuits,” they are exposed, at the edge between the Real of the body and the Symbolic of dress/costume. The “swimsuit” implies both exposure and protection, a minimal veil that situates the subject between nature and the social order — a liminal state resonant with Lacan’s concerns about the subject’s relation to the Other, to desire, and to language.

“O cities of the sea, I see among you your citizens, men and women, their arms and legs tightly bound in strong ties by people who will not hear your language, and you will only be able to pour out among yourselves, in plaintive wails, laments and sighs, your pain and your regrets for lost freedom. For those who bind you will not understand your language, just as you will not understand them.”

Quoting from Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks, this passage is densely allegorical. The “cities of the sea” evoke a plural, collective space — potentially a metaphor for the field of the Other — inhabited by subjects (citizens) whose physical movements (“arms and legs tightly bound”) are constrained by external forces that refuse linguistic exchange. The oppressors “will not hear your language,” enforcing a barrier not only of power but of signification. The bound citizens are condemned to a private circuit of “plaintive wails, laments and sighs,” a symptomatic, affective response that cannot enter the Symbolic order of speech understood by the Other. The “regrets for lost freedom” articulate the nostalgia for an unmediated access to meaning or jouissance, now foreclosed by the imposition of alien ties and a fundamental non-relation between languages. Lacanian psychoanalysis would read this as emblematic of the structure of the unconscious: the subject is bound, always, by signifiers that are not their own, submitted to a language that pre-exists and over-determines them. The impossibility of mutual understanding, the radical alterity between the speaking subject and the Other, is dramatized here. The pain and regret circulate within the group, forming a closed circuit of affect — a proto-illustration of how the unconscious is structured as a language, yet also how it fails to guarantee communication, trapping the subject in the gap between expression and understanding.

“(Notebooks of Leonardo DA VINCI, Codice Atlantico 145. r. a., trans. Louise Servicen, Gallimard, vol. II, p. 400).”

This bibliographic citation anchors the previous allegory in a text external to psychoanalysis, exemplifying Lacan’s method of drawing from outside the psychoanalytic tradition to illuminate the field of the unconscious. The act of citation is itself a play of signifiers, introducing an intertextual chain and emphasizing the letter as that which endures across contexts, marking the persistence of a signifying trace beyond its origin. This act exemplifies how psychoanalytic discourse, for Lacan, is always already involved in a network of other discourses, with the letter functioning as an index of that intertextuality.

“If the theme of this volume 3 of La Psychanalyse required this contribution from me, I owe this deference to what will be discovered here, to introduce it by situating it between writing and speech: it will be halfway.”

Here, the text is positioned as a response to a thematic call, an address to the symbolic demand of an Other (“the theme of this volume”). The “deference” is not simply politeness but an acknowledgement of the Law of the Other — the psychoanalytic principle that the subject is always subject to a demand or mandate it cannot escape. The intention “to situate it between writing and speech” signals a crucial Lacanian problematic: the relationship between écriture (writing) and parole (speech), each representing different modalities of the signifier and different relations to the unconscious. To locate the essay “halfway” is to refuse a naive privileging of one over the other, but also to emphasize the irreducible difference between the letter as written mark and the signifier as spoken chain. This “halfway” positioning is an allusion to the place of the subject, split between the demand of the Other (symbolic) and the materiality of the signifier (the letter), never fully coinciding with either.

“Writing, in fact, is distinguished by the prevalence of the text, in the sense that this factor of discourse will be seen to take here, – what allows for that tightening which, in my view, should leave the reader no other exit than their entry, which I prefer to be difficult. This will therefore not be a writing in my sense.”

The sentence meditates on the specificity of writing: its “prevalence of the text” — the way written discourse establishes a material field distinct from the ephemeral nature of speech. The “tightening” refers to the condensation and density of the signifier in writing, producing a structure where entry is possible, but exit is foreclosed. This produces a textual space analogous to the unconscious, where meaning is overdetermined, where the subject is ensnared by the letter and cannot simply pass through. The desire for the reader’s “entry” to be “difficult” resonates with Lacan’s general approach: psychoanalysis must resist the temptation of transparency, and the text must function as a site of encounter with opacity and resistance, akin to the encounter with the unconscious itself. The statement “this will therefore not be a writing in my sense” is a provocation, refusing to allow the essay to be read as a mere transcription or transparent communication, but as a structured field of the letter, resistant to easy consumption. The analyst, then, is called to attend to the letter, to the structure of the text, to its symptomatic knots — not to seek exit or mastery, but to tarry with the Real of the text’s difficulty.

“The priority I give to nourishing my seminar lessons each time with a new contribution has until now prevented me from providing such a text for them, except for one of them, which is otherwise unremarkable in their sequence, and to which it is only worth referring here for the scale of their topicality.”

The reference to “nourishing my seminar lessons each time with a new contribution” evokes Lacan’s pedagogical method: his seminars, always evolving, are less about systematization than about the living transmission of psychoanalytic thought. The emphasis on “new contribution” marks the continual reinvention at stake in Lacanian teaching, echoing the psychoanalytic emphasis on the uniqueness of each analytic session and intervention. The rare mention of “such a text” for seminar use underscores the unusual nature of producing a fixed, written document for an audience accustomed to the performative, spoken transmission of knowledge. The exception cited as “unremarkable in their sequence” underlines the idea that Lacan’s seminars are not a linear progression but rather a series of interventions, each with its own topical urgency—an echo of Freud’s own refusal of dogmatic system. The value of the previous text, then, is measured not by its place in an intellectual progression, but by its resonance with “the scale of their topicality,” a notion that recalls Lacan’s preoccupation with the event, the kairos, and the importance of analytic timing.

“For the urgency with which I now take the pretext to set aside this aim only covers the difficulty of sustaining it at the level at which I must here present my teaching, it does not move too far from speech, whose different measures are essential to the formative effect I seek.”

This sentence foregrounds the interplay between urgency and difficulty, a dialectic familiar to any Lacanian: the analyst’s act is always a response to the urgency of the subject’s desire, but is simultaneously marked by the impossibility of full realization. The reference to “taking the pretext to set aside this aim” signals that the current text is born of exigency rather than a continuation of the regular pedagogical series—circumstance has interrupted the norm, much like the real disrupts the symbolic. The note that this effort “does not move too far from speech” insists on the primacy of the spoken word, the register of the signifier in action, and the various “measures” or modalities through which speech functions: rhythm, intonation, address. For Lacanian psychoanalysts, this highlights that any written work still seeks to transmit something of the living movement of discourse, that formative dimension essential to analytic formation, which cannot be fully captured in the fixity of text but is always animated by the drive and by the dialogic encounter with the Other.

“That is why I have taken the approach of a conversation that was requested of me at that moment by the philosophy group of the Federation of Literature Students1, to find the accommodation suitable for my presentation there: its necessary generality finding a match in the extraordinary character of their audience, but its unique object meeting the complicity of their common qualification, the literary one, to which my title pays homage.”

Opting for “the approach of a conversation” reflects an attempt to bridge speech and writing, echoing the psychoanalytic session’s structure: neither pure monologue nor fully dialogic exchange, but a staged encounter. The “necessary generality” of his discourse aligns with the composition of his audience—students and philosophers steeped in literature—necessitating a mode of address that remains open, polyvalent, able to traverse multiple registers. The “extraordinary character” of the audience alludes to their distance from the strict psychoanalytic field, compelling the analyst to tailor the message accordingly, but also signaling the permeability of psychoanalytic knowledge into other discourses. The “unique object” of the talk is met by “the complicity of their common qualification, the literary one,” foregrounding that psychoanalysis, especially as Lacan understands it, is always entwined with the literary—through its use of language, its attention to signifier, and its continual play with the polysemy and ambiguity that literature so richly embodies. The title itself becomes a gesture of homage, an acknowledgment that psychoanalysis belongs within the field of the universitas litterarum, the literary universe that Freud esteemed.

“How can one forget, in fact, that Freud constantly and until the end maintained the primary requirement of this qualification for the training of analysts, and that he designated in the universitas litterarum of all times the ideal place for his institution2.”

The allusion to Freud’s insistence on the analyst’s literary and cultural formation is not mere nostalgia but an assertion of psychoanalysis’s fundamental dependence on language and on the structures of meaning that literary education confers. Freud’s choice to locate his institution within the “universitas litterarum” positions psychoanalysis as a discourse that cannot be severed from the great tradition of humanist study—language, text, interpretation, and the plurality of meaning. For Lacanians, this is a vital context: it signals that the analyst is not only a technician of the psyche but also a reader, an interpreter, someone whose apprenticeship must be in the polyvalence of the signifier, cultivated through literary, philosophical, and philological study. The institution of psychoanalysis, in its ideal form, is not merely clinical but always already embedded in the broader university, whose vocation is the transmission and problematization of meaning itself.

“Thus, the recourse to the movement restored in the heat of this discourse marked, moreover, by those to whom I address it, those to whom it is not addressed.”

Recourse to “movement restored in the heat of this discourse” signals a return to the vitality of speech—discourse as living act, marked by desire, by the transferential field established between speaker and audience. The “heat” suggests the passion and urgency that animate analytic discourse, always oriented not only to those explicitly addressed but also to the absent, the excluded, and those who are, in psychoanalytic terms, the unconscious addressees of any utterance. Lacan’s discourse thus acknowledges both its intended interlocutors and those it passes over, implicating the structure of the Other as always excessive to conscious intent. This aligns with the psychoanalytic logic that every enunciation, every act of address, is structured by unconscious determination and never fully coincides with its supposed addressee.

“I mean: none of those who, for whatever purpose in psychoanalysis, tolerate their discipline claiming some false identity.”

This sentence cuts sharply: Lacan marks a distance from those in psychoanalysis who accept a counterfeit identity for the discipline—whether as medical science, psychology, or any reduction that betrays the singularity of psychoanalytic knowledge. To “tolerate their discipline claiming some false identity” is to betray the cause of psychoanalysis, aligning with institutional or social demands rather than the disruptive, radical core that psychoanalysis brings to knowledge and subjectivity. The analyst, in Lacan’s sense, must resist all temptations to conformity, to the false comfort of easy identification, and remain faithful to the difference that psychoanalysis insists upon in relation to the discourses of the master, the university, and the contemporary social order.

“Habitual vice and such in its mental effect that even the true one may appear as an alibi among others, from which one hopes at least that the refined doubling does not escape the subtlest.”

Here Lacan addresses the “habitual vice”—the tendency, deeply rooted and repetitive, for even genuine psychoanalytic insight to be misrecognized or taken as a mere pretext, an “alibi.” In the economy of the signifier, even the most “true” position may be absorbed into the chain of signifiers as one more justification or rationalization. The “refined doubling” is a gesture toward the splitting, the duplication, the perpetual ambiguity at the heart of the subject and the signifier: meaning is always doubled, never pure, always susceptible to misrecognition and disavowal. For the “subtlest,” those most attuned to the nuances of the analytic field, there is hope that this doubling—this play of the true and the false—will not be lost. This is a call to vigilance, a reminder that the task of the analyst is to hold open the space for the unconscious, to resist the closure of meaning, and to recognize that every assertion, every “truth,” is always shadowed by its supplement, its double, its potential as alibi.

“This is how one observes with curiosity the turn beginning regarding symbolization and language in the Int. J. Psychoanal., with the great help of wet fingers leafing through the folios of Sapir and Jespersen. These exercises are still novice, but it is above all the tone that is lacking. A certain seriousness makes one smile when returning to the truthful.”

The “turn beginning regarding symbolization and language in the Int. J. Psychoanal.” references a contemporary trend in psychoanalytic research, especially in the English-speaking world, toward the study of linguistic structures and symbolic processes. Mention of Sapir and Jespersen, leading figures in linguistic anthropology and structural linguistics, signals the incursion of a scientific approach to language within psychoanalytic circles. The tactile image of “wet fingers leafing through the folios” both literalizes the engagement with linguistic texts and subtly mocks the earnest but clumsy attempt by psychoanalysts to appropriate the tools of linguistics. These efforts are described as “novice”—lacking sophistication or rigor—while “the tone that is lacking” underscores a failure not of method, but of style and ethos. The “seriousness” that “makes one smile when returning to the truthful” is a sardonic observation about the solemnity with which analysts approach linguistic matters, forgetting the irony and play that should animate any discourse on the letter. This is an invitation to recognize that psychoanalysis, grounded in the experience of the unconscious, cannot simply borrow the tone of scientific objectivity but must attend to its own relation to truth—truth as cause, as lack, as always partially spoken.

“And how could even a psychoanalyst today not feel drawn to it, when touching upon speech, when his experience receives from it its instrument, its framework, its material and even the background noise of its uncertainties.”

No psychoanalyst can ignore the question of language, for speech is not only the means of analytic work but its very substance. The phrase “touching upon speech” foregrounds the centrality of the spoken word in psychoanalytic experience: speech is the analyst’s “instrument,” the structure or “framework” in which the analytic process unfolds, the “material” from which the symptoms, slips, and formations of the unconscious are woven. Even the “background noise of its uncertainties”—the equivocations, ambiguities, lapses, and silences of speech—are constitutive of the analytic experience. For Lacanians, this signals the irreducibility of language as both medium and obstacle, as that which makes possible the work of analysis and simultaneously ensures that its object, the unconscious, remains elusive, displaced, and mediated by the play of the signifier.

“I. – THE MEANING OF THE LETTER”

The section heading, “THE MEANING OF THE LETTER,” inaugurates a decisive shift: from preliminary context to the essay’s core problematic. The focus on “the letter” signals an engagement with the materiality of the signifier, the letter as the smallest, most irreducible unit of written language, in contrast to “meaning” as something derived or secondary. In the Lacanian field, the letter is what endures through all permutations of meaning, what returns in the symptom, what “insists” beyond sense. The analyst is thus called to attend to the letter—not as vehicle of signification, but as the structural cause of meaning, the point where the unconscious is inscribed.

“Our title suggests that, beyond speech, it is the entire structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious. From the outset, it alerts the attentive mind that it may have to revisit the idea that the unconscious is only the seat of the instincts.”

The claim that psychoanalytic experience “discovers in the unconscious” the “entire structure of language” challenges a reductionist reading of Freud’s metapsychology. Where previous traditions located the unconscious in instinct or drive alone, Lacan repositions it in the register of language, insisting that the unconscious is not simply a repository of repressed contents, but a structured, articulated field, organized according to the laws of language. The attentive analyst is thus alerted to the necessity of revisiting their understanding: the unconscious cannot be grasped outside of language, and psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to a theory of instincts. This is the foundational move of the “return to Freud,” but filtered through Saussure and structural linguistics, asserting that what Freud discovered was not a dark biological substratum, but a structure homologous with language.

“But how should we take this letter here? Quite simply, literally [at face value – in French “à la lettre” is a wordplay meaning both “literally” and “concerning the letter”]. By letter we designate this material support that concrete discourse borrows from language.”

The phrase “how should we take this letter here?” foregrounds a double reading—“literally” (as in ‘taking at face value’) and “concerning the letter” itself—revealing a constitutive play on words at the heart of Lacanian theory. The “letter” is defined as “the material support that concrete discourse borrows from language,” emphasizing its function as the minimal, material carrier of the signifier. The letter is not reducible to phoneme or grapheme but is the structural element that underpins the chain of signifiers, the point where meaning may slip or fail, where the real returns. This materiality of the letter, indifferent to meaning, is crucial to the analytic interpretation of symptoms, slips, and dreams, where the unconscious insists as a trace or effect of the letter.

“This simple definition presupposes that language is not to be confused with the various somatic and psychic functions that serve it in the speaking subject. For the primary reason that language, with its structure, pre-exists the entry that each subject makes into it at a certain moment in their mental development.”

The distinction here is foundational: language cannot be reduced to the “somatic and psychic functions” (the organs and mental faculties) that enable speaking; instead, language is an autonomous structure, existing prior to and independent of the subject. The subject’s “entry” into language is a founding event—echoing Lacan’s notion of the subject’s alienation in the Other—where the symbolic order is always already in place before the subject arrives. This is crucial for psychoanalysis: the subject is not master of language, but is spoken by it; language structures the unconscious, and not the other way around. The letter, as the minimal mark of this structure, is the trace of this primordial anteriority, reminding the analyst that the symptom, the slip, the dream, are effects of the subject’s encounter with a language that pre-existed them.

“Let us note that aphasias, caused by purely anatomical lesions of the cerebral apparatuses that give these functions their mental center, are found as a whole to distribute their deficits along the two sides of the signifying effect of what we here call the letter, in the creation of meaning3. This indication will be clarified by what follows.”

The clinical phenomenon of aphasia—loss of language due to brain lesions—serves as an empirical touchstone for the discussion of the letter. Even when grounded in “purely anatomical” deficits, the disturbances are not random, but distribute themselves along the axes of language’s structure, what Lacan terms “the two sides of the signifying effect.” This is a direct allusion to the Saussurean distinction between signifier and signified, between the material support (the letter, the signifier) and the production of meaning. The observation that these deficits fall “along the two sides” highlights that even at the level of neurological pathology, language operates as structure, and meaning is always an effect of the play of signifiers. For the analyst, this opens the path to understanding the symptom not as mere dysfunction, but as the site where the unconscious letter insists. The promise that “this indication will be clarified by what follows” sets up a sustained exploration of how the unconscious is structured by, and inscribed within, the materiality of the letter.

“The subject as well, if he can appear to be a serf of language, is even more so of a discourse, in the universal moment of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name.”

The subject’s subjection to language is a foundational premise of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Here, this servitude is described as even more radical: not only is the subject bound by language as such, but by a particular discourse—meaning a historically situated, socially articulated structure of signification. This discourse predates the subject, inscribing their position “at his birth,” most evidently through the imposition of a proper name. The proper name, as a primary signifier, marks the subject’s entry into the symbolic order; it is the moment at which the Other locates the subject within a pre-existing structure of meaning. The subject is always already spoken, determined in advance by the coordinates of the Other’s discourse. This underscores that subjectivity, for Lacan, is not a pre-linguistic essence but a function of inscription, alienation, and structural determination—highlighting the subject’s dependence not just on language in the abstract but on the specific, material articulations of the symbolic order.

“The reference to the experience of the community as to the substance of this discourse resolves nothing. For this experience takes its essential dimension in the tradition that this discourse establishes. This tradition, well before the historical drama is inscribed in it, founds the elementary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal an ordering of exchanges that, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations that language allows.”

The notion that “community experience” could ground the subject’s relationship to discourse is dismissed as insufficient. The real substance of discourse is not some immediate lived experience but the tradition—the transmission and continuity—instituted by language. Tradition, which precedes historical events, is what grounds the foundational structures of culture. These elementary cultural structures (for instance, kinship systems or rituals) reveal an unconscious order, an “ordering of exchanges,” that cannot be separated from the possibilities introduced by language. The permutation of signifiers allows for social exchange, symbolic circulation, and the institution of meaning—concepts central to both structural anthropology (as in Lévi-Strauss) and to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The unconscious itself is not outside culture but is structured by these permutations, by the network of possible signifier substitutions and combinations. This foregrounds the idea that the unconscious is a cultural and linguistic production, not a biological substrate.

“Whence it follows that to the ethnographic duality of nature and culture, a ternary conception is about to be substituted: nature, society, and culture, of the human condition, of which it might well be that the last term is reduced to language, that is, to what essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies.”

Traditional anthropology posited a binary opposition between nature and culture. Lacan introduces a third term—society—to suggest a more nuanced understanding of the human condition. However, the real radical move here is to propose that “culture,” as the third term, is fundamentally reducible to language. It is precisely language that sets human society apart from any so-called “natural society.” The implication for psychoanalysis is profound: what is distinctive about the human subject is not just sociability or acculturation, but subjection to the symbolic, to language as a field of differences, rules, and permutations. Thus, the analytic focus must be on language as the structuring principle of culture and society—language as the locus of the unconscious, as the grid that determines the very possibility of subjectivity.

“But we will here neither take a side nor a start, leaving to their darkness the original relations of the signifier and of labor. Contenting ourselves, to discharge a point with the general function of praxis in the genesis of history, to note that even the society that would have restored, in its political right with the privilege of producers, the causative hierarchy of the relations of production to the ideological superstructures, has not for all that engendered an Esperanto whose relations to socialist reality would have from the root excluded any possibility of literary formalism4.”

Rather than entering into debates about the “original relations of the signifier and of labor”—that is, the Marxist problematic of base and superstructure, or how language and work relate at the origins of society—Lacan sidesteps the question, leaving it “in darkness.” He limits himself to a critical observation: even a hypothetical socialist society, one which perfectly subordinated ideology to the economic base (“the privilege of producers”), has not managed to produce a language (an “Esperanto”) that would exclude literary formalism—namely, the excess, play, and formal innovation of language beyond utilitarian or referential communication. This is a pointed intervention in debates about language planning, ideology, and the supposed transparency or universality of linguistic systems. For Lacanian psychoanalysts, the point is clear: the letter, the play of the signifier, always escapes functionalist or instrumental reductions, and the unconscious persists even in the most rationally engineered linguistic context. Literary formalism is the symptom of the letter’s irreducibility, a marker of the unconscious in language.

“As for us, we will rely only on the sole premises whose value has been confirmed by the fact that language has effectively conquered in experience its status as a scientific object.”

The method to be adopted is neither speculative nor utopian but grounded in a single, rigorous premise: language is now recognized as a scientific object. This refers to the advent of structural linguistics, with its capacity to analyze language as a system of differences, governed by laws that can be scientifically described. For psychoanalysis, this scientific status of language legitimizes the Lacanian project of treating the unconscious as structured like a language. The “experience” that confers value is not only linguistic research but the analytic encounter itself, where the effects of the letter, the structure of the signifier, and the permutations of meaning can be observed, interpreted, and theorized as objective phenomena—no longer mere intuition or philosophy but grounded in the rigor of scientific inquiry. The psychoanalyst, then, is tasked with a practice that is attentive to the science of language, but without ever forgetting the irreducible remainder, the real, that always escapes full signification.

“For it is by this fact that linguistics5 presents itself in a pioneering position in this domain around which a reclassification of the sciences signals, as is customary, a revolution in knowledge: only the necessities of communication make us register it under the heading of this volume as “human sciences,” despite the confusion that may thus be covered.”

Linguistics is situated here as the vanguard discipline in the field where psychoanalysis operates, instigating a radical reordering of knowledge—a “reclassification of the sciences”—that always signals an epistemological rupture. This revolution is not a minor shift but an event that fundamentally changes how knowledge is structured and pursued, reminiscent of the scientific revolutions in the Kuhnian sense. The text points out the pragmatic reason linguistics is categorized as one of the “human sciences”: the requirements of academic and disciplinary communication, rather than any intrinsic limitation of its scope. However, this placement in the “human sciences” category is misleading, as linguistics, especially as Lacan draws from it, operates at a level of rigor and abstraction that can trouble the boundaries between the “human” and the “formal” or “mathematical” sciences. For psychoanalysis, this move is decisive: the unconscious is no longer merely a psychological phenomenon but is addressed through the formal structures revealed by linguistic science.

“To point to the emergence of the linguistic discipline, we will say that it holds, as is the case with any science in the modern sense, in the constituting moment of an algorithm that founds it. This algorithm is the following:”

Linguistics is defined as a “modern science” precisely because it is founded on an algorithm—a minimal formal inscription that organizes the field and makes its objects and relations graspable. The reference to “algorithm” is crucial: it signals that linguistics, like other hard sciences, operates through a principle of formalization, an abstract model that structures and enables the generation of knowledge. The concept of the algorithm situates linguistics within the same tradition as mathematics or logic, which provides the theoretical basis for Lacan’s own project of re-formalizing psychoanalysis.

“S/s”

The “S/s” notation is the minimal formula for understanding the structure of signification: the signifier (S) over the signified (s), with the bar as a point of separation and articulation. For Lacanian psychoanalysts, this is the key to understanding the unconscious as structured like a language. The signifier is given logical and topological primacy, positioned “above” the signified, suggesting that meaning always depends on the differential play of signifiers rather than any direct relation to things or referents. The bar, which separates and connects, marks the gap at the heart of the signifying process—the place of the Freudian unconscious.

“which is read: signifier over signified, the over corresponding to the bar that separates the two levels.”

The formula “S/s” is read as “signifier over signified.” The “over” designates the function of the bar, which creates a structural separation between the two registers. The signifier is not simply a vehicle for the signified; it constitutes the signified through its own operations and permutations. The bar is crucial: it is not a bridge but a barrier, highlighting the resistance and irreducibility between the two orders. For the Lacanian, this bar is the very locus of the unconscious, the site of repression and the gap that enables metaphor, metonymy, and the formation of symptoms.

“The sign written thus deserves to be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure, even though it is not strictly reduced to this form in any of the numerous diagrams under which it appears in the printed versions of the various lessons from the three courses of the years 1906-07, 1908-09, 1910-11, which the devotion of a group of his disciples gathered under the title Course in General Linguistics: a primordial publication for transmitting a teaching worthy of the name, that is to say, one that can only be grasped in its own movement.”

Ferdinand de Saussure is recognized as the founder of this structural model, although the exact “S/s” form is a Lacanian formalization and condensation of several diagrams in Saussure’s lectures. The historical reference to the gathering of Saussure’s lessons by his disciples and their publication as the Course in General Linguistics is significant: it foregrounds the idea that foundational knowledge is transmitted not by static doctrine but by “movement”—the dynamic, living process of teaching and interpretation. For psychoanalysis, this is an essential reminder: the teaching of Freud (and Lacan) is never reducible to a static system; it is always a discourse, a process, a movement in the field of the signifier.

“That is why it is legitimate to pay homage to him with the formalization S/s, in which the modern stage of linguistics is characterized in the diversity of the schools.”

The use of “S/s” as an homage to Saussure is justified by the decisive role this formalization plays in the contemporary landscape of linguistics. The “modern stage” is defined by the acceptance of the primacy of the signifier-signified relation, as formalized in this notation. Different linguistic schools may diverge on specifics, but this structural distinction remains foundational. For the Lacanian analyst, this formalization is not only a theoretical homage but the very matrix that permits a structural reading of the unconscious, symptoms, and subjectivity.

“The thematic of this science is from then on indeed suspended from the primordial position of the signifier and the signified, as distinct orders and initially separated by a barrier resistant to signification.”

The field of linguistics, and by extension psychoanalysis, is henceforth “suspended” from (or structured by) the distinction between the signifier and the signified. These are “distinct orders,” fundamentally separate and initially divided by a “barrier” that resists any naive notion of transparent signification. This barrier is not simply a technicality; it is the very site where meaning is generated, deferred, distorted, or fails—precisely the space inhabited by the unconscious. For the analyst, this is the structuring principle that governs the play of desire, the formation of symptoms, and the movement of the subject within the field of the Other. The barrier’s resistance to signification is not a failure but the structural condition for all sense, all interpretation, and all analytic work.

“It is this that will make possible an exact study of the connections specific to the signifier and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified.”

The separation between signifier and signified, established by the S/s algorithm, allows for a rigorous investigation into the unique relations that signifiers entertain with one another and with the production of meaning. This approach shifts the focus from the signified as given to the interplay and operations of the signifier, which generate and structure the signified. For psychoanalysis, this means that the processes of the unconscious, from slips to dreams to symptoms, are to be understood in terms of the functioning of signifiers, not as transparent conveyors of latent content but as operators producing effects of meaning.

“For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the debate concerning the arbitrariness of the sign, as it has developed since ancient reflection, or even the impasse experienced in the same period that opposes the bi-univocal correspondence of the word to the thing, even in the act of naming.”

The distinction between signifier and signified is not reducible to the classic debate about the “arbitrariness of the sign” (the idea that the link between word and thing is conventional), nor to the problem of whether words correspond one-to-one with things in the world. These are issues that have occupied philosophy since antiquity—questions of whether naming is natural or conventional—but the Lacanian approach radically exceeds them. The S/s model abolishes the fantasy of a direct or bi-univocal relation between the word and the thing, positing instead that meaning emerges from a differential network of signifiers. For psychoanalysis, the act of naming does not secure a referent but rather installs the subject in the chain of the Other, introducing both division and desire.

“This is contrary to the appearances given by the role attributed to the index finger pointing to an object in the learning of his mother tongue by the subject infans or in the use of so-called concrete school methods for the study of foreign languages.”

The index finger pointing at an object, often considered a natural model for how words acquire meaning (through ostensive definition), is exposed as misleading. Early language acquisition, or language pedagogy, sometimes relies on the illusion that naming is simply a matter of connecting a sound or word with a thing by pointing at it. Lacan insists that this apparent simplicity masks the true logic of language, which is always already symbolic, mediated by difference and by the pre-existing structure of the signifier. For the psychoanalyst, this deconstructs any naive model of language as a transparent vehicle for the real; what is at stake is always a network of substitutions and a subject divided by language.

“On this path, things can go no further than to demonstrate6 that there is no meaning that is sustained except by referral to another meaning: touching to the extreme the remark that there is no existing language for which the question of its inadequacy to cover the field of the signified arises, it being an effect of its existence as a language that it meets all needs there.”

No language is ever complete or wholly adequate to its field of signifieds. Meaning in language is never grounded in an ultimate referent or a fixed foundation; rather, meaning always refers to other meanings, in an endless chain. This is the principle of différance, or the sliding of the signified under the signifier. Even when languages are deemed “inadequate,” this lack is an effect of their very nature as languages: because every language is a differential system, it produces both surplus and lack, and can always respond to any communicative need through new combinations or neologisms. For the analyst, this signals that the unconscious, structured as a language, is likewise open-ended, lacking a stable ground or fixed meaning.

“If we try to confine in language the constitution of the object, we can only observe that it is found only at the level of the concept, very different from any nominative, and that the thing, being clearly reduced to the name, breaks apart in the double divergent ray of the cause where it has taken shelter in our language and of the nothing to which it has relinquished its Latin robe (rem).”

When attempting to pin down the “object” through language, what actually emerges is a concept, not a nominative “thing” in itself. The act of naming is not a simple capture of the object, but a reduction and a transformation. The “thing” (Latin “rem”) dissolves into two trajectories: it becomes the “cause” in language—the hidden reason or drive behind signification—and simultaneously vanishes into “nothing,” the void or absence at the heart of the signifying chain. This double movement is at the core of Lacanian psychoanalysis, where the object (objet a) is always both the cause of desire and something fundamentally ungraspable, lost in the process of being named and symbolized.

“These considerations, as stimulating as they may be for the philosopher, turn us away from the place from which language questions us about its nature.”

While these debates may intrigue philosophers, they risk diverting us from the analytic task: to focus on how language itself interrogates us, rather than how we speculate about its philosophical nature. For psychoanalysis, the real question is not about the adequacy of language to represent the world, but about how language structures the subject and how the subject is questioned by language—how meaning is always deferred, how desire and the unconscious are produced by the very gaps and failures of the signifier.

“And one will fail to support the question as long as one has not shaken off the illusion that the signifier corresponds to the function of representing the signified, or better yet: that the signifier has to answer for its existence on the basis of any signification whatsoever.”

The analyst must abandon the illusion that the signifier’s only function is to represent the signified. The signifier has its own material, structural existence, irreducible to any reference or meaning. To believe otherwise is to misunderstand the logic of the unconscious and the basis of analytic intervention. The signifier “answers for its existence” not by serving meaning, but by generating the very space where meaning, lack, and desire are produced. This is the radical insight that grounds Lacanian theory: the autonomy and primacy of the signifier over meaning, the independence of the letter, and the necessity for psychoanalysis to attend to what escapes or disrupts signification, not merely what can be translated into sense.

“For even when reduced to this last formula, the heresy is the same. It is the one that leads logical positivism to the quest for the meaning of meaning, the ‘meaning of meaning’ as the objective is called in the language in which its adherents frolic.”

Logical positivism, in its pursuit of the “meaning of meaning,” perpetuates the fundamental error of assuming that meaning can be stabilized or found through an ever more refined reference, seeking a final signified or meta-signification. This “heresy” consists in the refusal to recognize the irreducibility of the signifier and the perpetual deferral of meaning. The phrase “the meaning of meaning” mocks the positivist fantasy that language can fully ground itself, exposing the tautological and ultimately empty nature of such pursuits. For the Lacanian analyst, this is a reminder that meaning is always an effect of the signifier’s movement, not a stable essence to be discovered.

“Hence we see that the text most laden with meaning is, in this analysis, reduced to insignificant trifles, the only ones resisting being mathematical algorithms, which are themselves, as is fitting, without any meaning7.”

The logical positivist’s method strips texts of their supposed depth, reducing them to minutiae that resist translation into formal algorithms—while those algorithms themselves possess no meaning. In this operation, the richness and ambiguity of meaning are dissolved, leaving only bare formalism, which, as Lacan notes, “are themselves…without any meaning.” This highlights the paradox that the more one tries to purify meaning through formal analysis, the more one discovers the emptiness at the heart of the algorithm. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is interested in that which resists both absolute formalization and total transparency—the symptomatic, the equivocal, the letter that persists beyond sense.

“It remains that the algorithm S/s, if we could extract from it only the notion of the parallelism of its upper and lower terms, each taken only in its entirety, would remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery. Which, of course, is not the case.”

If the S/s formula were simply the static juxtaposition of two parallel wholes, its function would remain utterly enigmatic—a cipher of total mystery, producing nothing but opacity. This would be to misunderstand the dynamic and productive aspect of the relation. Lacan’s point is that the formula is not a map of stable correspondence but an engine of difference and displacement. Its importance lies in the operations it permits, the way it stages the continual production and slippage of meaning. For the psychoanalyst, this model is neither merely mystical nor empty, but rather operational and generative for the logic of the unconscious.

“To grasp its function, I will begin by producing the faulty illustration by which its usage is classically introduced. Here it is:”

The classical illustration is intentionally labeled “faulty”—an admission that the standard pedagogical presentation of the S/s relation misleads by implying a direct link between signifier and signified, or between word and thing. This is a crucial corrective for psychoanalysts, as it draws attention to the persistent temptation to read language representationally, as if signifiers “stand for” objects in a transparent, one-to-one manner.

“(the word ‘tree’ over the image of a tree)”

The textbook pairing of the word “tree” written above an image of a tree is precisely the sort of illustration that gives false comfort to the student or layperson. It stages the signifier as if it sits directly above its referent, suggesting a natural or self-evident relation. This aligns with the erroneous “direction” previously critiqued, which imagines meaning as a stable transmission from signifier to signified to referent. For Lacan, such an illustration obscures the play of difference, metonymy, and the real work of the signifier, leading to a misunderstanding of how language—and thus the unconscious—actually functions.

“where one can see what favor it opens to the direction previously indicated as erroneous.”

This image fosters the very misconception that Lacan is working to undo: that language is grounded in a natural, referential correspondence, rather than in the structural differential play of the signifier. The “favor” it offers is the ease of the representational fallacy—a comfort that must be unsettled if psychoanalysis is to fully grasp the effects of the letter and the structure of desire.

“For my listeners, I substituted another, which could not be considered more correct than to patch together in the incongruous dimension to which the psychoanalyst has not yet entirely renounced, in the justified feeling that his conformism has value only starting from it. Here is this other:”

Rather than presenting a “correct” image, Lacan offers a different, equally provisional illustration—one that exposes the incongruity and discontinuity at play in the relation between signifier and signified. The acknowledgment that psychoanalysts have not “entirely renounced” a certain incongruity signals the necessary persistence of a tension, a discomfort at the heart of the analytic field. This discomfort is productive; it resists the lure of easy formalism or representational closure, insisting on the value of questioning conformism rather than settling for it.

“(two toilet doors marked over them ‘hommes’ ‘dames’)”

The image of two toilet doors, labeled “hommes” and “dames,” introduces a new kind of signifying operation. Here, the signifiers are not attached to any intrinsic visual referent; their function is purely differential, marked by opposition and social code. The meaning of each sign emerges not from any essential property, but from their relational juxtaposition and the structure of social practice they invoke. This illustration is closer to the logic of the signifier as Lacan articulates it: meaning is produced through difference, not resemblance or correspondence.

“where one can see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier involved in the experience, simply by doubling the nominal species through the mere juxtaposition of two terms whose complementary sense seems bound to be consolidated, the surprise occurs of an unexpected acceleration of meaning: in the image of two twin doors that symbolize, with the voting booth offered to the Western man to satisfy his natural needs outside his home, the imperative he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities and which subjects his public life to the laws of urinary segregation.”

This example demonstrates that the juxtaposition of two signifiers—“hommes” and “dames”—instantly multiplies and complicates meaning. The effect is not additive, but exponential; meaning is accelerated and transformed by the logic of opposition and the social practices it indexes. The twin doors, while functionally identical, become bearers of entirely distinct significations by virtue of their labels, a distinction rooted not in nature but in the symbolic order, the law, and social convention. The “laws of urinary segregation” are not reducible to biology but are the effect of symbolic inscription—just as the unconscious is structured by the play of signifiers, not by any inherent content. This scene thus stages the structure of the symbolic as such: meaning emerges from difference, opposition, and the social institution of signifiers, not from any essential or intrinsic connection between sign and thing.

“This is not merely to shock the nominalist debate with a low blow, but to show how the signifier in fact enters the signified; namely, in a form which, for not being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality.”

The use of the toilet door example is not just a rhetorical gesture meant to scandalize philosophical debates about names and universals. Rather, it serves to demonstrate how the signifier makes its entry into the field of the signified. The signifier does not remain in the realm of the purely abstract or immaterial—it intervenes in the signified in a concrete, material form (as with the enameled plaques). This immediately reintroduces the question of the signifier’s ontological status: how and where does it “exist” in the real? For the Lacanian analyst, this is crucial, as it points to the intersection of the symbolic and the real: the letter, the signifier, is not a mere idea, but a material trace inscribed in the world.

“For in having to approach the small enameled plaques that support it, the blinking gaze of a myopic person might perhaps be justified in questioning whether this is really where one should see the signifier, whose signified in this case would receive from the double and solemn procession of the upper nave its final honors.”

The act of physically approaching the enameled signs brings into focus the material support of the signifier. The myopic’s struggle to perceive the inscription is a parable: the location and nature of the signifier is always in question, always just out of clear view. The “final honors” that the signified receives from the “double and solemn procession” of the plaques—“hommes” and “dames”—ironically stages the ritual or social performance that surrounds meaning. The signifier does not simply represent; it institutes, it marks, it divides, and it produces effects in the social field. The analyst is invited to see the signifier not just as a label, but as a real force that cuts, organizes, and ritualizes the space of the Other.

“But no constructed example could equal the relief encountered in the living experience of truth. Which is why I have no reason to be dissatisfied for having forged this one: since it awakened in the person most worthy of my trust this memory from her childhood, which, happily thus brought within my reach, fits best here.”

Theoretical constructions, while illustrative, cannot match the resonance and force of lived experience. Lacan’s pleasure at having produced his example is less about theoretical ingenuity than about its power to provoke the emergence of a genuine childhood memory in another—someone “most worthy of [his] trust.” This transition from constructed illustration to a recovered, spontaneous scene highlights a central Lacanian tenet: truth is not a matter of correct examples or logical demonstrations, but of that which emerges unexpectedly, contingently, from the intersection of language, memory, and desire. The analyst recognizes that such moments are privileged sites for encountering the real of the unconscious.

“A train arrives at the station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are sitting in a compartment facing each other on the side where the window opening onto the outside lets the view of the buildings along the platform where the train stops unfold: ‘Look,’ says the brother, ‘we’re at Ladies!’ – ‘Idiot!’ replies the sister, ‘don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.'”

This anecdote stages the interplay of signifier and signified in an everyday scene. The children, confronted with the station platform’s signs (“Ladies” and “Gentlemen”), misread their referential function, taking them for names of places rather than as indicators of social designation. The misunderstanding dramatizes the arbitrary and differential logic of the signifier: the physical location is identical, yet the meaning is decided entirely by the label—the inscription—seen through the train window. The humorous exchange also highlights the effects of misrecognition (méconnaissance), a central concept for Lacan: meaning is always subject to error, displacement, and the structure of the Other’s desire.

“Indeed, apart from the fact that the rails in this story materialize the bar of the Saussurean algorithm in a form well-suited to suggest that its resistance may be other than dialectical, it would take, and it is the fitting image, not having one’s eyes in the right place to get confused here about the respective place of the signifier and the signified, and not to follow from which radiant center the first comes to reflect its light in the darkness of unfinished meanings.”

The rails themselves are a materialization of the bar in the Saussurean S/s algorithm—an image that translates theory into lived space. The “resistance” suggested here is not merely a theoretical one (dialectical opposition), but something encountered in the real, in the body and in experience. The confusion of the children is not a trivial error, but a structural effect of the play between signifier and signified: misrecognition arises when one “does not have one’s eyes in the right place”—when one fails to situate oneself with respect to the locus of the signifier. The “radiant center” from which the signifier casts its light into the “darkness of unfinished meanings” is the locus of the Other, the place where meaning emerges only as an effect, always belated, always partial. For the analyst, this passage reiterates that what matters is not the object or the scene in itself, but the structuring cut, the inscription of the signifier, and the position from which the subject apprehends the field of meaning.

“For it will carry Dissension, only animal and doomed to the oblivion of natural mists, to the boundless power, implacable to families and harassing to the Gods, of ideological War. Gentlemen and Ladies will henceforth be for these children two homelands towards which their souls will each draw from a divergent wing, and on which it will be all the more impossible for them to reach a pact that, being in truth the same, neither could yield on the preeminence of one without impinging on the glory of the other.”

The error or misrecognition of the children concerning the “Gentlemen” and “Ladies” signs is not a trivial confusion, but the site where dissension is elevated from a merely animal or natural form (“doomed to the oblivion of natural mists”) to the ideological register—where it acquires the “boundless power” characteristic of symbolic conflict. The signifiers, in their social usage, install a rivalry not only between siblings but between whole categories, a rivalry that resonates on the level of families, nations, and even the gods (evoking mythic and tragic dimensions). The signifiers “Gentlemen” and “Ladies” become for the children “two homelands,” polarities that structure subjectivity as such: each soul is drawn toward a different pole, and any reconciliation—any “pact”—becomes structurally impossible, since each signifier demands absolute preeminence. The rivalry is not due to the content of the signified, but to the structural position of the signifiers themselves, which institute a logic of exclusion and glory, a dynamic that psychoanalysis traces in neurosis, desire, and the conflicts of the family romance.

“Let us stop there. It could be the history of France. More human, as it happens, when evoked here than that of England, destined to tumble from the Big End to the Little End of the Dean Swift’s egg.”

The allusion to “the history of France” universalizes the previous example, suggesting that the rivalries instituted by signifiers are not just personal but national, collective, and symbolic in their operation. The comparison to England, referencing Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and the ridiculous conflict over which end of the egg to break, underlines the arbitrariness and yet inescapability of symbolic oppositions. The point is that such conflicts, even when rooted in the most contingent distinctions, take on an existential weight; they are “more human” in their lived, affective reality than any mere logical difference.

“What remains is to conceive what step and what corridor the S of the signifier, visible here in the plurals of which it forms the center of its receptions beyond the window, must cross in order to bring its elbows to the channels through which, like warm air and cold air, indignation and contempt come to blow on this side.”

The “S of the signifier”—the structural logic of signification—operates at the center of the opposition (“Gentlemen” and “Ladies”), especially as it is played out in the children’s perception. The plural “s” inscribed in these words symbolizes the capacity of the signifier to multiply, divide, and channel meaning and affect. The “step” or “corridor” to be conceived is the passage by which the signifier traverses from its symbolic position outside (beyond the window) to its effect on the subject (on this side, in the psychic and social reality of the child). This is a movement akin to a circulation of air—warm and cold, indignation and contempt—suggesting that signifiers not only differentiate but also mobilize affect, drive, and social energy. The analyst is reminded that the signifier is not inert, but is charged, dynamic, and structuring, giving rise to passions, rivalries, and identifications.

“One thing is certain, in any case, this access must not include any signification, if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate for it. For the algorithm, in that it is itself nothing but the pure function of the signifier, can reveal only a structure of the signifier in this transfer.”

For the passage from signifier to signified to remain faithful to the Lacanian algorithm, there must be no presupposed signification already present in the access itself. The S/s relation is strictly structural, not referential. The “access” is the play of difference, not the transport of a ready-made meaning. The algorithm operates as a “pure function,” revealing only the structure of the signifier and the ways it is deployed and received. The function of the bar is to maintain this irreducible gap, this non-coincidence, between signifier and signified. In psychoanalytic terms, the work is to attend to the operations of the signifier as such, not to presume that its function is to deliver sense or content directly.

“Now, the structure of the signifier is, as is commonly said of language, that it is articulated. This means that its units, wherever one starts in mapping their reciprocal encroachments and their increasing inclusions, are subject to the double condition of being reduced to ultimate differential elements and of being composed according to the laws of a closed order.”

The articulation of language means that signifiers are organized both as minimal, differential units (the “ultimate differential elements”) and according to systemic laws that establish a “closed order.” This echoes Saussure’s insight that language is a system of differences without positive terms; each element exists only by virtue of its relations and oppositions. In mapping these “reciprocal encroachments” and “increasing inclusions,” the analyst must recognize both the atomization and the structural closure of the signifying chain: no unit has meaning in isolation, and yet the system itself is governed by rules, exclusions, and the play of absence and presence. For psychoanalysis, this is the structural foundation for the operations of metaphor, metonymy, and the mechanisms of the unconscious, which rely on the articulation and differential logic of the signifier.

“These elements, a decisive discovery of linguistics, are the phonemes, where one should not look for any phonetic constancy in the modulatory variability to which this term is applied, but the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of words in a given language.”

Linguistics revealed that the fundamental units of spoken language are not stable, universal sounds, but “phonemes”—abstract, differential elements. Phonemes are not defined by any invariant phonetic quality, since their acoustic realization varies greatly, but by their position in a synchronic system: what matters is the way each phoneme differs from others within the language at a given moment, making word distinctions possible. For the Lacanian psychoanalyst, this is a decisive shift. Meaning and identity in language do not rest on positive qualities, but on differences—on the system of oppositions that constitute the signifying field. The unconscious, structured like a language, thus functions by such differential logic: the symptom is not a simple sign, but a product of play between signifiers.

“Thus one can see that an essential element in speech itself was predestined to be molded into the movable characters which, whether Didots or Garamonds pressing in the lowercase cases, validly present what we call the letter, namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier.”

The transition from the phoneme (in speech) to the letter (in writing) is not arbitrary. The letter materializes, localizes, and fixes what is already a differential, relational element in speech. The reference to typefaces (“Didots or Garamonds pressing in the lowercase cases”) highlights the letter’s incarnation in concrete, material form, further rooting the concept of the signifier in the real—inscribed, repeatable, iterable. For the analyst, the letter in the symptom, dream, or slip is not merely a metaphor: it is the site where the structure of the signifier manifests materially, leaving its mark on the body, the psyche, and the social field.

“With the second property of the signifier, that of being composed according to the laws of a closed order, is affirmed the necessity of the topological substrate, of which the term ‘signifying chain’ that I usually use provides an approximation: rings whose necklace is sealed in the ring of another necklace made of rings.”

The signifier’s organization into a closed, rule-governed order creates a topology—a structured, interconnected field where each element is both singular and part of a chain. The “signifying chain” is not a simple sequence but an articulated network, in which each ring (signifier) derives its value from its position and linkage. The metaphor of necklaces sealed to each other evokes the complexity of language and the unconscious: each chain is potentially part of larger structures, crossing over, looping, and creating knots—just as the unconscious ties together disparate signifiers, creating meaning effects and symptoms that ripple throughout the psychic economy. This topological vision is central to Lacanian theory, especially in later developments using knot theory and topology to describe the relations between the registers.

“Such are the structural conditions that determine as grammar the order of constituent encroachments of the signifier up to the unit immediately superior to the sentence, – as lexicon the order of constituent inclusions of the signifier up to the verbal locution.”

Grammar and lexicon are described in strictly structural terms: grammar is the set of rules that organizes how signifiers (words, morphemes, etc.) encroach upon one another—how units combine and structure themselves hierarchically, up to the level above the sentence. Lexicon is the system of how signifiers are included within larger units, like phrases or idiomatic expressions. Both are determined not by reference to the world, but by the internal laws of the signifying chain—their “encroachments” and “inclusions.” For psychoanalysis, this approach frames the symptom and the unconscious formation not as deviations from referential meaning, but as effects of the underlying order of the signifier, the chain, and the rules that bind them.

“It is easy, within the limits where these two enterprises of apprehending the use of a language stop, to realize that only the correlations of the signifier to the signifier there provide the standard for any search for meaning, as marked by the notion of the use of a taxeme or a semanteme, which refers to contexts of just the next degree above the concerned units.”

The true key to meaning lies in the correlation of signifier to signifier, not in any external reference or signified. The analytic tools of linguistics—terms like “taxeme” and “semanteme”—point to the necessity of considering each unit of language within its immediate context: the next higher level in the structure. Meaning is always relational, always determined by differential links within the signifying system. For the analyst, this is a call to attend to context, to the chain of associations, substitutions, and contiguities that structure discourse, and through which the unconscious insists. It is the movement and articulation of signifiers that creates, displaces, and troubles meaning—not the supposed presence of an underlying reality.

“But it is not because the enterprises of grammar and lexicon exhaust themselves at a certain limit that one should think that meaning reigns undivided beyond that. This would be a mistake. For the signifier by its nature always anticipates meaning by, in a sense, unfolding its dimension ahead of itself.”

The exhaustion of grammatical and lexical analysis at their respective limits does not inaugurate a sovereign domain of meaning beyond the signifier. This would be a fundamental misreading. The signifier perpetually outpaces and organizes meaning, projecting its own order in advance, unfolding a space for sense that is always in anticipation, never fulfilled. In the analytic setting, this anticipatory dimension is evident in how speech both structures and delays meaning, producing expectation and deferral in the subject.

“As is seen at the level of the sentence when it is interrupted before the meaningful term: Never do I…, Still and all…, Perhaps again… It nonetheless makes sense, and all the more oppressively as it is content to make itself awaited8.”

A sentence left incomplete—“Never do I…,” “Still and all…,” “Perhaps again…”—shows how the signifier creates meaning in suspense. The incomplete utterance has an oppressive power, producing more meaning in its waiting and withholding than a completed statement might. This reflects the structural primacy of the signifier: it is the arrangement and the gap, not the fullness of content, that generates the field of sense and desire. In psychoanalysis, this is the dynamic of the enigmatic statement or the half-said, which provokes the subject and organizes their relation to the unconscious.

“But the phenomenon is no different when, with only the backward movement of a but, making it appear, beautiful as the Shulamite, as virtuous as the prize maiden, dresses and prepares the Black woman for marriage and the poor woman for auction.”

A simple word like “but” retroactively transforms the sense of what precedes, operating a structural cut and redirection. The references—“beautiful as the Shulamite, as virtuous as the prize maiden”—point to how the signifier reconfigures entire scenes, identities, and social roles (preparing the Black woman for marriage, the poor woman for auction). The signifier’s intervention is not just additive but re-organizational; it folds meaning back, subverts expectations, and institutes new relations. This is the principle behind the analytic interpretation: a single word or intervention can reshape the subject’s position and the sense of an entire narrative.

“Hence one can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning insists, but that none of its elements consists in the meaning of which it is capable at that very moment.”

Meaning “insists” within the chain of signifiers—it persists, recurs, presses forward—but is never fully present in any single signifier at a given instant. Meaning is not something contained in words but something that emerges from their articulation, their sequence, their interplay. For the analyst, this is the logic of the unconscious: the symptom, the dream, the slip, never deliver a singular, final meaning, but function as sites where meaning circulates, is displaced, and insists as a question or a lack.

“The notion of a ceaseless sliding of the signified under the signifier thus imposes itself, – which F. de Saussure illustrates with an image that resembles the two sinuosities of the upper and lower Waters in the miniatures of Genesis manuscripts. A double stream where the marker seems slender as the fine streaks of rain drawn by the vertical dotted lines supposed to delimit there segments of correspondence.”

The ceaseless “sliding” (glissement) of the signified beneath the signifier becomes a necessary concept. Saussure’s illustration, likened here to two undulating streams (“upper and lower Waters”), captures the endless movement and slippage between signifier and signified, where correspondence is only ever partial, momentary, and subject to continual re-articulation. The “fine streaks of rain” and “vertical dotted lines” indicate attempts to segment or anchor meaning, but these are always provisional, never absolute. For the analyst, this visual metaphor underscores the impossibility of fixing sense, the permanent mobility and non-coincidence at the heart of signification and of the unconscious.

“All experience goes against this, which led me at a certain point in my seminar on psychoses to speak of ‘quilting points’ [French: points de capiton – a term coined by Lacan for moments where meaning is anchored in the signifying chain] required by this schema to account for the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject9.”

Despite the structural sliding of the signified under the signifier, clinical experience demonstrates that there are moments where meaning is, however briefly, anchored—where the chain of signifiers is quilted, fixed at a “point de capiton.” These points stabilize sense, preventing the signifying chain from dissolving into endless equivocation. The term “quilting point” refers to those places in discourse where the letter, the signifier, momentarily dominates and secures meaning, allowing for “the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.” This is a pivotal concept for the psychoanalyst: interpretation aims neither at exhaustive signification nor at the collapse of meaning, but at the creation of moments where the subject is restructured, where sense is knotted and reknotted, opening new possibilities for desire, identification, and speech.

“But the linearity that F. de Saussure holds as constitutive of the chain of discourse, in accordance with its emission by a single voice and the horizontal line on which it is written in our script, while it is indeed necessary, is not sufficient. It is imposed on the chain of discourse only in the direction in which it is oriented in time, even being taken as a signifying factor in all languages where: [Pierre beats Paul] reverses its time by inverting its terms.”

Saussure’s insistence on the linearity of language—the necessity that signifiers be ordered one after the other in speech or writing, on a horizontal axis—remains foundational. This linearity, reflected in both temporal sequence (as in spoken language) and spatial arrangement (as in written text), is essential for differentiation and for the production of meaning through syntactic order. The example “Pierre beats Paul,” which completely changes sense if reversed, highlights the temporal and sequential constraints that structure meaning. For psychoanalysis, this is the level at which neurosis, fantasy, and identity are structured: the order of signifiers matters, and the temporal unfolding of speech (including in the analytic session) is not arbitrary.

“But it is enough to listen to poetry, which perhaps was not the case for F. de Saussure, for a polyphony to be heard there and for all discourse to prove itself aligned along the multiple staves of a score.”

Poetry, however, interrupts the straightforwardness of linearity. In poetry, multiple registers, echoes, repetitions, and resonances arise—a “polyphony”—that is not captured by simple temporal sequence. The signifying chain is revealed to be more than linear: it is organized along “multiple staves,” like a musical score, with vertical as well as horizontal relations. The analyst is reminded that unconscious formations—dreams, slips, symptoms—are overdetermined, polysemic, and multiply articulated. Meaning does not simply move forward in a line; it reverberates across axes, resonates with other times and contexts, and is structured by a multidimensional network of signifiers.

“Indeed, there is no signifying chain that does not carry, as attached to the punctuation of each of its units, all that is articulated from attested contexts, vertically, so to speak, from this point.”

Every point in the signifying chain—each word, each pause, each punctuation—bears with it a “vertical” array of resonances: all the previous contexts, uses, and associations of that signifier, all that can be “articulated” from it. This vertical dimension is the source of metaphor, condensation, and the unconscious echo of prior scenes and meanings. The structure of discourse is thus not simply one-dimensional but is a web where meaning is generated through intersection, context, and the sedimentation of prior speech. The analyst listens not only to what is said and in what order, but to the “vertical” dimension of associations, lapses, and returns—what is condensed or displaced in the speech of the analysand.

“Thus, to take our word: tree, no longer in its nominal isolation, but at the end of one of these punctuations, we shall see that it is not only by virtue of the fact that the word bar is its anagram, that it crosses that of the Saussurean algorithm.”

When “tree” is considered not as an isolated noun but in the context of its place in the chain—“at the end of one of these punctuations”—it participates in a complex web of relations, not only through linear sequence but through anagrammatic play (“barre” as an anagram of “arbre” in French), homophony, and metaphor. This “crossing” with the “bar” of the Saussurean algorithm is not a mere linguistic accident; it signals how signifiers are structurally connected, layered, and articulated in ways that escape conscious intention. For the Lacanian psychoanalyst, this underlines the endless productivity and mobility of the signifier, the way it traverses axes and registers, generating formations that inscribe the subject and the unconscious. The bar is not only a mark of separation but a site of crossing, condensation, and transformation, demonstrating that the real of language and the real of the unconscious are both overdetermined and radically open.

“For, decomposed into the double spectrum of its vowels and consonants, it summons with the oak and the plane tree the meanings with which it is charged in our flora, of strength and majesty.”

When the word “tree” is broken down into its phonemic elements—its vowels and consonants—it is immediately placed within a system of associations and symbolic meanings drawn from the culture’s flora. The oak and the plane tree, for instance, bring connotations of strength, grandeur, and majesty. The signifier thus never functions in isolation; even at the level of its phonetic decomposition, it is already linked to networks of meaning, myth, and cultural heritage. For the analyst, this demonstrates that meaning is always constructed by the differential play of signifiers and their historical-symbolic overdetermination, not by any inherent quality of the word or thing.

“Draining all the symbolic contexts in which it is taken in the Hebrew of the Bible, it raises on a treeless mound the shadow of the cross.”

The signifier “tree” draws in (“drains”) further symbolic resonances from religious texts, especially the Hebrew Bible, where trees frequently signify life, law, knowledge, or trial. The mention of the cross, which is “raised on a treeless mound,” reveals the ultimate symbolic condensation: the tree as cross, an emblem of sacrifice and redemption, which itself is abstracted from any literal arboreal reality. The signifier “tree” is thus the site of an immense symbolic accretion, bearing both cultural and theological charge. For psychoanalysis, this movement shows how signifiers traverse contexts and meanings, concentrating the unconscious kernel of a culture in single points of reference.

“Then it is reduced to the capital Y of the sign of dichotomy, which, without the image telling the story of the coat of arms, would owe nothing to the tree, however genealogical it claims to be.”

The tree, further abstracted, becomes the capital letter Y, a graphical sign of dichotomy and bifurcation. In genealogical trees, this shape represents division and lineage, yet, when detached from its narrative context (the coat of arms or family story), the image owes nothing to the tree itself. Here, Lacan emphasizes that signification is constructed through differential relations and graphical forms—the Y as the sign of split or choice—rather than any essential link to botanical reality. This underlines the arbitrariness and materiality of the signifier, which structures not only language but the imaginary genealogies of the subject.

“Circulatory tree, tree of life of the cerebellum, tree of Saturn or Diana, crystals precipitated in a tree that conducts lightning, is it your figure that traces our destiny in the tortoise shell passed through the fire, or your lightning that brings forth from an unnamable night this slow mutation of being in the ἐν Πάντα [Greek: en Panta, ‘in everything’] of language:”

The motif of the tree proliferates through multiple registers: the anatomical (“circulatory tree,” “tree of life of the cerebellum”), the mythological (“tree of Saturn or Diana”), the physical (“crystals precipitated in a tree,” the conductor of lightning), and the divinatory (the tortoise shell, as in Chinese oracle reading). The tree becomes a template or matrix for tracing fate and transformation—its image is mobilized to map destiny, passage, and metamorphosis. The Greek “ἐν Πάντα,” meaning “in everything,” points to the universality of the signifier, how the structure of the tree is woven throughout language and world. For the Lacanian, this is not mystical but structural: the signifier “tree” is a node of condensation, a place where multiple chains intersect and where the unconscious deposits its symbolic excess.

“No! says the Tree, it says: No! in the glittering Of its proud head”

The tree, in poetic language, is personified and made to speak: “No!” The signifier “No!”—uttered in the “glittering of its proud head”—becomes a site of affirmation and resistance, a symbolic refusal. The poetic gesture here makes manifest the way signifiers do not merely describe but perform; the “No!” is a cut, an act, a position taken within language. For psychoanalysis, this kind of poetic utterance is a model for how the unconscious speaks: in refusals, negations, condensations, and flashes of meaning that exceed simple reference.

“verses that we hold as equally legitimate to be heard in the harmonics of the tree as their reverse:”

The legitimacy of the verses is not restricted to their literal order; their reverse can be heard and understood within the same “harmonics.” The signifier, and thus meaning, is polyphonic and reversible, echoing across the axes of the chain, not bound by univocal direction. For the analyst, the unconscious too is structured by such reversals and ambiguities: the repressed returns, signifiers are inverted or displaced, meaning emerges in the play of permutations.

“Let the storm treat universally As it does a blade of grass.”

The storm’s force, universal in its scope, reduces all difference, “treating” the mighty tree as it would “a blade of grass.” The parallelism here highlights the structural relation between the particular and the universal, the proud and the humble, the one who says “No!” and the one who is swept away. The poetic logic is the logic of the signifier—parallelism, contrast, and the power to both differentiate and collapse distinctions. For psychoanalysis, this speaks to the universality of the law, the drive, the symbolic function, as well as the violence by which the symbolic order levels, organizes, or disrupts the field of meaning and identity.

“For this modern stanza is ordered according to the same law of parallelism of the signifier, whose harmony governs the primitive Slavic epic and the most refined Chinese poetry.”

The law governing the poetic stanza—the law of parallelism, repetition, and variation—is the same law that structures ancient epic poetry and the most sophisticated forms of literary expression. This is the law of the signifier: the harmony and resonance found in parallel structures, recurring motifs, and the articulation of difference. Lacan situates the poetic function as a universal property of the signifier, transcending cultural and historical particularity. For the Lacanian analyst, the poetic logic is the logic of the unconscious: the formations of dreams, symptoms, and slips obey similar principles of parallelism, resonance, and transformation.

“As is seen in the common mode of being where tree and grass are chosen, so that there arise the signs of contradiction of: saying ‘No!’ and of: treating as, and that through the categorical contrast of the particularism of the proud one to the universality of its reduction, the indistinguishable glittering of the eternal instant is consummated in the condensation of the head and the storm.”

The “common mode of being”—the way both tree and grass are selected as poetic terms—creates a structure where contradiction becomes possible: the refusal (“No!”) and the reduction to sameness (“treating as”). Through this “categorical contrast” between the particular (the proud tree) and the universal (the storm’s force), poetry produces a moment of “indistinguishable glittering,” an “eternal instant” where singularity and universality are condensed. For psychoanalysis, this condensation is not just a literary effect but a structural operation of the unconscious, where signifiers are woven together, creating sites of intensity, contradiction, and the production of meaning out of opposition and alignment. The condensation of “the head and the storm” is a model for how the unconscious produces meaning through the convergence of difference, conflict, and poetic logic.

“But all this signifier, one may say, can only operate by being present in the subject. This is exactly what I satisfy by supposing that it has passed to the level of the signified.”

There may be an objection that the complex operations of the signifier only become effective when they are somehow present “in the subject,” as if they require subjective interiorization or conscious apprehension. Lacan’s response is to grant this, but only on the condition that the signifier “passes to the level of the signified”—that is, when it is taken up and retroactively re-inscribed as meaning. This “passage” is not a guarantee of subjective mastery; rather, it reveals the structure by which the signifier produces effects in the subject, sometimes without the subject’s awareness. In psychoanalytic terms, this is precisely how unconscious formations work: they are signifiers that structure the subject’s position, even when not consciously grasped as such.

“For what matters is not that the subject knows more or less of it. (GENTLEMEN and LADIES could be written in a language unknown to the little boy and the little girl and their quarrel would be all the more exclusively a quarrel of words, but not for that any less ready to be charged with meaning).”

The effectiveness of the signifier is not measured by conscious knowledge or comprehension. Whether or not the children understand the words “Gentlemen” and “Ladies,” those signifiers still organize their experience and their conflict. The quarrel would persist even if the language were unknown: the signifier’s operation is structural and performative, not limited to explicit knowledge. For psychoanalysis, this is a crucial point: the unconscious is not a matter of not-yet-known content, but of the structuring power of the signifier, which organizes the subject’s relations and desires even in the absence of clear understanding.

“What this structure of the signifying chain reveals is the possibility I have, precisely insofar as my language is shared with other subjects—that is, insofar as this language exists—of using it to signify something entirely different from what it says. A function more worthy of being highlighted in speech than that of disguising the subject’s thought (most often indefinable): namely, that of indicating the place of this subject in the search for truth.”

The signifying chain enables a foundational ambiguity: because language is social, shared, and thus structured in the field of the Other, it is always possible to use the signifier to say something different from what is explicitly stated. This is not simply a matter of concealment or “disguising thought,” which already presumes a stable, pre-existing content. Rather, the primary function is to mark the place of the subject in relation to truth. In speech, the subject is not just a container of thoughts but is constituted and located by the position they occupy in the structure of enunciation—by how they are placed or displaced in the chain of signifiers. This is central to psychoanalytic ethics: speech is always more than information; it is an act that positions the subject with respect to desire, law, and truth.

“Indeed, it suffices for me to plant my tree in the expression: to climb the tree, or even to project onto it the mocking light that a descriptive context gives to the word: to arbor, in order not to let myself be imprisoned in any communiqué of facts, however official it may be, and, if I know the truth, to make it understood despite all censorship, between the lines, through the sole signifier my acrobatics through the branches of the tree may constitute—provocative to the point of burlesque or only perceptible to a trained eye, depending on whether I want to be understood by the crowd or by a select few.”

By playing with language, inserting the signifier “tree” into new contexts (“to climb the tree,” “to arbor”), one can evade the literalism of official discourse, escape the imprisoning force of “communiqués of facts.” The true operation of the signifier is revealed in its flexibility: the subject can transmit the truth through wit, irony, or poetic displacement, subverting censorship “between the lines.” The signifier’s function here is both to veil and to reveal, depending on the position and intention of the speaker. The meaning may be “provocative to the point of burlesque” or subtle, only legible to those with the proper training—reflecting the difference between interpretation for the masses and the selectivity of the analytic act. For the Lacanian analyst, this dramatizes how the unconscious speaks: always between the lines, always through the detours, slips, and acrobatics of the signifier, revealing the subject’s relation to truth not through what is said, but through how it is said, and to whom.

“The properly signifying function thus depicted in language has a name. This name, we learned in our childhood grammar on the final page where the shadow of Quintilian, relegated to a ghostly chapter to convey final considerations on style, seemed to hurl its voice under the threat of the hook.”

The operation of the signifier in language, as described so far, is not just a philosophical abstraction—it is a function with a classical rhetorical name, found in the tradition of grammar and style. Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician, appears here as a spectral authority, signaling the enduring importance of rhetorical categories in understanding how language works. In schoolbooks, these notions were perhaps relegated to the margins, but they contain the key to the analytic function of language. Psychoanalysis finds itself in continuity with, but also beyond, this rhetorical tradition: it takes the insights of style and trope and radicalizes them, showing their structuring force in the unconscious.

“It is among the figures of style or tropes—from which we get the verb ‘to find’—that this name is indeed to be found. This name is metonymy.”

Among the rhetorical figures—tropes, which are “turns” or “ways of finding” meaning in language—one discovers the operation that underlies the signifying chain: metonymy. Metonymy is not an ornament, but a principle of how signifiers relate and produce meaning through contiguity and displacement. The verb “to find” is etymologically linked to trope, underscoring the process by which meaning is discovered or constituted not by direct representation but by relational substitution. For psychoanalysis, metonymy is a fundamental process of the unconscious, present in slips, dreams, and symptoms.

“Of which we will recall only the example that was given: thirty sails. For the uneasiness it provoked in us, that the word ship hiding there seemed to double its presence by being able, through the very repetition of this example, to borrow its figurative meaning—veiled less these illustrious sails than the definition they were supposed to illustrate.”

The classic example of metonymy—“thirty sails” to mean “thirty ships”—always leaves a residue of uneasiness. The substitution of “sails” for “ships” is not only a rhetorical device but a displacement in the signifying chain. The word “ship” is hidden but present, haunting the example. Repeatedly invoking this example risks masking the very definition it is meant to clarify; the displacement enacted by the trope reveals how signification always leaves something unsaid, evoking what is absent through what is present. The anxiety around metonymy arises because it exposes the slipperiness and non-coincidence at the heart of language.

“The part taken for the whole, we told ourselves in fact, if the thing is to be taken in reality, gives us little idea of what we are to understand about the importance of the fleet that these thirty sails are nevertheless supposed to assess: that a ship has only one sail is in fact the least common case.”

Metonymy’s logic (“the part for the whole”) is only loosely tethered to empirical reality. In practice, ships rarely have a single sail, making the phrase “thirty sails” a poor index of actual fleet size or constitution. This reveals the autonomy of the signifier: its functioning is not determined by material reality, but by its position within the linguistic and symbolic chain. The fleet’s “importance” is assessed not by a count of physical objects, but by a logic of substitution, displacement, and repetition, which is the very principle of the unconscious.

“From this one sees that the connection between the ship and the sail is nowhere else but in the signifier, and that it is in the literalness of this connection that metonymy is based10. We will designate this as the first side of the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can take its place there.”

The relationship between “ship” and “sail” exists only in the domain of the signifier—their proximity, contiguity, and substitutability in language. Metonymy is grounded in the literal chain, not in metaphorical resemblance or reference to a real object. This is the “first side” of the signifier’s field of action: metonymy establishes meaning through displacement along the axis of combination, the contiguity of signifiers. In the analytic session, this is the movement of associations, slips, and the metonymic drift of speech, where meaning is produced through the endless chaining of signifiers.

“Let us say the other. That is metaphor. And let us immediately illustrate it: the Quillet dictionary seemed fit to provide a sample not suspect of being selected, and I did not look any further for the joke than the well-known line by Victor Hugo:”

On the other side stands metaphor, the trope of substitution by resemblance rather than by contiguity. To illustrate metaphor, Lacan draws not on an esoteric example but on an entry from a standard dictionary (the Quillet), and invokes a familiar line from Victor Hugo—choosing an instance that is publicly available, not tailored for psychoanalytic demonstration. This strategy emphasizes that the logic of metaphor, like metonymy, is omnipresent in language and not the exclusive property of literary or psychoanalytic discourse.

“Her sheaf was neither miserly nor hateful…”

This line by Victor Hugo serves as a literary instance of metaphor, in which qualities proper to a person (“miserly” or “hateful”) are attributed to a “sheaf”—a bundle of grain. The substitution operates on similarity, transferring human affective traits to an inanimate object, thereby transforming meaning through resemblance. For psychoanalysis, metaphor is not just a poetic device but the key operation of the unconscious—central to the formation of symptoms, dreams, and the constitution of the subject.

“under the aspect of which I presented metaphor at the appropriate moment in my seminar on psychoses.”

Lacan foregrounds that metaphor was addressed “at the appropriate moment” in his seminar on psychoses. The timing signals the clinical importance of metaphor: the formation or foreclosure of metaphorical substitution is directly tied to psychic structure. In psychosis, the failure or foreclosure of metaphor (the Name-of-the-Father, as a metaphorical operation) produces specific clinical effects. For the Lacanian, the logic of metaphor is thus essential not only to literature but to the dynamics of subject formation, symptom production, and the structure of the unconscious.

“Let us say that modern poetry and the surrealist school have led us to make great strides here, by demonstrating that any conjunction of two signifiers would be equivalent to constitute a metaphor, if the condition of the greatest possible disparity of the signified images were not required for the production of the poetic spark, in other words, for metaphorical creation to occur.”

Modern poetry, particularly the surrealist movement, expanded the field of metaphor by showing that a metaphor could in principle be created by joining any two signifiers. Yet, this is only true in a formal sense; the real production of poetic or metaphorical effect—the “poetic spark”—depends on a maximal disparity between the images signified. The more dissimilar the signifieds, the greater the surprise and intensity produced by their conjunction. This paradox is central for Lacanian psychoanalysis: the unconscious functions not by similarity, but by difference, rupture, and the unexpected forging of connections that transform meaning.

“Certainly, this radical position is based on an experience called automatic writing, which would not have been attempted without the assurance its pioneers took from Freud’s discovery. But it remains marked by confusion because the doctrine is false.”

The avant-garde experiments in automatic writing, inspired by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, attempted to bypass conscious intention and allow the free association of signifiers. While this method did illuminate new possibilities in poetic creation and the workings of the unconscious, it is also marked by “confusion” and doctrinal error. The confusion lies in believing that any automatic conjunction of signifiers would inherently generate metaphorical meaning or poetic value. Lacan’s critique is that there is a structure to metaphor that is not reducible to mere juxtaposition or chance.

“The creative spark of metaphor does not spring from the bringing together of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It springs between two signifiers, one of which has substituted itself for the other by taking its place in the signifying chain, the hidden signifier remaining present through its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain.”

True metaphor involves substitution: one signifier replaces another in the chain, and it is in this substitution—not simple conjunction—that the creative “spark” occurs. The replaced (hidden) signifier remains present through its metonymic connections, lingering in the background of the chain. This operation is crucial for psychoanalysis: metaphor is the locus of unconscious formation, the place where a signifier, absent on the surface, is nonetheless structuring meaning from within, as in the symptom or the dream. The substitution creates a condensation—Freud’s Verdichtung—where multiple signifying chains intersect, and new meanings emerge from their overlay.

“One word for another, such is the formula of metaphor, and if you are a poet, you will produce, as if it were a game, a continuous flow, even a dazzling fabric of metaphors. Moreover, the effect of intoxication achieved in the dialogue that Jean Tardieu composed under this title is obtained only by the demonstration performed there of the radical superfluity of all meaning for a perfectly convincing representation of bourgeois comedy.”

The formula “one word for another” encapsulates metaphor: the poet (or the unconscious) plays with substitution, producing a “dazzling fabric of metaphors,” a continuous, playful flow. In Jean Tardieu’s dialogue “Intoxication,” this proliferation is pushed to its limit, exposing the “radical superfluity of all meaning”—that is, the form and play of signifiers can create a convincing representation, even in the absence of stable, referential sense. This effect, so important for both poetry and psychoanalysis, shows that the order of the signifier exceeds the order of meaning. For the analyst, this is a structural reality of the unconscious: the symptom, dream, or joke can “represent” without being anchored in stable content; it operates by the logic of substitution, condensation, and the endless movement of the signifier.

“In Hugo’s verse, it is clear that not the slightest light springs from the assertion that a sheaf is neither miserly nor hateful, for the reason that there is no question of it possessing more of the merit than of the demerit of these attributes, both being, along with it, properties of Boaz who exercises them in disposing of her, without sharing his feelings with her.”

In the cited line from Victor Hugo, the sheaf (bundle of grain) is attributed the qualities of being “neither miserly nor hateful.” However, there is no literal or logical basis for ascribing these human characteristics to an inanimate object. The point is that both avarice and hatred, as well as the act of giving the sheaf, are qualities or actions that properly belong to Boaz—the biblical figure—who dispenses the sheaf. The sheaf itself does not possess or lack these traits; they are properties circulating around the subject Boaz. The poetic effect arises not from any objective merit or demerit in the sheaf, but from the play of signification and the displacement of properties.

“If his sheaf refers to Boaz, as is indeed the case, it is by substituting itself for him in the signifying chain, in the very place that awaited it to be elevated by a degree through the removal of avarice and hatred.”

The sheaf stands in for Boaz, replacing him in the signifying chain precisely at the moment where the poem removes (negates) the negative attributes. This substitution is the mechanism of metaphor: one signifier (the sheaf) is elevated, stepping into the place of another (Boaz), while the qualities of avarice and hatred are metaphorically cleared away. The poetic spark occurs through this substitution, as the sheaf becomes the locus of qualities previously associated with Boaz, transformed by the chain’s logic.

“But hence it is also from Boaz that the sheaf has cleared this space, as he is now thrown into the darkness outside where avarice and hatred shelter him in the hollow of their negation.”

By this movement, Boaz is displaced, cast into the “darkness” where the negative traits (avarice and hatred) remain, but now in the realm of negation. In metaphor, the subject is both replaced and marked by the void or lack left behind. The sheaf shines in its generosity, while Boaz is eclipsed, hidden with the traits that are now denied. The analytic implication is that metaphor is always double: it brings to the fore a new signification by casting another term into the shadows, where it is defined by absence or negation.

“But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Boaz could not return to it, the thin thread of the little his that attaches him to it being an additional obstacle to reconnecting this return by a title of possession that would keep him within avarice and hatred. His affirmed generosity is seen reduced to less than nothing by the munificence of the sheaf which, being taken from nature, knows neither our restraint nor our rejections, and even in its accumulation remains lavish by our measure.”

After the metaphorical substitution, Boaz cannot simply reclaim his former position; the possessive “his” (as in “his sheaf”) is a fragile connection that cannot re-establish ownership or re-inscribe him within the earlier structure of avarice and hatred. The sheaf, once invested with meaning, is now marked by an abundance that exceeds Boaz’s human generosity. The metaphor has transformed the sheaf into a signifier of infinite, natural munificence—beyond human calculation or moral restraint. This operation demonstrates how metaphor abolishes the subject as a locus of meaning and redistributes qualities in ways that cannot be undone by simply reattaching the signified to its former “owner.”

“But if in this profusion the giver has disappeared with the gift, it is to resurface in what surrounds the figure where he has annihilated himself. For it is the radiance of fertility—which announces the surprise celebrated by the poem, namely the promise that the old man will receive in a sacred context of his coming to fatherhood.”

Even though the figure of the giver vanishes in the act of giving—Boaz disappears behind his gift—he reappears in the broader context, as the poem frames the event within the promise of fertility, new life, and fatherhood. The radiance of the sheaf as metaphor does not annihilate Boaz completely but prepares the ground for his re-emergence in another symbolic register. This is a poetic manifestation of the return of the repressed: what is negated or substituted in one position returns in another, now linked to fertility, transformation, and symbolic renewal.

“It is thus between the signifier of a man’s proper name and that which abolishes it metaphorically that the poetic spark is produced, here all the more effective in realizing the meaning of fatherhood as it reproduces the mythical event in which Freud reconstructed, in the unconscious of every man, the journey of the paternal mystery.”

The poetic effect arises in the space between Boaz’s name (as signifier of the subject) and the metaphor that abolishes or displaces that name. This interval is where the “spark” of metaphor is generated, and where the meaning of fatherhood is realized in its fullest symbolic sense. The poetic operation here echoes Freud’s reconstruction of the “paternal mystery” in the unconscious—the primal scene, the mythic narrative of the father’s position, disappearance, and symbolic return. The psychoanalytic act, like the poetic act, is grounded in the power of the signifier to abolish, displace, and re-inscribe meaning, enacting the mythical journey of the father within the structure of the subject’s unconscious.

“Modern metaphor does not have any other structure. That is why this utterance: Love is a stone laughing in the sun, recreates love in a dimension that I have said seems tenable to me, against its ever-imminent sliding into the mirage of a narcissistic altruism.”

The structure of modern metaphor, in Lacan’s account, remains that of substitution and condensation within the signifying chain. The example “Love is a stone laughing in the sun” exemplifies this: the metaphor functions not by resemblance but by the shock of conjunction between radically heterogeneous signifiers. This poetic operation resists the reduction of love to a “narcissistic altruism”—a fantasy of fusion or reflection between ego and other—by producing a new dimension of sense, one that emerges precisely where the signifiers are at their most incongruous. The effect is to relocate the meaning of love in a space of difference, opacity, and play, not in sentimental transparency.

“One sees that metaphor is situated at the precise point where meaning is produced in nonsense, that is, at that passage Freud discovered which, when crossed in reverse, gives rise to that word which in French is ‘the word’ par excellence, the word that has no other patronage than the signifier of the mind11, and where it is touched that it is man’s very destiny that he challenges by the derision of the signifier.”

Metaphor arises exactly where meaning emerges out of apparent nonsense, at the threshold where language seems to break down and yet delivers its most powerful effects. This is the Freudian moment: where the unconscious formation, the slip, the joke, or the dream traverses the space of non-sense and retroactively produces meaning. In French, “le mot” (the word, but also the joke or witty remark) is the site of this operation: it is the product of the signifier’s autonomy, a creation of mind (esprit) rather than intention. In this, man confronts the real of his own destiny—not as a master of meaning, but as the site where the signifier works, sometimes with irony or derision, sometimes with violence or surprise.

“But to come back from here, what does man find in metonymy, if it is to be more than the power to circumvent the obstacles of social censorship? Does this form, which gives its field to truth in its oppression, not reveal some servitude inherent in its presentation?”

Metonymy, as the other great operation of the signifier, is often seen as a technique for dodging censorship or repression, allowing the subject to speak obliquely, to skirt prohibitions. Yet, if this is all, it risks remaining a function of servitude—a forced accommodation to the constraints of the Other, a structure of truth only in the mode of oppression or lack. The analyst is thus called to consider whether metonymy, for all its capacity to sustain truth under duress, does not also enact the subject’s fundamental submission to the signifying chain, to the barring, the veiling, and the endless deferral that language imposes.

“It is worth reading the book in which Leo Strauss, from the classical land offering asylum to those who have chosen freedom, meditates on the relationship between the art of writing and persecution12. In pressing as closely as possible the kind of connaturality that ties this art to this condition, he lets one glimpse that something which imposes its form here, in the effect of truth on desire.”

Leo Strauss’s work on the relationship between writing and persecution is invoked as an exemplary meditation on how the truth is structured under conditions of censorship. Strauss demonstrates that, historically, the art of writing is intimately linked to social oppression—writers encode, displace, and veil their truths in order to evade persecution, producing an entire field where metonymy becomes the very form of thought. The “effect of truth on desire” here is shaped by the necessity to speak indirectly, to let truth slip through the cracks, to play the long game of signifiers in the face of the Other’s prohibition.

“But do we not feel for some time now that by having followed the paths of the letter to reach Freudian truth, we are burning, its fire taking from everywhere.”

In pursuing the signifier—the “paths of the letter”—to uncover Freudian truth, psychoanalysis finds itself consuming and consumed by this very fire. The work of interpretation, the journey through the signifying chain, is not a cold or merely intellectual exercise, but a passionate, dangerous, and consuming affair. The “fire” is that of the unconscious, of desire, of the truth that emerges only through and because of the signifier’s unpredictable and sometimes destructive energy. The analyst, in following these paths, finds that the letter burns, illuminates, and transforms, drawing heat and power from every possible source—history, poetry, law, the symptom, and the enigma of language itself.

“Certainly, the letter kills, as it is said, when the spirit gives life. We do not deny it, having had to pay homage somewhere here to a noble victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter, but we also ask how without the letter the spirit would live.”

The proverb that “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” points to a traditional suspicion of literalism and formalism: to focus on the letter (the material signifier) can suffocate the living force of meaning or spirit (esprit). Lacan acknowledges this tension, even referencing the “noble victim” of trying to find the spirit directly in the letter—a gesture that leads to tragedy or failure when the letter is made the exclusive repository of truth. Yet he inverts the problem: the “spirit” itself, that living and generative force, cannot exist without the support and articulation of the letter. Meaning, thought, and even vitality emerge from the structuring operations of the signifier; without the letter, the spirit would remain a mere claim, an empty potential.

“The claims of the spirit would yet remain irreducible, if the letter had not proven that it produces all its effects of truth in man, without the spirit having the least involvement.”

The “claims of the spirit”—the aspirations toward meaning, truth, and interiority—might be infinite, but it is the letter, the material signifier, that actually produces the effects of truth in the subject. The operations of language and the unconscious unfold “without the spirit having the least involvement.” This assertion radically decenters the subject: the unconscious effects, the formations of desire and truth, are generated not by the will or interiority, but by the machinery of the signifier, the letter’s differential logic. In analysis, truth is encountered not as the presence of spirit, but as the effect of the letter at work.

“This revelation is what came to Freud, and his discovery, he called the unconscious.”

This is the core of the Freudian revelation: the unconscious is not a reservoir of hidden spirit, intention, or content, but a function of the signifier, of the letter’s work. Freud’s discovery is that the unconscious is structured like a language; its truths are produced, not expressed. The slips, dreams, and symptoms are not messages from a hidden spirit, but the effects of signifiers at play—combinations, substitutions, and condensations in the letter itself.

“II. – THE LETTER IN THE UNCONSCIOUS”

This new section signals a move to directly engage the letter as it operates within the unconscious. The psychoanalyst now focuses not on general questions of language and spirit, but on the concrete ways the letter functions as the structuring principle of the unconscious.

“Freud’s complete works present us with one page out of three of philological references, one page out of two of logical inferences, everywhere a dialectical apprehension of experience, the linguistic analytics there reinforcing its proportions as the unconscious is more directly concerned.”

Freud’s corpus is saturated with references to philology (the study of language and textual analysis), with logical argumentation, and with dialectical thought. The analytic engagement with language is not peripheral but central to his project: as Freud addresses the unconscious more directly, the density of linguistic analysis only increases. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, this confirms that the unconscious is to be approached through its textuality, its logic, and its dialectics—the play and struggle of the letter in its endless permutations and articulations.

“Thus, in the science of dreams, every page is about what we call the letter of discourse, in its texture, in its uses, in its immanence to the matter at hand. For this work opens, with the work itself, the royal road to the unconscious. And we are warned of this by Freud, whose confidential aside when he launches this book toward us in the first days of this century13 only confirms what he proclaimed to the end: in this all-or-nothing of his message is the whole of his discovery.”

The analysis of dreams, as the “royal road to the unconscious,” is fundamentally the analysis of the letter in discourse: the texture, the uses, the way language and its materiality are woven through the dream. The “immanence” of the letter to the dream means that every dream is a textual production, a tissue of signifiers whose laws and logic must be deciphered as such. Freud’s own statements—his “confidential aside”—underline that his discovery is uncompromising: the message of psychoanalysis is “all or nothing” precisely because it stands or falls with the structural priority of the signifier, the letter, in the unconscious. For the analyst, this is the ethic and rigor of the analytic act: to pursue the letter, wherever it leads, as the vehicle and engine of truth in the speaking being.

“The first clause articulated from the very opening chapter, because the exposition cannot bear any delay, is that the dream is a rebus. And Freud stipulates that it must be taken as I first said, literally.”

Freud’s fundamental assertion, set forth at the very beginning of his dream theory, is that the dream functions as a rebus—a pictorial puzzle whose elements must be deciphered letter by letter, signifier by signifier. Lacan insists that this should be understood literally: the dream is not a code for hidden content, but a text constructed of signifiers, operating by the rules of language and the letter. For psychoanalysis, this means that interpretation must focus not on translating dream images into latent content but on working through the lettered, phonematic material itself.

“This has to do with the instance in the dream of that same lettered (in other words, phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse.”

The same structure that articulates signifiers in speech is present in the dream, but at the level of the “letter” and “phoneme.” Dreams are structured as sequences or chains of signifiers—phonemic, written, or visual elements—subject to the same laws of combination, displacement, and condensation that govern spoken language. The analyst’s task is to attend to this structure: to the network of differences, substitutions, and juxtapositions that operate in the dream just as they do in waking discourse.

“Just like the unnatural figures of the boat on the roof or the man with a comma for a head expressly evoked by Freud, the images of the dream are to be retained only for their value as signifiers, that is, for what they allow one to spell out of the ‘proverb’ proposed by the dream’s rebus.”

Dream images—such as a boat perched on a roof or a man whose head is a comma—are not to be taken as representations or symbols of hidden content. Instead, they must be considered as signifiers in a chain, whose meaning lies in what they permit to be “spelled out,” much like the solution of a rebus or proverb. The dream’s sense is not a translation of its images into pre-existing meanings, but the product of working through the material network of signifiers, uncovering the play of language at work.

“This structure of language that makes the operation of reading possible is at the origin of the signifiance of the dream, of the Traumdeutung.”

It is the structural logic of language—the way signifiers are linked, displaced, and substituted—that allows dreams to be “read.” The “signifiance” of the dream, its capacity to generate meaning, derives from this logic, which Freud’s Traumdeutung (“The Interpretation of Dreams”) discovers and articulates. For Lacanian analysis, the unconscious speaks in the letter, and the dream is a privileged site where the signifier operates at its most creative and enigmatic.

“Freud exemplifies in every possible way that this value of the image as signifier has nothing to do with its meaning, bringing into play the hieroglyphs of Egypt where it would be ridiculous to deduce from the frequency of the vulture, which is an aleph, or of the chick, which is a vau, to indicate a form of the verb to be and the plurals, that the text has even the slightest interest in these ornithological specimens.”

Freud demonstrates that dream images, like Egyptian hieroglyphs, must not be understood as references to their literal, representational meanings. In Egyptian script, the frequent appearance of vultures or chicks does not indicate that the text is about birds; rather, these figures function as signifiers—vulture as “aleph,” chick as “vau”—operating as letters in the construction of words and grammar. To read a dream as a direct reference to its images is as misguided as imagining Egyptian writing is about birds simply because bird-shapes appear. For the analyst, this analogy clarifies the irreducible autonomy of the signifier.

“Freud finds his bearings in certain uses of the signifier in this writing, which are erased in our own, such as the use of a determinative, adding the exponent of a categorical figure to the literal representation of a verbal term, but it is in order better to bring us back to the fact that we are in a writing where even the so-called ‘ideogram’ is a letter.”

Freud notes certain features of hieroglyphic writing, such as determinatives—signs that categorize or specify the meaning of a word by adding a further symbolic mark. In modern writing, much of this explicit structuring has disappeared, but the underlying principle remains: even the “ideogram,” supposedly a direct image of meaning, is, in truth, a letter—a component of the signifying chain. For psychoanalysis, the dream, like writing, operates through the letter, not through any pre-given sense or representation. The “ideogram” is a signifier, participating in the chain, subjected to the laws of difference, substitution, and condensation that animate the unconscious.

“But there is no need for the common confusion about this term for, in the mind of the psychoanalyst who has no linguistic training, the prejudice prevails of a symbolism derived from natural analogy, or even from the coaptative image of instinct.”

There is a persistent confusion among analysts without linguistic formation: the belief that the unconscious speaks through a symbolism based on natural analogies or instinctual correspondences. This leads to interpreting dream images or symptoms as if they functioned like simple, universal symbols—for example, a snake representing sexuality purely by instinctive analogy. Lacan warns that this approach is a misunderstanding; the logic of the unconscious is not grounded in natural symbolism or instinctual meaning, but in the play and structure of the signifier.

“So much so that, outside of the French school which guards against this, it is along the lines of: seeing in coffee grounds is not reading in hieroglyphs, that I have to recall a technique to its principles, one whose ways can be justified by nothing other than the aim of the unconscious.”

Most schools of psychoanalysis, apart from the French tradition, still confuse the act of reading the unconscious with a kind of divination—like interpreting coffee grounds—rather than as the deciphering of a structured script, as with hieroglyphs. The analytic task, Lacan reminds us, is to follow a technique rooted solely in the principles of the unconscious: interpretation is not magical but structural, a work of deciphering rather than intuitive “seeing.” The aim is always to articulate the truth of the unconscious, not to uncover some pre-existing or “natural” meaning.

“It must be said that this is accepted only with difficulty and that the mental vice denounced earlier enjoys such favor that one can expect today’s psychoanalyst to admit that he decodes, before resolving to make with Freud the necessary stops (turn toward the statue of Champollion, says the guide) to understand that he deciphers: what is distinguished from the former by the fact that a cryptogram has all its dimensions only when it is that of a lost language.”

There is resistance to this approach. Analysts will more readily admit to “decoding” than to “deciphering.” Decoding implies a simple translation from one language to another, a substitution of signifieds, as if the dream were a code whose message is easily extractable. In contrast, “deciphering” (as with Champollion and the Rosetta Stone) refers to interpreting an unknown or lost language—a process that reveals the depth and complexity of the signifier’s work. The unconscious is not a code to be cracked, but a script whose sense emerges only through the slow and careful work of reading the structure. The difference is crucial: decoding presumes fixed correspondences, while deciphering means engaging with the singular, irreducible, and lost quality of the subject’s language.

“To make these stops, however, is only to continue within the Traumdeutung.”

Making these “stops”—pausing to consider the textual, linguistic dimension of dream-work—is not to step outside Freud’s project, but to remain within the very logic of Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams). The analytic process is always a matter of reading, deciphering, following the pathways of the letter.

“The Entstellung, translated as transposition, where Freud shows the general precondition of the function of the dream, is what we designated above with Saussure as the sliding of the signified beneath the signifier, always at work (unconsciously, let us note) in discourse.”

Freud’s notion of Entstellung (distortion or transposition) describes how the manifest content of the dream is produced through transformations and displacements of the latent thoughts. For Lacan, this is homologous to Saussure’s description of the perpetual sliding of the signified under the signifier—meaning is never stable, but always shifting, displaced, deferred. This sliding is not only a property of dreams but is the ongoing, unconscious operation in all discourse, structuring both language and subjectivity.

“But the two aspects of the incidence of the signifier on the signified are found there.”

The dream-work, and by extension all unconscious formations, can be analyzed into two fundamental mechanisms, both describing how the signifier acts on the signified. These two aspects will correspond to the central operations of condensation and displacement, which Freud named, and which Lacan maps onto the axes of metaphor and metonymy.

“Condensation (Verdichtung) is the structure of superimposition of signifiers where metaphor takes its field, and whose name, by condensing in itself the word Dichtung [German: poetry], indicates the kinship of the mechanism to poetry, up to the point where it envelops poetry’s properly traditional function.”

Condensation (Verdichtung) involves the fusion or superimposition of multiple signifiers into a single image or word, creating dense nodes of meaning—just as in metaphor, where one signifier substitutes for another, generating new sense by overlaying chains of meaning. The very word Verdichtung contains Dichtung (poetry), signaling the deep link between poetic creation and the unconscious. In both, meaning is produced by the creative, often surprising collision and condensation of signifiers. In psychoanalysis, this is where the symptom, the dream image, or the joke emerges as a site of poetic density, charged with excess meaning and affect.

“Displacement (Verschiebung) is closer to the German term for that shift of meaning demonstrated by metonymy and which, from its first appearance in Freud, is presented as the most apt means of the unconscious to outwit censorship.”

Displacement, or Verschiebung, operates in the dream-work as a movement along the chain of signifiers, shifting emphasis from one element to another, thereby altering the field of meaning. This is precisely the mechanism of metonymy: the production of meaning through contiguity and substitution, where what is present stands in for what is absent or forbidden. Freud saw displacement as the unconscious’s most effective strategy for circumventing censorship, displacing forbidden thoughts onto more acceptable or innocuous signifiers. For the Lacanian psychoanalyst, this highlights the structural link between metonymy in discourse and displacement in the unconscious: both are the means by which meaning is deflected, desire is routed, and repression is enacted.

“What distinguishes these two mechanisms, which play a privileged role in dream-work (Traumarbeit), from their homologous function in discourse?—Nothing, except for a condition imposed on the signifying material, called Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, which must be translated as: consideration for the means of staging (the translation as ‘the role of the possibility of representation’ is here much too approximate).”

Condensation (metaphor) and displacement (metonymy) function identically in the unconscious and in discourse, with one crucial difference: the dream-work is constrained by Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, or the necessity to render thought in forms that can be “staged,” that is, expressed or represented within the available means of the dream’s signifying material. This is not merely about the “possibility of representation,” but about the material conditions of staging—what can be shown, acted out, or depicted with the dream’s resources. The unconscious is thus always working within the limits of its expressive medium, subject to the laws of the signifier but also to the conditions of its own scenic, material logic.

“But this condition constitutes a limitation exercised within the system of writing, far from dissolving it into a figurative semiology where it would join the phenomena of natural expression.”

This limitation—the need to stage, to make presentable—remains internal to the system of writing (broadly understood as the logic of the signifier). It does not reduce the dream to a mere pantomime, nor does it collapse the specificity of the signifier into the order of natural or instinctual expression. The dream, for Lacan, is not a return to pre-linguistic or instinctual forms, but an effect of the structuring operations of the letter. It is the laws of the signifier, not a code of natural symbols, that organize the material of the dream.

“By this, one could probably shed light on the problems of certain modes of pictography, which one is not authorized, simply because they have been abandoned as imperfect in writing, to consider as evolutionary stages.”

There is a temptation to treat pictographic forms of writing as primitive stages on the way to fully developed phonetic scripts. Lacan challenges this evolutionary logic: the dream, like pictography, is not to be dismissed as a less evolved form, but as a distinct, structured use of signifiers. Each mode of writing has its own constraints, affordances, and logic. What matters for psychoanalysis is the structure of the signifying chain, not the representational or “natural” transparency of the image.

“Let us say that the dream is similar to that parlor game where one must, in the hot seat, have the spectators guess a known statement or its variant by the sole means of silent staging.”

Dream formation can be likened to a charade or parlor game, where the player must convey a statement, name, or phrase through gestures and silent performance. The point is not the mimetic reproduction of meaning but the creative staging of signifiers under constraints. This analogy underscores that the dream is a scene, a script, not a transparent message; it operates by the transformation and displacement of its elements, not by simple representation.

“That the dream has speech at its disposal does not change anything, since for the unconscious it is only one element of the staging like any other.”

Even when speech appears in dreams, it functions as one signifying element among many—no more privileged than images, actions, or written text. For the unconscious, all these elements are part of the staging, the arrangement of signifiers in a scene. The analyst must treat dream speech not as the “true” or “privileged” content, but as material to be read alongside the visual and the gestural.

“It is precisely when the game and likewise the dream come up against the lack of taxiematic material to represent the logical articulations of causality, contradiction, hypothesis, etc., that they prove that both are a matter of writing and not of pantomime.”

The limitation of both charades and dreams emerges most sharply when logical relations (such as causality, contradiction, or hypothesis) must be represented without the necessary signifying tools. These limits reveal that the dream’s construction is not a return to pre-linguistic mimesis, but a form of writing—a structured manipulation of signifiers, not merely images or instincts. The unconscious, like language, faces the challenge of expressing logical relations with limited resources, resulting in creative and often convoluted constructions.

“The subtle procedures that the dream is found to employ to represent these logical articulations—much less artificially than the game usually does—are, in Freud, the subject of a special study where it is confirmed once again that the work of the dream follows the laws of the signifier.”

Freud devoted special attention to the ways dreams manage to represent logical connections—often with astonishing inventiveness, and in ways far more sophisticated than any social game. These procedures confirm, for Lacan, that dream-work operates strictly according to the laws of the signifier. The unconscious is not irrational or arbitrary, but rigorously structured: it deploys the full resources of the letter to produce meaning, obeying the same principles that govern poetic and discursive creation in language.

“The rest of the elaboration is designated by Freud as secondary, which derives its value from what is at stake: fantasies or daydreams, Tagtraum to use the term Freud prefers in order to situate them in their function of wish-fulfillment (Wunscherfüllung).”

Freud distinguishes between primary dream-work—where the signifier’s mechanisms, like condensation and displacement, are dominant—and secondary elaboration, which he sees as derivative. The content here includes fantasies or daydreams (Tagtraum), which Freud aligns with wish-fulfillment (Wunscherfüllung). The daydream serves as the conscious or semi-conscious form of the same process that shapes dreams, but its link to wish is explicit and recognized by the subject.

“Their distinctive feature, given that these fantasies can remain unconscious, is thus indeed their meaning. Now, of these Freud tells us that their place in the dream is either to be taken up as signifying elements for the formulation of unconscious thought (Traumgedanke), or else to serve in the secondary elaboration in question here, that is, in a function, he says, which there is no need to distinguish from waking thought (von unserem wachen Denken nicht zu unterscheiden).”

Although these fantasies can themselves be unconscious, what sets them apart is their status as meaning-bearers. Freud clarifies that, within dreams, these elements either participate in the creation of unconscious thoughts (Traumgedanke), functioning as signifying components, or they appear as part of secondary revision—operating as modes of thought indistinguishable from the processes of waking consciousness. In other words, the dream’s surface often receives a “touch-up” from waking thought, which attempts to render the narrative more coherent, logical, or meaningful post hoc.

“One can give no better idea of the effects of this function than by comparing them to whitewash patches, which, stenciled here and there, tend to transform into the appearance of a genre painting the rather off-putting clichés in themselves of the rebus or the hieroglyphs.”

The effects of secondary elaboration are like “whitewash patches,” applied after the fact. These patches cover over, regularize, or beautify the more jarring, enigmatic, or even grotesque aspects of the dream’s original rebus structure. The result is that the dream comes to resemble a conventional narrative or painting, its rough edges smoothed out, but only at the cost of losing the singularity and force of the original signifying work. For the psychoanalyst, this process is not the discovery of meaning, but its effacement—an attempt by the ego to domesticate the disruptive logic of the unconscious.

“I apologize for seeming to spell out Freud’s text myself; it is not just to show what is gained by simply not omitting anything from it. It is in order to situate, on fundamental and never revoked reference points, what has happened in psychoanalysis.”

Lacan foregrounds his method: painstakingly tracing Freud’s arguments, not out of pedantry but to preserve the “fundamental and never revoked reference points” that are often lost in later developments of psychoanalysis. The fidelity to the text and its details is a polemic stance—Lacan insists that contemporary practice has too often abandoned or misunderstood these crucial insights, especially regarding the role of the signifier.

“From the very beginning, the constitutive role of the signifier in the status that Freud established for the unconscious, immediately and in the most precise formal modes, was misunderstood.”

There has been a structural misunderstanding: the foundational insight that the unconscious is structured by and through the signifier was missed or neglected, even as Freud stated it with formal rigor from the outset. Psychoanalytic theory and practice drifted away from the letter, often privileging meaning, symbol, or affect over the precise formal logic Freud uncovered. For the Lacanian analyst, this is not an accident but a resistance—one that must be confronted in theory and in the clinic.

“This for a double reason, the less noticed of which is naturally that this formalization alone was not enough to make the instance of the signifier recognized, for at the time of the publication of the Traumdeutung it was far ahead of the formalisms of linguistics, to which one could probably demonstrate that, by its sheer weight of truth, it blazed the trail.”

The neglect of the signifier’s centrality has two causes, the first of which is that Freud’s formalization was itself historically unprecedented. When Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, the tools of modern linguistics had not yet been developed; his insights into the structure of language and the signifier were so innovative that there was no conceptual framework in the broader intellectual field to recognize or receive them. Freud’s work anticipated—and, Lacan argues, made possible—the later breakthroughs of Saussurean linguistics. The “weight of truth” in Freud’s work was sufficient to blaze this new trail, but it took decades for the field to catch up and acknowledge the full implications of his discovery.

“The second reason is, after all, only the reverse of the first, for if psychoanalysts were exclusively fascinated by the meanings revealed in the unconscious, it was because these drew their most secret appeal from the dialectic that seemed to be immanent to them.”

The second reason why Freud’s formalization of the signifier was misunderstood is an effect of the first. Psychoanalysts became captivated by the rich, layered meanings disclosed by the unconscious—by the dialectic of signifieds and the apparent depth of latent content. These meanings seemed self-sustaining, possessing their own internal dialectical movement that drew analysts into an endless hermeneutic fascination. For Lacan, this obsession with meaning ultimately eclipsed the structural dimension of the signifier, replacing it with an illusion of self-unfolding sense, rather than tracing the mechanisms that produce it.

“I have shown in my seminar that it is in the necessity of correcting the ever-accelerating effects of this partiality that the apparent turnarounds, or better yet the course corrections, that Freud, in his primary concern to ensure the survival of his discovery through the initial adjustments it required of knowledge, felt compelled to make in his doctrine along the way, are to be understood.”

Lacan points out that many of the apparent contradictions or revisions in Freud’s work should be read as deliberate corrections against this tendency to privilege meaning over structure. Freud was always compelled, for the sake of preserving the integrity of his discovery, to make theoretical adjustments—what might appear as “turnarounds” or changes in course—when the analytic field began to drift too far toward hermeneutics, away from the rigor of the signifier. These were not betrayals of his doctrine, but necessary recalibrations in the face of a knowledge system not yet ready to accommodate his findings.

“For in the situation he was in, I repeat, of having nothing that, responding to his object, was at the same level of scientific maturation—at least he did not fail to maintain this object at the measure of its ontological dignity.”

Freud operated in an intellectual environment that lacked the scientific apparatus to match his object—the unconscious structured as a language. Despite this, he never abandoned the dignity of his object; he maintained its singular status and rigor, refusing to reduce it to mere psychological content or affect. This commitment to the “ontological dignity” of the unconscious is what preserved psychoanalysis as a science, even if it meant enduring misunderstanding or resistance from his contemporaries.

“The rest was the affair of the gods and played out in such a way that analysis today takes its bearings from those imaginary forms that I have just shown as sketched in reserve upon the text they mutilate—and that it is on these that the analyst’s aim adjusts itself: mixing them in dream interpretation with the visionary release of the hieroglyphic aviary, and more generally seeking control of the exhaustion of analysis in a kind of scanning14 of these forms wherever they appear, in the idea that they are witnesses to the exhaustion of regressions as well as to the remolding of the ‘object relation’ in which the subject is supposed to be typified.”

What ensued—“the rest”—belongs, in a sense, to the vicissitudes of history and fate (“the affair of the gods”). In contemporary psychoanalysis, practice is often guided by imaginary constructs that hover over Freud’s original text, distorting or “mutilating” it by overlaying new interpretive forms. These constructs are blended into dream interpretation and are sought out as visionary or symbolic forms—an “aviary” of hieroglyphs—supposedly attesting to analytic progress. In clinical work, analysts often scan for these imaginary forms as if their presence signals the exhaustion of regression or marks the transformation of the “object relation,” the typification of the subject. Yet for Lacan, this method risks losing the rigorous logic of the signifier, substituting symbolic and imaginary figures for the structural work of language that truly animates the analytic process.

“The technique that claims such positions can be fertile in diverse effects, very difficult to criticize under the shield of therapeutics. But an internal critique can emerge from a flagrant discordance between the operative mode that this technique authorizes—that is, the analytic rule by which all its instruments, beginning with ‘free association,’ justify themselves through the conception of the unconscious of its inventor—and the complete ignorance that reigns there of this conception of the unconscious.”

Psychoanalytic technique, even when based on approaches that drift from Freud’s structural insights, can generate multiple effects—symptomatic improvements, catharsis, behavioral shifts—and these outcomes are hard to contest, as they are protected by the pragmatic “shield” of therapeutic value. Yet Lacan insists that an internal critique becomes unavoidable when there is a glaring gap between the methods used (like free association) and the foundational conception of the unconscious on which they were established. Free association, for instance, is justified by a certain idea of the unconscious—the signifier’s primacy, its chains, slips, and mechanisms. When analysts deploy this rule without reference to its true logic, they reveal a fundamental ignorance of the very discovery that grounds the technique.

“The most extreme adherents believe they are done with a pirouette: the analytic rule must be observed all the more religiously for being only the fruit of happy accident. In other words, Freud never really knew what he was doing.”

Some clinicians resolve this inconsistency by embracing a paradox: the more arbitrary the rule (free association), the more stringently it should be enforced, as if its efficacy is a matter of “happy accident” rather than conceptual coherence. This view undermines Freud’s rigor and treats his discovery as accidental or intuitive, rather than the outcome of systematic, logical inquiry. Such a stance devalues the methodological and theoretical consistency at the heart of Freud’s work, reducing psychoanalysis to ritual observance rather than a science of the unconscious.

“A return to Freud’s text shows, on the contrary, the absolute coherence of his technique with his discovery, at the same time as it allows us to place his procedures in their proper rank. That is why any rectification of psychoanalysis requires returning to the truth of that discovery, which is impossible to obscure in its original moment.”

A careful reading of Freud’s writings reveals the precise alignment between his clinical technique and his conceptualization of the unconscious. Free association, interpretation, and the structure of the analytic setting are not arbitrary inventions; they directly reflect the mechanisms Freud identified in the unconscious: the play of the signifier, condensation, displacement, and the letter’s work. To correct psychoanalytic theory or practice is not to innovate freely, but to return to the truth of Freud’s discovery—its core logic, which remains clear and “impossible to obscure” at the point of origin.

“For in the analysis of the dream, Freud intends to give us nothing other than the laws of the unconscious in their most general extension. One of the reasons why the dream was most suitable for this, Freud tells us, is precisely that it reveals these laws no less in the normal subject than in the neurotic.”

Freud’s choice of the dream as the privileged site for his investigation was not accidental: dream analysis is a direct presentation of the laws that govern the unconscious as such. The dream is not a special or pathological phenomenon, but a universal structure—present in both “normal” and neurotic subjects—where the logic of the signifier is most visibly at work. The laws discovered in dream-work apply to all formations of the unconscious: slips, symptoms, jokes, and beyond. For the Lacanian analyst, this underscores the universality of Freud’s insight, and the necessity of grounding all analytic technique in the rigors of the letter and its structural operations.

“But in either case, the efficacy of the unconscious does not end upon awakening. Psychoanalytic experience is nothing other than to establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field.”

The power of the unconscious persists beyond the dream, extending into all aspects of waking life. Analysis demonstrates that the unconscious is not confined to the night or to the symptom but is implicated in every action, thought, or slip. The subject is never outside its reach; the unconscious structures every act and relation, from the most trivial to the most consequential. This is a foundational axiom for the Lacanian analyst: the field of the unconscious is coextensive with the field of the speaking being’s existence.

“Its presence in the psychological order, in other words in the functions of relation of the individual, nevertheless deserves to be specified: it is in no way coextensive with this order, for we know that, if unconscious motivation manifests as much in conscious psychic effects as in unconscious psychic effects, conversely, it is an elementary reminder to note that a great number of psychic effects which the term unconscious, by virtue of excluding the character of consciousness, legitimately designates, are nonetheless in their nature entirely unrelated to the unconscious in the Freudian sense.”

However, not all that is outside of conscious awareness belongs to the Freudian unconscious. Lacan clarifies that the unconscious, as Freud conceived it, is not synonymous with the merely “psychic” or “not conscious.” Many mental processes or effects can be unconscious (in the sense of not being conscious) without being structured by the logic of the signifier or implicated in desire as understood by psychoanalysis. Therefore, the field of the unconscious must be more rigorously defined; it is not simply the “unknown” part of the psyche, nor is it all that escapes conscious notice.

“It is thus only by an abuse of language that one confuses psychic and unconscious in this sense, and thus qualifies as psychic an effect of the unconscious upon the somatic, for example.”

To conflate everything unconscious (as in non-conscious) with the Freudian unconscious is a misuse of language. It is equally incorrect to refer to bodily or somatic effects (such as conversion symptoms or psychosomatic conditions) as “psychic” if they are produced by the workings of the unconscious. The Freudian unconscious is a specific structure, not a catch-all term for everything not accessible to introspection. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, maintaining this distinction is crucial for theory and clinic alike.

“It is thus a matter of defining the topology of this unconscious. I say that it is precisely that which is defined by the algorithm: S/s”

To specify the field of the unconscious, Lacan returns to topology: the structure of the unconscious is captured by the Saussurean algorithm S/s, where the signifier (S) is positioned over the signified (s), separated by the “bar.” This diagram encapsulates the split, the structural division that underlies all unconscious phenomena. The unconscious is that which is generated and organized by the primacy and movement of the signifier over meaning.

“What we have been able to develop from the incidence of the signifier on the signified, accommodates its transformation into: f(S) 1/s.”

Lacan reformulates this relationship mathematically. The function f(S) over 1/s expresses the transformation of meaning under the pressure of the signifier. This notation suggests that the action of the signifier (the function f(S)) operates upon, and perhaps disrupts or inverts, the domain of the signified (1/s). The letter structures and even fragments the field of meaning, giving rise to the various formations of the unconscious.

“It is from the co-presence not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain, but of its vertical adjacencies, in the signified, that we have shown the effects, distributed according to two fundamental structures in metonymy and in metaphor.”

The unconscious is structured not just by the linear (horizontal) sequence of signifiers but also by the “vertical” links—those substitutions, condensations, and adjacencies that occur across chains. These two axes, horizontal (metonymy) and vertical (metaphor), organize the effects of the signifier upon meaning. Metonymy functions along the chain, through displacement and contiguity; metaphor works vertically, through substitution and condensation.

“We can symbolize them as: f(S..S’)S ~ S(–)s, that is, the metonymic structure, indicating that it is the connection of signifier to signifier that allows the elision by which the signifier installs the lack of being in the object relation, using the value of reference of signification to invest it with the desire aimed at this lack it supports. The sign – placed between ( ) here shows the maintaining of the bar, which in the primary algorithm marks the irreducibility by which, in the relation of signifier to signified, the resistance of meaning is constituted15.”

The formula f(S..S’)S ~ S(–)s expresses the metonymic process: the chaining of signifiers (S..S’), their functional interaction (f), and the resulting effect, which is the creation of a gap or lack—indicated by the (–)—in the relation between signifier and signified. This lack is not an absence to be filled, but the very condition that sustains desire. The signifier introduces a split in the object relation, making the subject’s relation to meaning and to the Other fundamentally mediated by loss or impossibility. The “bar” (–) persists as the marker of resistance and division, the structural non-coincidence that animates both desire and signification. The field of the unconscious, then, is nothing other than the field of this split, organized by the operations of the signifier, sustained by the lack it installs and the desire that circles around it.

“Now here is: f(S’/S)S ~ S(+)s , the metaphoric structure, indicating that it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of signification is produced that is poetic or creative, in other words an advent of the meaning in question16. The sign + placed between ( ) here shows the crossing of the bar—and the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of meaning.”

The metaphoric structure is formalized as f(S’/S)S ~ S(+)s. This formula captures the operation by which one signifier substitutes for another (S’/S), generating a new effect of signification (the poetic, the creative, the genuinely new meaning). The “+” in parentheses signals the “crossing of the bar” that normally separates signifier from signified: in metaphor, this crossing occurs, allowing something new to emerge in the field of meaning. It is this crossing that marks the constitutive event for the production of novel or transformative meaning—an event at the very heart of metaphor, poetic invention, and the unconscious formation of symptom and subject.

“This crossing expresses the condition of passage of the signifier into the signified, the moment of which I marked above by temporarily identifying it with the place of the subject (p. 58, 3rd and 4th part).”

The crossing of the bar is not just a structural movement within language; it is the point at which the signifier penetrates into the field of the signified, producing meaning as an event. Lacan notes that he previously identified this passage with the “place of the subject,” indicating that the subject emerges at the point where this crossing occurs. It is where the structural effect of metaphor—the substitution and crossing—converges with the constitution of subjectivity itself.

“It is the function of the subject, thus introduced, on which we must now pause, because it is at the crucial point of our problem.”

The question of the subject is central: the very place where the signifier’s operation in metaphor produces meaning is also the point at which the subject emerges as a function of the signifier. The subject is not prior to language or outside the structure; it is constituted at the very moment and site where the signifier effects meaning, at the point of “crossing.”

“I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum), is not only the formula in which, with the historical apex of a reflection on the conditions of science, the link is constituted between the transparency of the transcendental subject and his existential affirmation.”

Descartes’ cogito (“I think, therefore I am”) historically represents the link between transparent self-reflection (the transcendental subject) and existential affirmation (the subject’s being). In classical philosophy, this formula is supposed to secure the unity of thought and existence, making the subject both knower and being, in the purest, most self-assured form.

“Perhaps I am nothing but object and mechanism (and thus nothing more than phenomenon), but certainly insofar as I think it, I am—absolutely. No doubt philosophers have made important corrections here, and specifically that in what thinks (cogitans) I never do anything but constitute myself as object (cogitatum).”

Philosophical critique has complicated this assurance: perhaps the subject is nothing more than a phenomenon, an object among others, a mechanism in the world. Yet, as long as this possibility is being thought—“insofar as I think it”—the cogito’s assertion persists: the thinking act testifies to being, regardless of what content that being may have. Philosophers, especially after Descartes, have explored how, in the very act of thinking, the subject is always also an object—what thinks (cogitans) also appears as that which is thought about (cogitatum).

“It remains that, through this extreme purification of the transcendental subject, my existential connection to its project seems irrefutable, at least in the form of its actuality, and that: ‘cogito ergo sum’ ubi cogito, ibi sum, overcomes the objection.”

Despite all philosophical modifications, there remains something unshakeable in the cogito’s structure: wherever I think, there I am—“ubi cogito, ibi sum.” This immediate, actual relation seems to guarantee existence wherever thought occurs. Lacan presents this as the final bulwark of the philosophical tradition regarding subjectivity, the anchor-point for existential and epistemological certainty.

For the Lacanian, the emergence of the subject in the field of the signifier is neither simple nor guaranteed by introspective transparency. Instead, the subject’s position is structurally determined by the crossing of the bar, by the operations of metaphor and the logic of the signifier. This logic both founds and undermines the subject’s certainty, rooting it in the structural effects of language, not in any self-transparent presence to itself. The subject, then, is not the master of meaning, but its effect, caught precisely where signification is produced—always already split, barred, and traversed by the logic of the signifier.

“Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only to the extent that I think I am in my thought; to what extent I truly think it concerns only me, and, if I say it, interests no one17.”

The cogito, as self-reflective thought, ultimately confines being to the certainty I have in thinking myself as being: “I am there only to the extent I think I am.” The subjective assurance gained through introspection remains solipsistic—how much I truly think, or how deeply I am invested in this act, is something that pertains only to me and has no necessary bearing or interest for others. In the analytic context, this points to the limit of introspective or conscious certitude: what counts for the unconscious is not what I “mean” or “feel” in my interiority, but what is produced in the field of the signifier, often despite and beyond the subject’s intentions.

“To evade it, however, under the pretext of its philosophical semblances, is simply to show inhibition. For the notion of subject is indispensable to the handling of a science such as strategy in the modern sense, whose calculations exclude all ‘subjectivism’.”

Refusing to deal with the notion of the subject on the grounds that it seems philosophically suspect or passé is itself a form of inhibition. Even in fields like modern strategy—where calculations are ideally objective and exclude “subjectivism”—the category of the subject remains indispensable. There is always an implicit subject at work, whether as agent, locus of calculation, or bearer of effects. In psychoanalysis, this necessity is even more pronounced, for the subject is the very operator and effect of the signifier.

“It also means forbidding oneself access to what can be called the universe of Freud, as one speaks of the universe of Copernicus. Indeed, it is to the so-called Copernican revolution that Freud himself compared his discovery, emphasizing that it was once again about the place that man assigns himself at the center of a universe.”

To disregard the question of the subject is to close off access to what Lacan calls “the universe of Freud”—in the same sense that one might refer to the Copernican universe. Freud’s discovery is likened to a Copernican revolution because it radically re-situates the human subject in relation to the universe: man is no longer the center, master, or transparent subject of his own experience. The unconscious, structured as a language, displaces the subject from its assumed position, challenging the centrality and sovereignty that philosophy had previously claimed for it.

“The place I occupy as subject of the signifier—is it, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified, concentric or eccentric, that is the question?”

Lacan poses the question of position: where is the subject of the signifier (the locus produced by language, the chain of signifiers) in relation to the subject of the signified (the locus of meaning, of what is said to be meant or understood)? Are these places overlapping (concentric) or displaced from one another (eccentric)? This question is foundational for the Lacanian approach: the subject is split between these two registers and cannot be reduced to either. The locus from which one speaks is never fully the same as the locus from which one is spoken of.

“It is not a matter of knowing whether I speak of myself in a manner consistent with what I am, but whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the one I am speaking of. And there is here no inconvenience in bringing in the term thought. For Freud designates by this term the elements at play in the unconscious; that is, in the signifying mechanisms I have just recognized there.”

The central issue is not the adequacy between self-description and self-being (“do I speak truly of myself?”), but rather the gap that exists between the “I” who speaks and the “I” who is spoken of. In other words, is the subject of enunciation (the one who speaks) the same as the subject of the statement (the one about whom something is said)? This split is mirrored in Freud’s usage of “thought”—not simply as conscious reflection, but as the play of elements in the unconscious, that is, the mechanisms of the signifier.

“Nonetheless, the philosophical cogito is at the center of that mirage which makes modern man so sure of being himself in his uncertainties about himself, even through the suspicion he may long since have learned to practice regarding the traps of self-esteem.”

Despite philosophical and psychoanalytic critiques, the cogito remains a kind of foundational mirage for modern subjectivity: the illusion that there is a core, stable self even in the midst of self-doubt or skepticism. The modern subject clings to a certainty of self-identity—even as this certainty is continually undermined by unconscious formations, the split introduced by language, and the very mechanisms of desire and self-estrangement that Freud and Lacan illuminate. The mirage persists, structuring the subject’s relationship to uncertainty, doubt, and even to the suspicions one develops about one’s own motives and self-esteem. For the analyst, recognizing the gap between the subject of the signifier and the subject of the signified is fundamental to understanding the unconscious, the symptom, and the process of analysis itself.

“And yet, if, turning against the nostalgia it serves, I use the weapon of metonymy and refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautology, and if, in the name of ‘war is war’ and ‘a penny is a penny’, I decide to be nothing but what I am, how can I detach myself from the evidence that I am in this very act?”

Even if I reject all illusion, memory, or longing for lost unity—if I employ the logic of metonymy, remaining within pure equivalence, refusing metaphor’s leaps of meaning, clinging to the flat literalness of tautology (“war is war,” “a penny is a penny”)—my very assertion of identity traps me in an evidence of being: in asserting “I am what I am,” I confirm my being precisely in this act. The subject, in its most radical refusal of signification beyond the chain of metonymy, cannot escape the consequence of subjectivity conferred by the signifier itself.

“No less than if I carry myself to the other metaphoric pole of the signifying quest and devote myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being—how could I doubt that even by losing myself there, I am there?”

Conversely, if I fling myself to the opposite pole—to metaphor, to the pursuit of becoming, transformation, creation—if I seek meaning in the poetic, the drive to “become who I am,” even in the ecstasy or dissolution of self, I cannot escape being present. Even in losing myself, my being is asserted in and through the signifying process. The subject is caught both in the fixity of metonymy and in the mobility of metaphor—each confers a presence that cannot be annulled by act or intention.

“Now, it is precisely at these points, where evidence is about to be subverted by the empirical, that the twist of the Freudian conversion lies.”

The Freudian innovation intervenes at the very point where these philosophical certainties about the subject’s presence (“I am”) and the signifier’s logic are about to be undone by empirical, lived contradictions—where self-evidence falters. Freud’s contribution is to reveal that the subject is not where it thinks, nor is it where it imagines itself to be. The twist is that the unconscious works precisely in this gap, subverting any straightforward relation between thinking and being.

“This signifying play of metonymy and metaphor, even to and including its active point which pins my desire on a refusal of the signifier or on a lack of being, and ties my fate to the question of my destiny, this play is played, until the game is called, in its inexorable subtlety, where I am not because I cannot situate myself there.”

The endless interplay of metonymy and metaphor organizes desire, symptom, and fate—whether it is a refusal of the signifier (refusal to speak, act, or signify) or a relation to a constitutive lack (lack of being, manque à être). This game continues inexorably; the subject is always somewhere other than where it would situate itself, unable to coincide with itself, never fully present to the locus of its own enunciation. The signifying process runs on, with the subject as its effect, never its master.

“That is to say, it is little of those words by which I may have momentarily startled my listeners: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words which, to any attentive ear, make palpable in what ambiguity the ferret of meaning flees our grasp along the verbal string.”

Lacan’s own formulation—“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think”—shocks only insofar as it names the very split at the core of subjectivity. The subject of the unconscious thinks (is spoken, acts) in places where it is not self-aware, while it is present (where it experiences being) in places where thought and signification are absent. This aphorism names the radical displacement produced by language: meaning slips, evades, flees—like a ferret escaping along the chain of words.

“What must be said is: I am not, there where I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am, there where I do not think I am thinking.”

The subject is not present where it is simply the object or “plaything” of its own thought (in the place of conscious mastery or self-possession). Conversely, the most authentic thinking of being (“I think of what I am”) occurs precisely where there is no conscious self-reflection or certainty—where unconscious mechanisms are at work. This division constitutes the Lacanian subject, always split, always decentered, always alienated in language.

“This two-faced mystery joins with the fact that truth is evoked only in this dimension of alibi, whereby all ‘realism’ in creation takes its virtue from metonymy, just as meaning gives access only at the double bend of metaphor, when one has their unique key: the S and the s of the Saussurean algorithm are not on the same plane, and man is deluded in thinking himself situated at their common axis, which is nowhere.”

The double nature of the subject (split between thought and being, between enunciation and statement) parallels the structure of truth, which always appears as an alibi—present only elsewhere, never where the subject expects. Creative “realism” draws its power from the logic of metonymy, the horizontal chain; the leap into meaning, into interpretation, only occurs through metaphor, the vertical substitution. The signifier (S) and the signified (s) in Saussure’s formula are not coextensive, not aligned on a common axis; to believe otherwise is a fundamental misrecognition. The axis at which the subject imagines himself situated—where thought and being, signifier and signified, would coincide—is precisely “nowhere,” the place of the subject’s structural lack and misrecognition. This is the inescapable topology of the speaking being, and the analytic act unfolds within its impossible intersection.

“At least this was so until Freud made his discovery. For if what Freud discovered is not precisely this, it is nothing at all.”

Prior to Freud, the subject’s illusion of unity, transparency, and alignment with meaning went largely unchallenged in scientific or philosophical discourse. Freud’s discovery disrupts this, revealing that the subject is divided, displaced, and fundamentally structured by the signifier. If Freud’s discovery does not touch precisely on this radical decentering—on the gap and split at the heart of the subject—then his discovery loses all specificity, all critical force. For the Lacanian, it is this cut that marks Freud’s true revolution.

“The contents of the unconscious deliver to us, in their disappointing ambiguity, no reality in the subject more consistent than the immediate; it is from truth that they derive their virtue, and within the dimension of being: Kern unseres Wesen, the terms are in Freud.”

The unconscious does not give us a deeper, more authentic core of the subject in the sense of a hidden “true self.” Its formations—dreams, slips, symptoms—are marked by ambiguity, discontinuity, and surface effects. Their only consistency comes from the structural truth they bear: the way they materialize the kernel of being (Kern unseres Wesen, “core of our being,” Freud’s term). This truth is not the presence of a stable essence, but the persistent working of the signifier, the insistence of a structural lack and the truth of desire.

“The double-action mechanism of metaphor is the very one in which the symptom, in the analytic sense, is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term to which it has just been substituted in a current signifying chain, the spark passes that fixes in a symptom—metaphor in which the flesh or the function are taken as signifying element—the meaning inaccessible to the conscious subject where it might be resolved.”

Symptoms are not random or purely physiological events; they are structured as metaphors. The process is a double movement: a signifier (such as that of sexual trauma) is substituted for another in a chain, and the meaning that is inaccessible to consciousness is “fixed” or “frozen” in the symptom. The symptom thus becomes a metaphor, materializing the encounter between two signifiers, often inscribed in or upon the body, in sensation or function. The subject is unable to consciously resolve this meaning because it is produced precisely at the intersection where the signifier replaces another, eluding conscious understanding and persisting as enigma.

“And the riddles posed by desire to all ‘natural philosophy,’ its frenzy mimicking the abyss of the infinite, the intimate collusion in which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and that of mastering with enjoyment, are due to no other disorder of instinct than its being caught in the rails—eternally stretched toward the desire for something else—of metonymy. Hence its ‘perverse’ fixation at the same suspension point of the signifying chain where the screen memory becomes immobilized, where the fascinating image of the fetish becomes petrified.”

Desire confronts and confounds “natural philosophy” (the attempt to explain human phenomena by recourse to natural instincts) because it is not rooted in instinctual necessity, but in the structure of the signifier—specifically, in the endless sliding of metonymy. Desire is perpetually displaced, always aiming at something else, never satisfied, always circulating through chains of signifiers. This dynamic produces the so-called “perversions,” fixations at particular points in the chain—such as the screen memory or the fetish—which become immobilized, suspended as if frozen, and acquire a special intensity or fascination. The “abnormality” is not in the instinct but in the fixation at a point in the signifying chain, where meaning and enjoyment become condensed.

“There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire—when there is no need that, in seeing its satisfaction forbidden, does not wither, in the extreme case by the consumption of the organism itself. It is in a memory comparable to what we call by that name in our modern thinking machines (based on an electronic realization of signifying composition) that this chain lies, which insists on reproducing itself in transference, and which is that of a dead desire.”

Unconscious desire endures, regardless of satisfaction or prohibition, because it is not the same as biological need. Needs, when unfulfilled, eventually wither, even to the point of death. Desire, by contrast, is indestructible because it is inscribed in the signifying chain, preserved in a form of “memory” similar to what is found in electronic computing: an inscription, a logic, an automatic insistence. This chain, with its structure and repetitions, persists in transference—where the subject relives and repeats the workings of desire in the analytic situation. Transference is thus the return of “dead desire,” an echo of past signifying circuits, which structure the subject’s present relations and the analytic field. The analytic task is to recognize and intervene at the level of this signifying structure, not merely at the level of affect or intention.

“It is the truth of what this desire was in its history that the subject cries out through his symptom, as Christ said the stones would have done if the children of Israel had not given them their voices.”

The symptom functions as a testimony to the truth of the subject’s desire as it has been shaped through personal history. This is not a truth that could be consciously articulated, but one that emerges despite the subject, often against conscious intention or awareness. The reference to Christ’s words (that even the stones would cry out if the people did not speak) dramatizes how, even in the absence of conscious speech, the body or the symptom will “speak” the truth of desire. The symptom is an involuntary utterance, an insistence of truth at the level of the signifier, as irrepressible as nature itself if denied symbolic articulation.

“This is also why psychoanalysis alone makes it possible to distinguish, within memory, the function of recollection. Rooted in the signifier, it resolves, through the ascendancy of history in man, the Platonic aporias of reminiscence.”

Only psychoanalysis distinguishes true recollection—not as a passive reproduction of past experiences, but as a process structured by the signifier. Analytic recollection is not about returning to an original moment, but about reconstructing history through the present workings of the unconscious. This Lacanian position resolves Plato’s aporias (unresolvable puzzles) about reminiscence: memory is not an unbroken chain of representations but a dialectic of the signifier, with all its gaps, substitutions, and creative transformations.

“It suffices to read the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality,’ covered over for the masses by so many pseudo-biological glosses, to observe that Freud derives all access to the object from a dialectic of return.”

A close reading of Freud’s “Three Essays on Sexuality” reveals that the drive toward the object is structured by return—a dialectical process rather than a straightforward biological instinct. While later readings often obscure Freud’s insight with biological or medicalized interpretations, Lacan insists that Freud’s true legacy is his recognition of the signifying, historical, and repetitive structure of desire. The “object” of desire is always encountered retroactively, in a movement of return, not as a simple presence but as an effect of a lost or missed encounter.

“Thus starting from the nostos hölderlinien [nostos: Greek, ‘return,’ with a poetic allusion to Hölderlin], it is to Kierkegaardian repetition that Freud comes less than twenty years later, that is, his thought, having submitted itself from its origin to the humble but unbending consequences of the talking cure, was never able to free itself from the living servitudes which, from the royal principle of the Logos, led him to rethink the mortal antinomies of Empedocles.”

Lacan draws a trajectory from the Greek notion of nostos (return, as in Homer’s Odyssey, and through the poetry of Hölderlin) to Kierkegaard’s philosophical concept of repetition. Freud’s work, shaped by the “talking cure,” continually returns to this dialectic of repetition and return, unable to escape the servitudes imposed by the signifier. The Logos—the order of speech, law, and reason—pulls Freud toward confronting fundamental antinomies (contradictions) of life and death, being and non-being, reminiscent of Empedocles’ philosophy. The analytic subject is forever caught in these dialectical repetitions, which structure the logic of desire and symptom.

“And how can one conceive otherwise than upon that ‘other scene’ of which he speaks as the place of the dream, his recourse as a scientific man to a Deus ex machina less derisory than what is revealed here to the spectator, that the machine governs the stage manager himself. Obscene and ferocious figure of the primordial father, inexhaustible in redeeming himself in the eternal blindness of Oedipus, how else to think, except that he had to bow his head under the force of a testimony that surpassed his prejudices, that a nineteenth-century scholar should have cared more than anything in his work for that ‘Totem and Taboo,’ before which today’s ethnologists bow as before the growth of an authentic myth.”

Freud’s “other scene”—the unconscious, as the theater where dreams, symptoms, and desires are staged—functions as a “Deus ex machina” in the analytic process. Yet this is not a cheap or artificial resolution; rather, it is a machine (the chain of the signifier, the unconscious structure) that governs even the analyst’s own position as “stage manager.” The scene is populated by archaic figures—most notably, the primordial father, both obscene and redemptive, echoing endlessly in the mythic logic of the Oedipus complex. Freud, a scientist of the nineteenth century, found himself compelled by the force of evidence beyond his prejudices or rational expectations, drawn to the very myths (“Totem and Taboo”) that modern science would have dismissed. The work, ultimately, surpasses its origins, and even contemporary ethnology recognizes in Freud’s text the growth of a true myth—not in the sense of fiction, but as a living structure of symbolic and signifying truth.

“It is indeed to the same necessities as those of myth that this imperative proliferation of particular symbolic creations responds, in which the compulsions of the neurotic, down to their details, are motivated, just as in what are called the sexual theories of the child.”

The endless multiplication of symbolic formations seen in neurotic symptoms responds to the same structural necessity as myth-making itself. Both myth and symptom emerge to give structure, meaning, and a kind of solution to an impossible or traumatic real—an impasse in being. The compulsions and rituals of the neurotic are not arbitrary but are highly motivated, precise arrangements of signifiers, echoing the child’s sexual theories. Children, faced with enigma and lack, invent myths to fill the gap, just as the neurotic creates symptoms that crystallize desire and anxiety into symbolic formations.

“Thus, to place you at the precise point where my commentary on Freud is currently unfolding in my seminar, little Hans, at five years old left stranded by the shortcomings of his symbolic environment, faced with the enigma of his sex and existence suddenly actualized for him, develops, under the guidance of Freud and his father, his disciple, around the signifying crystal of his phobia, in a mythical form, all possible permutations of a limited number of signifiers.”

Lacan situates his commentary at the case of little Hans, which epitomizes how the child, encountering the limit of knowledge—here, the enigma of sexuality and existence—attempts to solve it through the creation of a symptom (the phobia). This phobia does not emerge from nowhere; it is a mythic construction around a small set of signifiers (horse, father, biting, etc.), whose permutations serve to work through the impossible question posed by sexual difference and the threat of castration. With the symbolic resources of his environment lacking, Hans, guided by Freud and his father, demonstrates how even the individual subject, when confronted by the real, is compelled to invent a myth—an elaborate symbolic solution that holds together the fragments of his subjective experience.

“This operation demonstrates that even at the individual level, the solution to the impossible is provided to man by the exhaustion of all possible forms of impossibility encountered in the signifying equation of the solution. A striking demonstration that sheds light on the labyrinth of an observation that has so far only been used to extract materials for demolition.”

Little Hans’s phobia is not just a maladaptive response, but a creative operation: faced with an impossible question (the real of sexual difference, the mystery of being), the child’s unconscious invents a symbolic system. The “solution to the impossible” is produced by traversing and exhausting the permutations of a signifying equation. Rather than seeing symptoms only as pathological debris (as material for demolition), Lacan argues that they bear witness to the subject’s creative work in the face of structural impasse—a testimony to the symbolic ingenuity of the unconscious.

“It also reveals that in the coextensivity of the development of the symptom and its curative resolution, the nature of neurosis is established: whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive, neurosis is a question that being poses for the subject ‘from where it was before the subject came into the world’ (this subordinate clause is the very phrase used by Freud in explaining the Oedipus complex to little Hans).”

The process by which the symptom develops and is resolved in analysis are coextensive, revealing that neurosis itself is not merely a disorder to be cured, but a question posed to the subject by being—a riddle originating “from where it was before the subject came into the world.” This clause, which Freud used in his explanation of the Oedipus complex to little Hans, points to the primordial status of the question of being, lack, and desire. Neurosis—whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive—is the subject’s singular response to the call of this question, inscribed in the symbolic order even before the subject’s individual existence. The symptom is thus a structural answer to an impasse rooted in the subject’s very emergence in language and desire.

“It concerns here that being which appears only as the flash of an instant in the void of the verb to be, and I have said that it poses its question for the subject. What does this mean? It does not pose it before the subject since the subject cannot come to the place where it is posed, but it poses it in the place of the subject, that is, in that place it poses the question with the subject, as one poses a problem with a pen and as the ancient man thought with his soul.”

The being in question here is not an enduring, substantial reality but a fleeting emergence—an instantaneous spark—within the emptiness of the verb “to be.” It is not a pre-existing ground or substance but an event, a flash that happens at the place of the subject. This is not a question that can be posed to the subject as something external or prior, since the subject is always already an effect of this very question, an answer to a structural lack. The question is “posed with the subject,” meaning that the very possibility of subjectivity is inseparable from the encounter with the enigma of being. Like a problem set down on paper or the way ancient thought tried to grasp the soul, this question is instantiated, not as a prior fact, but as an act or inscription—the subject as effect of the question.

“It is thus that Freud brought the ego into his doctrine. Freud defined the ego by its own resistances. They are of an imaginary nature in the sense of coaptative lures, of which the ethology of animal behavior in display and combat offers us the example. Freud showed their reduction in man to the narcissistic relation, whose elaboration I have taken up in the mirror stage. There he united the synthesis of the perceptive functions in which the sensori-motor selections that define what he calls reality for man are integrated.”

Freud’s introduction of the ego into psychoanalytic doctrine centers on its role as a locus of resistance. These resistances are fundamentally imaginary, not because they are fictitious, but because they operate through images, identifications, and misrecognitions. Ethology provides analogies in the forms of animal displays—ritualized combats or courtship behaviors meant to deceive, signal, or intimidate. In humans, Freud locates this imaginary structure in narcissism: the ego is constructed through identification with an image, particularly the image of one’s own body (as detailed in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage). The ego achieves a synthesis of perception, organizing and selecting sensory and motor inputs to construct what is experienced as “reality.” This “reality” is always filtered, misrecognized, and defended by the imaginary structure of the ego.

“But this resistance, essential for cementing the imaginary inertias that block the message of the unconscious, is only secondary compared to the resistances proper to the signifying path of truth.”

While ego resistance is critical for maintaining the defenses that shield the subject from unconscious truth, it is only secondary in importance. The primary resistance is found at the level of the signifier itself—at the structural points where the chain of signifiers blocks, diverts, or occludes access to truth. The subject is constituted by the very structure of language, and the major obstacles to analytic work arise not from the images and identifications of the ego, but from the structure of the signifying chain, from the way truth is resisted, deferred, or barred by the play of signifiers. The analyst’s task is not merely to unmask imaginary lures but to work through the resistance embedded in the symbolic itself, in the logic and topology of the unconscious.

“This is the reason why an exhaustion of defense mechanisms, as palpable as Fenichel makes it for us in his technical problems because he is a practitioner (whereas his entire theoretical reduction of neuroses or psychoses to genetic anomalies of libidinal development is mere flatness), manifests itself, without his accounting for it or even being aware of it, as the reverse side of which the mechanisms of the unconscious would be the obverse.”

Fenichel, known for his clinical detail in cataloging defense mechanisms, demonstrates how these defenses can be worn down or exhausted in analytic work. Yet, for all his technical acuity, Fenichel misses the structural insight: the exhaustion of defenses (what he observes so vividly) is not merely a psychological event but the obverse of unconscious mechanisms—symmetrical, structural operations rather than merely the breakdown of “ego defenses.” The field of resistance is not separate from the unconscious; rather, both sides—defense and the workings of the unconscious—are two aspects of the same signifying process. Defense mechanisms and formations of the unconscious (symptoms, slips, jokes) are effects of the same linguistic structure.

“Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, suspension, anticipation, retraction, denial, digression, irony—these are the figures of speech (figurae sententiarum of Quintilian), just as catachresis, litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms are imposed on the pen as the most apt to label these mechanisms. Can we see in them only a mere manner of speaking, when these are the very figures enacted in the rhetoric of the discourse actually uttered by the analysand.”

Lacan draws a direct line between rhetorical figures of classical grammar and the operations of the unconscious as revealed in analytic discourse. These rhetorical devices—periphrasis (circumlocution), ellipsis (omission), irony, denial, etc.—are not just ways of speaking; they are the actual forms and movements by which the analysand’s unconscious is articulated in speech. The tropes and figures, long catalogued by rhetoricians, are the precise tools and markers of the subject’s relation to truth, desire, and defense. What emerges in analytic speech is not a neutral “content,” but the movement of language itself, materializing as symptoms, slips, and resistances, all structured like a language and written in tropological form.

“By stubbornly reducing to an emotional permanence the reality of resistance, of which this discourse would be nothing but the cover, today’s psychoanalysts only show that they fall under the blow of one of the fundamental truths Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis. It is that, with a new truth, it is not enough to make room for it, for it is a matter of taking our place in it. It demands that we unsettle ourselves. One cannot succeed by merely getting used to it. We get used to the real. Truth, we repress.”

If analysts explain resistance solely as an enduring affect or emotional state—treating discourse as a mere screen for inner emotion—they miss Freud’s deeper discovery. Resistance, like the unconscious, is not merely “emotional residue,” but is fundamentally linguistic, structural, rhetorical. Freud’s truth, rediscovered by Lacan, is that a new truth—such as that revealed by psychoanalysis—requires a transformation of the subject’s position, a radical dislocation. The subject cannot simply “adapt” to this truth or assimilate it into old habits. We become accustomed to reality (to the given, the repeated, the bearable); but the new truth unsettles, disturbs, and provokes repression. The encounter with the unconscious, then, is not a matter of integrating a new piece of information, but of undergoing a displacement, an unsettling—precisely the structural effect of the signifier, which psychoanalysis alone dares to confront at its most radical.

“But it is especially necessary for the scholar, the magus, and even the physician, that he be the only one to know. The idea that, in the depths of the simplest and, moreover, sickest souls, there is something ready to hatch—so be it! But someone who seems to know as much as they do about what to make of it… Come to our aid, categories of primitive, prelogical, archaic thought, even of magical thought, so convenient to impute to others. For it is not fitting that these peasants keep us breathless by posing riddles that prove to be quite mischievous.”

The desire to maintain the privilege of knowledge—whether in the position of the scholar, magus, or physician—rests on the fantasy that knowledge is an exclusive possession. When confronted with the fact that the unconscious, even in the most unlettered or “sick” individual, harbors complex formations and riddles, this privilege is threatened. To protect their status, those in positions of authority often resort to labeling such phenomena as “primitive” or “magical” thought—categories assigned to others but not to themselves. This gesture serves as a defense against the anxiety provoked by the emergence of knowledge, riddles, or truth from unexpected quarters. The riddle of the symptom, the slyness of unconscious formations, undermines the scholar’s fantasy of mastery by showing that profound knowledge can erupt from the most humble or disregarded places, forcing the master to rely on exotic categories to explain away his own lack.

“To interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be, like him, an encyclopedia of the arts and the muses, doubled as an assiduous reader of the Fliegende Blätter. Nor would the task be easier to put ourselves at the mercy of a thread woven of allusions and citations, puns and equivocations. Will we have to make a trade of antidoted fripperies?”

Freud’s interpretation of the unconscious is not the work of a mere technician, but of someone steeped in the full range of human culture: arts, literature, humor, history, and daily life. Reading the unconscious requires attunement to the most subtle connections—puns, allusions, wordplay, cultural references—an endless web of signification. To follow the workings of the unconscious is to put oneself “at the mercy” of this unpredictable, poetic chain, and not to rely solely on scientific or medical authority. The analyst risks becoming a kind of bricoleur, trading in “fripperies” or odds and ends, antidoted against their toxicity only by the rigor of the analytic method. This is a critique of any reduction of psychoanalysis to a standardized profession or practice: interpretation is a singular art, not a checklist.

“Yet it must be accepted. The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual, and the only elementary things it knows are the elements of the signifier.”

Despite these difficulties and temptations, one must accept that the unconscious, for Freud (and for Lacan), is not a reservoir of primitive instincts or archetypes. Its only “elements” are those of the signifier: the units, oppositions, and differences that make up language. The unconscious is structured as a language, not as a storehouse of pre-linguistic urges. This is a break with earlier, more “naturalistic” or Jungian views, and is central to the Lacanian project. The elementary processes of the unconscious are linguistic, not biological.

“The books that can be called canonical on the unconscious—the Traumdeutung, the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and the Joke (Witz) in its relation to the unconscious—are nothing but a fabric of examples whose development unfolds in the formulas of connection and substitution (only multiplied tenfold by their particular complexity, and sometimes tabulated by Freud as an appendix), which are those we give for the signifier in its function of transfer. For in the Traumdeutung, it is in the sense of such a function that the term Übertragung or transference is introduced, which will later give its name to the operative spring of the intersubjective link between analysand and analyst.”

Freud’s foundational texts are a tapestry of examples—dreams, slips, jokes—each one demonstrating the logic of connection (association, chaining, contiguity) and substitution (metaphor, displacement). These are not random; they are the very forms of the signifier at work. Freud’s analysis anticipates structural linguistics and the notion of the signifier, which is the thread running through all the mechanisms of the unconscious. In the Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), Freud introduces the term Übertragung (transference) not just as a clinical phenomenon, but as a general function of meaning’s passage and transformation. This notion of transference becomes central to psychoanalytic praxis as the name for the dynamic, signifying link between analyst and analysand, the spring from which analytic work draws its energy and possibility. The unconscious, as Lacan underscores, is not a mythic or instinctual realm, but a chain of signifiers, irreducible to anything other than their own operations.

“Such diagrams are not only constituent in neurosis for each of its symptoms, but are the only means of encompassing the thematic of its course and its resolution. As the great analytic observations given by Freud are admirable in demonstrating.”

The structural diagrams Lacan refers to—the signifying chains, the metonymic and metaphoric processes, the formulae of substitution and connection—are not mere illustrations but essential to understanding every symptom of neurosis. Each neurotic symptom is underpinned by a singular structure, a configuration of signifiers, and only by mapping these can the analyst grasp the logic both of the symptom’s formation and of its analytic dissolution. Freud’s most important clinical cases reveal, through detailed observation, that what repeats, shifts, or resolves in the symptom can only be made sense of by recourse to the diagram of signifiers that organizes the subject’s unconscious logic.

“And to bring us back to a more limited but more manageable datum, to offer us the final seal with which to close our remarks, shall I cite the 1927 article on fetishism, and the case Freud reports there of a patient18 for whom sexual satisfaction required a certain shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase), and whose analysis showed that he owed it to the fact that his early Anglophone years had shifted into a glance at the nose (a glance at the nose, and not shine on the nose in the “forgotten” language of the subject’s childhood) the burning curiosity that attached him to his mother’s phallus, that is, to that eminent lack-of-being whose privileged signifier Freud revealed.”

To anchor these abstractions, Lacan invokes Freud’s 1927 case of fetishism: a patient whose sexual satisfaction was contingent upon “shine on the nose.” Analysis revealed that this fixation was the result of a misheard signifier from the patient’s childhood in English—a “glance at the nose”—which was displaced into German as “shine on the nose.” The crucial point is that the signifier, in its linguistic slipperiness, becomes invested with desire precisely where it masks or points to the lack at the heart of the maternal Other: the mother’s phallus, not as a positive organ but as a signifier of lack-of-being (manque-à-être). Fetishism is thus revealed not as a biological anomaly, but as a structural solution to the enigma of castration, through the workings of language and the slip of the signifier.

“It is this abyss opened to thought by a thought making itself heard in the abyss that from the start provoked resistance to analysis. And not, as is said, the promotion of sexuality in man. This is the object that has predominated in literature across the centuries. And the evolution of psychoanalysis has managed, by a comic sleight of hand, to make of it a moral instance, the cradle and waiting place of selflessness and lovingness. The Platonic harness of the soul, now blessed and illuminated, goes straight to paradise.”

What provoked anxiety and resistance to analysis was never the fact that sexuality was spoken of, but the abyss that analysis exposed: that thought, desire, and subjectivity themselves are structured by something radically Other—by the unconscious and its abyssal truth. Literature has long dwelled on sexual themes; what was intolerable in Freud was the discovery that sexuality is inextricably linked to the enigmatic logic of the signifier and to lack. Over time, psychoanalysis has been domesticated, recast as a moral discourse on the origins of altruism and love—an ethical apparatus for the soul. The once-scandalous “Platonic harness” that drove the soul now appears blessed and purified, the radical challenge of Freud’s thought is lost as psychoanalysis is absorbed into the culture of moral uplift.

“The intolerable scandal at the time when Freudian sexuality was not yet holy was that it was so ‘intellectual.’ In this, it revealed itself as the worthy partner of all those terrorists whose conspiracies were set to ruin society.”

The true scandal of Freudian theory was not the reference to sex per se but that sexuality, in Freud’s hands, became an “intellectual” matter—bound up with language, representation, signification, the logic of thought. Freud’s revolution was to reveal that the drives, symptoms, and formations of the unconscious were not simply natural or instinctual, but part of the order of the signifier. In this sense, psychoanalysis joined the company of those other “dangerous” intellectual movements that threaten to unravel the fabric of society, not by encouraging hedonism, but by exposing the unconscious, structural logic that governs both social order and subjective desire. The effect is subversive: not simply liberating sexuality, but revealing that desire is always implicated in language and law, and thus can never be assimilated to any harmonious or reconciled order.

“At the moment when psychoanalysts are working to remodel a right-thinking psychoanalysis whose sociological poem of the autonomous ego is its crowning achievement, I wish to tell those who listen to me how they will recognize bad psychoanalysts: it is by the term they use to denigrate any technical and theoretical research that pursues the Freudian experience along its authentic line. It is the word: intellectualization, execrable to all those who, themselves living in fear of feeling what it is to drink the wine of truth, spit on the bread of men, without their saliva ever being able to do more than act as a leaven.”

Lacan points to the contemporary trend among psychoanalysts to adapt psychoanalysis to fit “right-thinking” (bien-pensant) norms, fashioning it into a discipline focused on the autonomous ego—a vision domesticated by sociological ideals of self-mastery and adjustment. In this atmosphere, those truly following Freud’s radical, structural, and linguistic line are disparaged as “intellectualizers.” The label “intellectualization” is wielded by those who fear the encounter with analytic truth, reducing the traumatic effects of the signifier to a mere evasion of feeling. These critics, Lacan suggests, posture as guardians of emotional authenticity, but in truth avoid confronting what is at stake in the unconscious—an avoidance that is itself a refusal of the very “wine of truth” that psychoanalysis is meant to offer. Their contempt, spitting on the “bread of men,” serves only to ferment further misrecognition, never allowing the genuine transformation that analytic truth demands.

“III. The Letter, Being, and the Other”

The movement now situates the discussion at the intersection of the letter (the signifier), being (ontology), and the Other (the locus of language, law, and desire outside the subject). This triad is crucial for a Lacanian psychoanalyst: it signals the terrain on which the subject, the unconscious, and the structure of language are inextricably bound.

“Is that which thinks in my place then another self? Does Freud’s discovery represent the confirmation, at the level of psychological experience, of Manichaeism19?”

If the unconscious speaks, thinks, and desires in my place, is it to be identified with a “second self,” an interior double? Does Freud’s theory of the unconscious point to a split personality or to some cosmic dualism (Manichaeism)—the struggle of good and evil, or two separate selves within one being? This is a critical point for psychoanalysis, given the risk of confusion between structural division and the notion of a secondary, rival personality.

“No confusion is possible in fact: what Freud’s research introduced was not to more or less curious cases of a secondary personality. Even in the heroic era we have just mentioned, where, like animals in fairy tales, sexuality spoke, never did the atmosphere of devilry that such a direction would have engendered become precise20.”

Lacan clarifies that the unconscious is not a “secondary personality,” a demon, or a Manichean double. Even in the early days of psychoanalysis—when sexuality, the drives, and the unconscious seemed to speak with voices as uncanny as those in folktales—Freud never reduced these phenomena to supernatural or binary forces of good and evil. The unconscious is not a devil within; it is a structural division, an effect of the signifier, not an alternate self.

“The end that Freud’s discovery proposes to man was defined by him at the peak of his thought in moving terms: Wo es war, soll Ich werden. There where it was, I must come to be.”

Freud’s ultimate horizon for psychoanalytic work is encapsulated in the famous phrase, “Wo es war, soll Ich werden”—“Where it was, I must come to be.” This is not about integrating or assimilating a second self, but about traversing the field of the unconscious, the place of the “it,” and allowing the subject (“I”) to come into being there. This is the ethical imperative of psychoanalysis: not to achieve wholeness, but to make the subject present where the structural lack of being had prevailed.

“This end is one of reintegration and harmony, I will say reconciliation (Versöhnung).”

The analytic goal, for Freud and for Lacan, is reconciliation—a coming to terms with, or assuming, the split that structures the subject. It is not a simplistic harmony or naive unity, but a dialectical reconciliation (Versöhnung): the integration is not between two egos or selves, but between the subject and its own truth, which is necessarily divided, barred, and structured by the Other. The “letter” (signifier), being, and the Other are thus brought into a new relation, one marked by the assumption of lack and the possibility of subjective transformation through language.

“But if one ignores the radical ex-centricity of oneself to oneself to which man is confronted, in other words the truth discovered by Freud, one will fail in the order and means of psychoanalytic mediation, and will make of it the operation of compromise to which it has indeed come, to that which both the spirit of Freud and the letter of his work most strongly repudiate: for the notion of compromise, being constantly invoked by him as underpinning all the miseries that his analysis aids, one can say that recourse to compromise, whether explicit or implicit, disorients all psychoanalytic action and plunges it into darkness.”

To disregard the fundamental decentering revealed by Freud—the fact that the subject is ex-centric, divided from itself by the structure of the unconscious—is to betray the very basis of psychoanalytic practice. The analyst who neglects this division ends up reducing the analytic act to a mere compromise, a negotiation that aims to patch things up or adapt the subject to reality. This is precisely what Freud rejected most strongly: the idea that compromise forms the basis of psychic life is for Freud the root of neurosis, not its cure. If psychoanalytic mediation becomes simply the search for pragmatic or harmonious solutions, then analysis becomes lost, its action disoriented, and the radical work of truth disappears into obscurity.

“But it is also not enough to rub up against the moralistic hypocrisies of our time and have a mouth full of “total personality,” to have even said something articulated about the possibility of mediation.”

Mere opposition to the moral hypocrisies of contemporary culture, or the facile rhetoric of “total personality,” does not constitute a genuine psychoanalytic articulation of mediation. Declaring oneself against convention or in favor of wholeness says nothing about how mediation is actually structured in the unconscious, nor about the subject’s relation to the Other. Such slogans do not confront the true dimension of division, lack, and alterity revealed by analysis.

“The radical heteronomy whose yawning gap Freud’s discovery has shown within man can no longer be covered over without making everything that attempts it fundamentally dishonest.”

Freud’s discovery demonstrates an insurmountable split or heteronomy (being ruled by an Other) at the heart of subjectivity. To try to cover over, deny, or close this gap is not merely mistaken, but fundamentally dishonest. It amounts to denying the very essence of psychoanalytic experience, which is grounded in the subject’s constitutive alienation in language, desire, and the unconscious.

“Who then is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since at the very heart of my identity with myself, it is he who agitates me?”

Lacan foregrounds the mystery of alterity: the Other is not simply an external interlocutor, but the very site from which the subject’s own desire, division, and truth are articulated. This Other is more intimate than the subject’s own ego, more determining than the subject’s self-image. The subject’s very being is agitated—put into question—by the presence of the Other at the heart of its own identity.

“His presence can only be understood at a second degree of otherness, which already situates him himself in the position of mediation with respect to my own splitting from myself as well as from a fellow being.”

This Other is not simply the mirror image, the peer, or the fellow being (semblable), but stands at a second degree—a site of mediation that structures both the subject’s division from itself and its relation to others. The Other is the place from which law, language, and desire are articulated, and it is only through this mediation that the subject becomes a speaking being.

“If I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other with a capital O, it is to indicate the beyond where the recognition of desire is knotted to the desire for recognition.”

Lacan’s formula—“the unconscious is the discourse of the Other”—means that unconscious formations arise from, and are addressed to, the place of the Other: the locus of language, culture, and law. It is in this beyond that desire emerges, always intertwined with the desire for recognition from the Other, the desire to be seen, named, and acknowledged.

“In other words, this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in which it subsists.”

Even when the subject lies, the structure of the lie necessarily appeals to a guarantor of truth—the Other. A lie only functions as a lie in relation to the truth that it attempts to conceal or distort, and this truth is located not in the subject, but in the Other, in the symbolic order to which the subject is accountable.

“From which it is observed that it is with the emergence of language that the dimension of truth emerges.”

Truth is not a pre-linguistic substance but comes into being only with the appearance of language. The field of truth is a product of the symbolic order, of the Other. The emergence of language introduces the possibility of truth, error, and deception, anchoring subjectivity in a structure that is always already Other to itself. The entire analytic experience, then, is founded on this emergence: the subject is born into the field of language and truth, constituted by and through the desire of the Other.

“Before this point, in the psychological relation, perfectly isolable in the observation of animal behavior, we must admit the existence of subjects, not due to some projective mirage—the old chestnut that psychologists love to endlessly attack as a phantom—but because of the manifested presence of intersubjectivity. In the ambush where it hides, in the constructed trap, in the lingering feint where a fugitive breaking away from a group throws off the predator, something more emerges than in the fascinating erection of the parade or combat. Yet nothing there transcends the function of the lure at the service of a need, nor affirms a presence in that beyond-the-veil where all of Nature can be questioned about its purpose.”

In animal psychology, intersubjective relations can be observed—not as mere projections of the observer’s mind, but as genuine interactions with strategic, responsive behaviors. Lacan distinguishes between these rudimentary forms of intersubjectivity—such as the feinting of prey, traps, or displays in combat and mating—and the more profound structures found in human subjectivity. In animal interaction, every strategy and response remains fundamentally tied to the satisfaction of need; all lures and stratagems are in service of immediate biological interests. There is no leap, in these behaviors, into the dimension where the question of meaning, purpose, or truth is posed. The “beyond-the-veil,” that site where the very purpose of nature could be interrogated, remains absent. The animal’s maneuvers, while involving the other as adversary or object, never generate the symbolic space in which the question itself can emerge.

“For the question itself to come to light (and it is known that Freud reached this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle), language must be.”

The true emergence of the question—the moment when the subject can ask about meaning, truth, or purpose—presupposes the existence of language. Only with language does the subject enter the symbolic order, and with it, the possibility of questioning and being questioned. Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” approaches this radical opening, where the drive and repetition break with mere utility and reveal the subject’s relation to a beyond that is inseparable from language.

“For I can deceive my adversary by a movement that is contrary to my battle plan; this movement only exercises its deceptive effect precisely to the extent that I produce it in reality, and for my adversary.”

Deception in the animal or pre-linguistic world is entirely immanent: a feint or trick is effective only because it appears as an action in reality, registered by the senses of the other. The ruse has no symbolic surplus; its meaning is exhausted in its immediate, physical impact on the adversary’s behavior. The capacity for deception here is limited to observable movement, with no gap between what is shown and what is meant.

“But in the propositions with which I open peace negotiations with him, it is in a third place, which is neither my word nor my interlocutor, that what it proposes to him is situated.”

In human speech, however, a new dimension is introduced: when I negotiate, argue, or make a proposition, the meaning of my words is not simply given by my intention nor received unmediated by my interlocutor. Rather, there is a third place, an Other scene, where the proposition is situated. This is the locus of the signifier, the site of symbolic exchange, which is irreducible to either the speaker’s or the listener’s psychology. It is this space that constitutes the social bond, and within which meaning, promise, and even deception acquire a new structure and reach.

“This place is nothing other than the place of the signifying convention, as it is revealed in the comic aspect of this painful complaint of the Jew to his companion: “Why do you tell me that you are going to Krakow so that I will believe you are going to Lemberg, when you are actually going to Krakow?””

The “third place” is the order of the signifier, the shared symbolic framework that allows communication, negotiation, and misunderstanding to occur. The cited joke perfectly encapsulates this: the comic effect arises from the recognition that truth and deception are now mediated by the symbolic order, not by mere observable action. The interlocutor’s expectation of a lie is so entrenched in the symbolic pact that a statement of fact (“I am going to Krakow”) becomes a riddle, as if it must be decoded in relation to presumed intentions. The comic pain of the joke points to the irreducible gap opened up by language—a gap in which the subject, truth, and the Other are perpetually entangled. The signifying convention is the true “place” of psychoanalysis: the field where subjects and meaning are constituted through the dialectic of speech, recognition, and the law of the signifier.

“Of course, my troop movement from earlier can be understood within this conventional register of the strategy of a game, where it is according to a rule that I deceive my adversary, but then my success is appreciated in the connotation of treachery, that is, in the relation to the Other, guarantor of Good Faith.”

When strategy or deception occurs within a game or agreed framework, its meaning is established not simply by the intent of the actor or the effect on the adversary, but by reference to the rules—i.e., to the symbolic order. The success of a deceptive maneuver is not judged simply by its immediate outcome, but is colored by whether it breaks faith with the shared Other, the one who guarantees the meaning and legitimacy of the rules. “Treachery” only emerges when there is a law, a contract, or a symbolic pact to be betrayed; thus, the sense of betrayal always involves the relation to the Other as guarantor of truth, fidelity, or Good Faith.

“Here, the problems are of an order whose heteronomy is simply misunderstood by being reduced to no “feeling for others,” no matter how it is named. For “the existence of the other,” having lately managed to reach the ears of the psychoanalyst-Midas through the partition that separates him from the phenomenologists’ conclave, it is known that this news runs through the reeds: “Midas, King Midas, is the other of his patient. He himself said so.””

Lacan points out that the dimension at stake—the Other as the locus of law and guarantee—is often misconstrued by psychologists or psychoanalysts as merely an affective or empathic relation (“no feeling for others”). The “existence of the other” has become a fashionable concern, even reaching psychoanalysis via phenomenology. Yet when the analyst is told “Midas is the other of his patient,” as if the analyst’s alterity is a straightforward fact, this misses the crucial difference between the other as fellow being and the Other as structural function. The news is merely a rumor, misunderstood and superficially repeated.

“But what door, indeed, has he broken down here? The other, which other?”

What is at issue is precisely the ambiguity and polysemy of “the other.” Is it simply another person, an alter ego, or is it the Other in the Lacanian sense—the locus of language, law, and symbolic authority? The confusion between these two levels is what leads to a fundamental misunderstanding in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

“The young André Gide, daring his landlady to whom his mother entrusted him, to treat him as a responsible being, by ostentatiously unlocking, in her view, with a key that is false only in that it opens all the same padlocks, the padlock she herself believes is the worthy signifier of her educational intentions—which other is he targeting? The one who will intervene, and to whom the child will laughingly say, “What use is a ridiculous padlock to keep me obedient?” But just by having stayed hidden and waiting for the evening, for after the tight-lipped reception that suits the moment, to scold the boy—not only is it another person whose face she shows him with anger, it is another André Gide, who is no longer so sure, from then on and even looking back now, of what he wanted to do: who is changed even in his truth by the doubt cast on his good faith.”

In the story of the young André Gide, a nuanced structure of the Other emerges. Gide’s childish defiance is directed at the landlady as a representative of parental and social law—her padlock is a symbolic act, meant to secure obedience. Yet the child’s challenge is not simply to her as individual, but to the authority she embodies: he exposes the arbitrariness of her “signifier.” When she later reacts with anger, another “other” appears—not merely the landlady as a person, but the symbolic function she enacts: the upholder of the law, the figure of the Other as authority.

But the event does not leave André Gide untouched. The rebuke and the confrontation with the Other’s anger force a change not only in his relationship to the landlady but also in his own self-relation: he is left uncertain, even retroactively, about his own intentions and the “truth” of his act. The intervention of the Other not only enforces social law, but reconfigures the subject’s relation to his own desire, his own “good faith.” This is the structural point: the Other is not merely an external person but the agency whose intervention transforms the very coordinates of the subject’s being and truth. It is this effect that is central to psychoanalytic work, where the encounter with the Other restructures the subject’s relation to law, desire, and meaning.

“Perhaps this empire of confusion, which is simply that in which all human opera buffa plays out, deserves that we pause here, to understand the ways in which analysis proceeds not only to restore order there, but to set up the conditions for the possibility of restoring it.”

The “empire of confusion” is the stage upon which all the comedies and dramas of human existence unfold—an allusion to the perpetual misunderstandings, misrecognitions, and rivalries that structure social life, reminiscent of the opera buffa, where farce and chaos reign. Psychoanalysis is not simply about imposing a new order onto this confusion, but about interrogating the conditions of possibility for any restoration of order at all. In other words, analysis exposes the structural laws that make both disorder and order possible, and by mapping the workings of the signifier, it creates the space for a different kind of ordering, one that does not simply repress or cover over the real of division and alienation.

“Kern unseres Wesen, the core of our being, is not so much what Freud instructs us to aim for—as so many before him have done through the vain adage “Know thyself”—but rather it is the paths leading to it that he gives us to revise.”

Freud’s contribution is not simply a reiteration of the old Socratic imperative—“know thyself”—which presumes that the core of the subject is accessible through introspection or self-mastery. Rather, Freud directs our attention to the ways, the pathways, the signifying chains through which the subject’s being is constituted and through which the subject’s relationship to its own core is perpetually displaced and revised. The analytic experience is a traversal, not of an interior essence, but of the routes and detours, the aberrations and returns, that structure desire.

“Or rather, this that he proposes we reach, is not something that can be the object of knowledge, but rather, does he not say, it is that which makes my being, and he teaches us that I bear witness to it as much and even more in my whims, in my aberrations, in my phobias and my fetishes, as in my vaguely civilized persona.”

The “core of our being” for Freud is not an object of knowledge, not something that can be captured or possessed by the subject. It is that which makes me what I am, the kernel of my being, and it is attested to not only in what is socially recognized or normatively “civilized,” but above all in the symptomatic, the excessive, the whimsical, the pathological—whims, aberrations, phobias, and fetishes. In other words, the unconscious speaks most truly in what disrupts my own self-image and social persona.

“Madness, you are no longer the object of the ambiguous praise in which the wise man has set up the impregnable burrow of his fear. If, after all, he is not so badly housed there, it is because the supreme agent who has always dug its tunnels and labyrinth, is reason itself, it is the same Logos that he serves.”

Madness is not simply the shadow or negative of reason, nor the site of a mysterious wisdom that the sage admires from a safe distance. If the wise man can tolerate the proximity of madness, it is because both reason and madness are produced by the same agent: the Logos, the symbolic order, the very structure of language and meaning. The labyrinths of madness are the reverse side of the structures built by reason; the “burrow” of fear is dug by the same symbolic agent that seeks to master it.

“And how, then, could you imagine that a scholar as little gifted for the “engagements” that solicited him in his own time as in any other, as Erasmus was, played such an eminent role in the revolution of a Reformation in which man was as much invested in every man as in all?”

Erasmus, depicted here as a figure largely detached from direct worldly or political engagement, becomes crucial precisely because he touches on the relation of the subject to the signifier—particularly through the exegetical, interpretive transformation of texts in the Reformation. The impact of such a figure is not in the force of personality or will, but in the way his work shifts the moorings of meaning itself, redistributing the investment of man both individually and collectively.

“It is that to touch, even slightly, the relation of man to the signifier, here the conversion of exegetical procedures, changes the course of his history by altering the moorings of his being.”

Even a minor shift in how the subject relates to the signifier—in how words are read, interpreted, or circulated—can produce a fundamental transformation in history, in the coordinates of subjectivity, and in the structure of being itself. The exegetical revolution of the Reformation, as with any transformation of the symbolic, reorders what is possible, thinkable, and livable for the subject. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is always the logic of the signifier that, when touched or displaced, sets off seismic shifts in both individual and collective existence. This is why analysis, rather than restoring a prior order, reveals the law of these shifts and makes their structural necessity visible.

“It is in this way that Freudianism, however misunderstood it may have been, however confused its consequences may be, appears to any gaze able to perceive the changes we have lived through in our own life, as constituting an elusive but radical revolution. To amass testimonies is pointless21: everything that interests not only the human sciences, but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, the arts, advertising, propaganda, and thus, I do not doubt, the economy, has been affected by it.”

Freud’s discovery inaugurated a revolution whose effects have reverberated across all domains of human life and culture. Even if often misunderstood, distorted, or superficially adopted, Freudianism has radically shifted the coordinates of the human sciences, as well as all activities that concern subjectivity, desire, and discourse—from politics and philosophy to art, media, and even economics. The point is not to collect endless anecdotes or testimonies about Freud’s influence, but to grasp that a structural transformation has occurred: the introduction of the unconscious, the primacy of language, and the workings of the signifier have reconfigured what it means to be a subject, what counts as knowledge, and how truth circulates.

“Is this anything other, however, than the discordant effects of an immense truth in which Freud traced a pure path? It must be said that this path is not followed, in any technique that prides itself solely on the categorization of its object, as is the case with psychoanalysis today unless it returns to Freud’s discovery.”

What is visible in the scattered and sometimes contradictory consequences of Freudianism are the aftershocks of a single, immense truth—Freud’s “pure path,” the analytic articulation of the unconscious structured like a language. Techniques or schools of psychoanalysis that reduce their work to the categorization of psychic objects (types, structures, stages) lose sight of the essential rupture Freud introduced. Only by returning to the analytic principle of the signifier, to the logic of desire and the unconscious, can psychoanalysis remain faithful to its own revolution. Otherwise, psychoanalysis becomes a mere collection of diagnostic tools and behavioral schemas, betraying its radical promise.

“Likewise, the vulgarity of the concepts on which its practice is based, the bits of faux-Freudism that are now merely ornamental, as well as what must be called the disrepute in which it prospers, together testify to its fundamental renunciation.”

Many current psychoanalytic concepts—when detached from their original context and function—become vulgarized, ornamental, or clichés. Phrases and terms are repeated without understanding their position in the analytic structure, leading to a debased and hollow practice. The spread of psychoanalysis as a mere cultural reference, or its reduced state within the clinic, is not a sign of its triumph, but of its fundamental renunciation. Its apparent “disrepute” is paradoxically the index of its profound betrayal and the dilution of its founding act.

“Freud, by his discovery, brought within the circle of science this boundary between object and being which seemed to mark its limit.”

Freud’s intervention brought the question of the boundary between object and being—between what is known, manipulated, or categorized (object), and what constitutes subjectivity or existence (being)—into the very heart of science. Before Freud, the boundary marked a limit of science: the subject was outside, irreducible, inaccessible. Freud, by positing the unconscious and its laws, internalized this limit, making it the very object of analytic investigation and scientific discourse. The subject, with its lack and its desire, is no longer outside the field of science, but is inscribed within it as a structural effect of the signifier.

“Whether this is the symptom and the prelude to a questioning of man’s situation in being, as all the postulates of knowledge have assumed up to now, do not be satisfied, I beg you, with cataloging the fact that I say it as a case of Heideggerianism—even if it is prefixed with a “neo,” which adds nothing to that style of dustbin by which it is customary to dispense with all reflection by recourse to the “get-rid-of-that” of its mental debris.”

Lacan warns against dismissing this inquiry into man’s situation in being—this encounter between psychoanalysis and ontology—as a mere repetition or offshoot of Heideggerian existential philosophy. The question is not simply philosophical fashion or jargon (“neo-Heideggerianism”), but concerns the very way in which psychoanalysis, by its structural approach, shifts the entire horizon of the subject’s being. Lacan mocks the intellectual laziness that relegates such considerations to the “dustbin” of thought, urging a deeper reflection on the relation between the analytic and the ontological. Psychoanalysis, when it remains close to its Freudian origins, radically interrogates the foundations of knowledge, truth, and being—reshaping the terms of subjectivity for our time.

“When I speak of Heidegger or rather when I translate him, I strive to let the word he utters retain its sovereign significance.”

Lacan clarifies that when he references Heidegger or undertakes the work of translating his concepts, he does so with a careful respect for the singular force and authority of Heidegger’s terms. The point is not to appropriate Heidegger’s thought or reduce it to mere jargon, but to allow his “word”—the unique resonances and existential stakes of terms like “Being,” “Dasein,” or “aletheia”—to preserve their radicality and depth. For a Lacanian psychoanalyst, this caution mirrors the respect owed to Freud’s own terms: both Freud and Heidegger demand that their key notions not be reduced to academic platitudes but retained in their full, sovereign power to disrupt and reorient thinking.

“If I speak of the letter and of being, if I distinguish the other and the Other, it is because Freud indicates them to me as the terms to which refer these effects of resistance and transfer, which I have had to measure myself against unequally, for twenty years now, as I practice this impossible endeavor, as everyone likes to repeat after him, of psychoanalysis. It is also because I must help others not to get lost in it.”

The distinction between “the letter and being,” between “the other” (with a lowercase o) and “the Other” (with a capital O), is not a mere philosophical flourish but responds directly to the demands of analytic experience. Resistance and transference—those two great effects structuring analytic work—can only be grasped by attending to these precise differences, which Freud was the first to mark. Over two decades of analytic practice, Lacan has had to confront and elaborate these structures, knowing that to neglect them would be to mislead both himself and those who come after him. Psychoanalysis is difficult, even “impossible,” precisely because it turns on these distinctions, which continually threaten to become muddled.

“It is to prevent the field of which they are the heirs from lying fallow, and for this, to make them understand that if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, no more than to say that man’s desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor, whether or not one cares to say so, just as desire is a metonymy, even if man mocks it.”

Lacan’s project is to ensure that the analytic field—this inheritance from Freud and the tradition he inaugurated—is not left unworked, neglected, or emptied of its force. It is vital for the psychoanalyst to grasp that the symptom is structurally a metaphor: it is not a metaphorical expression to say so, but a structural truth. Likewise, desire is the effect of metonymy: it is a sliding, a displacement along the signifying chain, not simply an image or poetic flourish. These are not analogies, but technical statements about the workings of the unconscious. Even if one mocks or ignores these formulas, the real structures persist: the symptom continues to function as metaphor, desire as metonymy, regardless of the subject’s belief or scorn.

“And if I invite you to be indignant that after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical showmanship, nothing has yet been validly articulated of what binds metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, would it be necessary that, of the object of this indignation, as perpetrator and as victim, something is still there to respond: namely the man of humanism and the credence, irredeemably protested, that he has drawn on his intentions.”

Lacan calls for a justifiable indignation: it is astonishing that after centuries of theological and philosophical labor, there has yet to be an authentic articulation of the way metaphor connects to the very question of being, or how metonymy relates to the subject’s lack of being. This failure is not accidental; it testifies to the persistent refusal of “the man of humanism”—that subject who has always claimed autonomy, good intentions, and transparent self-knowledge—to recognize his structural implication as both perpetrator and victim in this oversight. The faith in intentions and the ideal of humanist self-mastery are precisely what analytic experience unravels, revealing a subject divided, lacking, and traversed by the play of the signifier.

“T. t. y. m. u. p. t.22 *14-26 May 57.”

These initials, enigmatic at first glance, stand as a cryptic signature or postscript. In the accompanying note, Lacan reveals (in correspondence decades later) that they encode a phrase: “Tu t’y es mis un peu tard” (“You got to it a little late”). This is both a personal confession and a statement about the analytic experience: it is always belated, always after the fact, that insight, knowledge, and transformation arrive. The missing “e” in the published version is noted—a detail that itself plays with the signifier, with absence and remainder. For the Lacanian psychoanalyst, this enigmatic ending reiterates the structural lesson: what matters is not just the message, but the way the letter marks time, loss, and subjective position in the field of the Other.

“1- The talk took place on May 9, 1957, at the Descartes amphitheater at the Sorbonne, and the discussion continued over drinks.”

The setting for Lacan’s address is historically and symbolically charged: the Descartes amphitheater at the Sorbonne, one of the traditional seats of French philosophy and intellectual culture. The very naming of Descartes—the philosopher of the cogito and the legacy of rationalism—signals the stakes of the discourse Lacan is conducting: a discourse that interrogates, displaces, and radicalizes the Cartesian subject through the Freudian letter and the logic of the signifier. That the discussion continues “over drinks” situates this encounter within the living, social transmission of knowledge, where the symbolic order is always negotiated in the interplay of conversation, recognition, and conviviality. Psychoanalytic truth is never only a matter of written doctrine or sterile theory, but emerges in dialogue, in the exchange of signifiers that circulate within a community of interlocutors.

“2- Die Frage der Laienanalyse, G.W., XIV, pp. 281-283.”

This reference points to Freud’s text on lay analysis, which is fundamental for understanding the place of psychoanalysis within, and at the limits of, institutional authority and professionalization. Freud’s insistence that analysis is not reducible to the medical or scientific discourse of his time, that its field is essentially linked to the universitas litterarum—the university of letters, of literature and science—grounds Lacan’s own repeated calls to return to Freud’s discovery rather than its institutional accretions. The citation also underscores the connection between analytic practice and the broader cultural field, with the implication that the question of who may analyze (the lay or non-lay analyst) is tied to the transmission and legitimation of the letter, the symbolic, and the unconscious.

“3- This aspect, which is highly suggestive in overturning the perspective of the ‘psychological function’ that obscures everything in this matter, appears illuminating in the purely linguistic analysis of the two major forms of aphasia, which one of the leaders of modern linguistics, Roman Jakobson, was able to organize. See, in the most accessible of his works, Fundamentals of Language (with Morris Halle), Mouton and Co, ‘S-Gravenhage, chapters I to IV of the Second Part.”

Here Lacan refers to the work of Roman Jakobson, whose structural linguistic analysis of aphasia demonstrates how language disorders are structured not as mere deficits in “psychological function,” but as disruptions in the relations among signifiers. Jakobson’s work, especially as articulated in Fundamentals of Language, displaces the old psychological or functionalist frameworks and reveals that even the breakdown of language (in aphasia) is governed by the laws of the signifier—the paradigmatic (substitution/metaphor) and syntagmatic (combination/metonymy) axes. For Lacan, this supports the psychoanalytic assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that the phenomena encountered in analytic practice (and in pathology) must be grasped in their linguistic, not merely psychological, logic.

“4- One will remember that the discussion concerning the necessity for the advent of a new language in communist society really did take place, and that Stalin, to the relief of those who trusted in his philosophy, settled it in these terms: language is not a superstructure.”

Lacan alludes to the debate in early Soviet ideology about whether a new socialist society should develop its own new language, or whether language is a reflection (“superstructure”) of economic base. Stalin’s position—that language is not a superstructure—acknowledges the autonomy of language, its irreducibility to direct social or economic determination. For Lacan, this is a crucial point: the structure of language, as Freud and Saussure indicate, pre-exists and transcends the subject, and cannot be simply engineered or reformed to match ideology or politics. The unconscious, too, is not the product of social will, but is inscribed in the structures of language itself.

“5- Linguistics, as we say, that is, the study of existing languages in their structure and in the laws that are revealed therein – which leaves aside the theory of abstract codes, inappropriately classified under the heading of the theory of communication, the theory, of a physicist constitution, called information theory, or even any more or less hypothetically generalized semiology.”

Linguistics, in the sense that concerns psychoanalysis, is not merely a generalized theory of signs or information processing, nor is it about abstract coding. Rather, it is the rigorous study of the structure and laws of natural languages—the field where the play of the signifier, the emergence of meaning, and the formation of subjectivity take place. Lacan distinguishes this scientific linguistics from communication theory or information theory, which operate according to a logic alien to the unconscious as Freud understands it. The unconscious is not an information-processing device but a field of desire, absence, and differential signification.

“6- See De magistro by Saint Augustine, of which I commented on the chapter ‘De significatione locutionis’ in my seminar on June 23, 54.”

Lacan cites Augustine’s De magistro (“The Teacher”), focusing on the discussion of the signification of utterances. Augustine’s meditation on how words signify, and how meaning is transmitted and constituted, provides a crucial antecedent for psychoanalytic questions of interpretation, signification, and the status of the signifier. Lacan’s own commentary (delivered in a seminar) testifies to his project of re-reading the philosophical tradition in light of Freud’s discoveries, showing how the problem of meaning was already at stake in theological and philosophical debates.

“7- Thus M. Richards, author precisely of a work on the appropriate procedures for this objective, shows us in another the application of these. For this, he chooses a page of Mong-Tse, Mencius for the Jesuits: Mencius on the mind, it’s called, given the subject of the piece. The guarantees provided for the purity of the experience are in no way inferior to the luxury of its approaches. And the expert scholar in the Traditional Canon where the text is inserted, is encountered at the very site in Beijing where the demonstrative spinner was transported without regard to cost. But we too will be transported, and at a lower price, to see the transformation of a bronze that emits a bell sound at the slightest brush of thought, into a sort of mop for cleaning the blackboard of the most dismal English psychologism. Not without, alas, quickly identifying it with the author’s own meninges, the only thing left to remain of his object and himself after the accomplished exhaustion of the sense of the sense of the one, and the common sense of the other.”

Lacan ironizes the attempt, exemplified by I. A. Richards, to extract meaning from classical texts (here, Mencius) through elaborate experimental and scholarly procedures. Despite all the scholarly apparatus, the attempt to pin down “the sense of sense” or “common sense” reduces the rich resonance of the text to a flat psychologism. The “bronze that emits a bell sound” (a poetic metaphor for the living, resonant quality of meaning) is degraded into a “mop for cleaning the blackboard,” an instrument of erasure and deadening. The end result is the exhaustion of both the object (the text) and the subject (the scholar), who are left emptied out by the relentless pursuit of sense at the cost of meaning. For Lacan, this is a warning against any psychoanalysis that would reduce the work of the letter to a mere search for psychological content or utilitarian function, instead of attending to the singularity and structure of the signifier as it resonates within the unconscious.

“8- It is in this that verbal hallucination, by taking on this form, sometimes opens for us a door of communication, until now missed from being unnoticed, with the Freudian structure of psychosis (Seminar of the year 55-56).”

Verbal hallucination here refers to those phenomena in psychosis where the subject “hears voices” or otherwise experiences language as coming from elsewhere. Lacan highlights that such moments are not merely random disruptions, but rather windows into the structure of the unconscious as Freud conceived it. The very form of verbal hallucination—language imposed upon the subject, the signifier at work outside the subject’s conscious intention—discloses the logic of the signifier in its rawest, most unmediated state. In his 1955-56 seminar, Lacan draws attention to how these psychotic phenomena give us privileged access to the fundamental split between the subject and language, and to the way the unconscious speaks through, or even as, the Other. This is an invitation to read psychosis not as a deficit or breakdown of meaning, but as a particular mode of inscription in the symbolic, a point where the Freudian structure reveals itself with unusual clarity.

“9- We did this on June 6, 56 with the example of the first scene of Athalie, admitting that a passing allusion in the New Statesman and Nation by a highbrow critic to the ‘high prostitution’ [the phrase ‘haute putasserie’ plays on the French term ‘haute putain’ and means both high-class prostitution and hypocrisy] of Racine’s heroines was not unrelated to it, by prompting us to give up the reference to the savage dramas of Shakespeare, which had become compulsive in analytical circles where it played the role of the soap for the villain of philistinism.”

Here Lacan references his use of Racine’s play Athalie as an analytic example, specifically the way its opening scene was read through a critical aside about the “high prostitution” of its heroine—a pun capturing both a certain sophistication and a charge of hypocrisy. Lacan signals the interpretive possibilities opened by such “passing allusions,” which allow us to see the function of the signifier (here, through wit, pun, or trope) operating across literary and analytic texts. He also critiques the analytic community’s habit of reflexively turning to Shakespearean “savage dramas,” a kind of theoretical cliché or purifying ritual, which can obscure more nuanced, contextually situated interpretations. The point is that analytic interpretation must attend to the letter—sometimes in its most subtle or ironic manifestations—rather than rely on grand thematic gestures.

“10- Here we pay homage to what we owe in this formulation to Mr. Roman Jakobson, we mean his works in which a psychoanalyst at every moment finds a way to structure his experience, and which make “personal communications” as superfluous for us as for anyone else. One indeed recognizes in this oblique form of allegiance the style of that immortal couple: Rosenkranz and Guldenstein, whose mismatch is impossible, even by the imperfection of their destiny, for it lasts by the same device as Jeannot’s knife, and for the very reason for which Goethe praised Shakespeare for having presented the character in their double: they alone are the entire Gesellschaft, society itself (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Ed. Trunz, Christian Wegner Verlag, Hamburg, V 5, p. 299) (a). Let us in this context thank the author of Some remarks on the role of speech in psycho-analytic technique (I. J. P., Nov.-Dec. 1956, XXXVII, 6, p. 467), for having taken care to stress that they are “based on” a work from 1952. Thus, it is understandable that nothing of the work published since is assimilated there and yet the author is not unaware of it since he cites me as its editor (sic. I know what editor means).”

Lacan expresses his debt to Roman Jakobson, whose work on linguistics, metaphor, and metonymy provides psychoanalysis with conceptual tools to structure analytic experience. Jakobson’s insights allow analysts to move beyond subjective “personal communications” to a systematic approach grounded in the laws of the signifier. Lacan wittily aligns this “allegiance” with the comic duo Rosenkranz and Guldenstein (Lacan’s playful variation on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet), whose double act, much like Jeannot’s endlessly repaired knife, persists not in spite of, but thanks to, their inconsistencies and failures. In Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, these figures become the very embodiment of society—pure function, structure without substance—echoing how, for Lacan, the signifier exists in the social bond, in “Gesellschaft.” Lacan then turns a critical eye to analytic literature, noting a 1956 article on speech in analysis that claims to build on earlier work, yet demonstrates no awareness of the more recent advances (including Lacan’s own editorial contributions). The implication is that the real work of the letter—its structuring force in psychoanalysis—often goes unassimilated by those who fail to keep up with its theoretical movement.

“(a) The whole passage of Goethe would have to be distilled: Dieses leise Auftreten, dieses Schmiegen und Biegen, dies Jasagen, Streicheln und Schmeicheln, diese Behendigkeit, dies Schwänzeln, diese Allheit und Leerheit, diese rechtliche Schurkerei, diese Unfähigkeit, wie kann sie durch einen Menschen ausgedruckt werden? Es sollten ihrer wenigstens ein Dutzend sein, wenn man sie haben könnte; denn sie sind bloss in Gesellschaft etwas, sie sind die Gesellschaft…”

The quoted Goethe passage describes the infinite variety, duplicity, emptiness, and flexibility of these “characters”—so multifaceted that no single human could contain them, they exist only as a multiplicity, as a function of society itself. Lacan uses this as a metaphor for the way the signifier, and the analytic subject, cannot be grasped in singularity but only in the multiplicity and movement of the symbolic. This is the nature of analytic discourse: not the unity of meaning, but the play of differences and the perpetual mediation of the Other—just as Rosenkranz and Guldenstein, in their comic and structural interdependence, embody society’s own split logic.

“11- This is indeed the equivalent of the German term Witz, to which Freud marked the aim of his third fundamental work on the unconscious. The much greater difficulty of finding this equivalent in English is instructive: wit, weighed down by the discussion going from Davenant and Hobbes to Pope and Addison, leaving its essential virtues to humor, which is something else. Only pun remains, yet it is too narrow.”

Here Lacan draws attention to the term “Witz,” which Freud used to designate the central analytic object of his book on jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Lacan notes that French (and especially English) lack an exact equivalent, which signals both a linguistic and cultural gap in grasping Freud’s insight. In English, “wit” is bogged down by centuries of debate about reason, style, and literary history, with its “essential virtues” (namely, the sudden effect of sense and nonsense that Witz implies) lost to the more sentimental or ethical realm of humor. The English “pun” is closer, since it refers to play with the signifier, but even this is too restricted compared to the generativity of the Witz, which includes surprise, subversion, condensation, displacement, and the enjoyment of the letter. This absence of a full equivalent reveals, for the Lacanian psychoanalyst, that not all analytic concepts travel smoothly between languages; the letter itself inscribes its effects of difference and resistance.

“12- Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss, The Free Press, Glencoë, Illinois.”

Lacan references Leo Strauss’s “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” a study of how truth may be encrypted, disguised, or displaced in writing due to the threat of censorship or social persecution. Strauss argues that thinkers often encode their most radical or dangerous thoughts in ambiguous forms, using the resources of the letter, allusion, and equivocation. For Lacan, this bears directly on the structure of the unconscious, which similarly “hides” the truth in symptoms, jokes, slips, and dreams, under the pressure of internal and external censorship. The psychoanalyst, like the esoteric reader Strauss describes, must decipher what is hidden in the folds of the letter.

“13- See the correspondence, specifically nos. 107 and 119, of the letters selected by his editors.”

This refers to Freud’s own letters, which often reveal, in moments of privacy or confidence, the stakes and anxieties of his project. For the Lacanian, the correspondence is a supplementary field where the function of the letter—the written trace, the enduring support of meaning and transmission—can be seen at work not just theoretically but in the lived practice of psychoanalysis. Nos. 107 and 119 are cited as containing key declarations about the all-or-nothing character of Freud’s message: the irreducibility of the unconscious to partial compromise.

“14- It is known that this is the procedure by which a research assures itself of its result by a mechanical exploration of the entire extension of its object’s field.”

Here Lacan describes the technique of “scanning” or exhaustive enumeration, by which a research methodically explores all possible cases in a given field. In the context of psychoanalysis, this points to the process of interpretation and free association, which attempts to “cover” the unconscious material presented by the analysand. But, as Lacan repeatedly warns, such exhaustive methods can never wholly capture the movement of the letter; there is always a remainder, a structural impossibility of totalizing the field of the signifier.

“15- The sign ~ here designates equivalence.”

Lacan clarifies his use of the tilde (~) as a mathematical sign for equivalence in his algorithms of the signifier. This notational precision matters, because Lacan is constructing a logic of the signifier and of analytic processes that demands exactness. For the psychoanalyst, this is not an academic gesture but an assertion that the relations between metaphor, metonymy, and the effects of the unconscious must be rigorously distinguished and formalized.

“16- S’ in the context designates the productive term of the signifying effect (or signifiance); it is latent in metonymy, patent in metaphor.”

S’ stands for the signifier that produces the signifying effect—what Lacan elsewhere calls “signifiance.” In metonymy, this effect is latent; meaning slides but is not fixed. In metaphor, it becomes patent, manifesting a new meaning or effect of signification through the substitution of one signifier for another. The analytic subject is thus traversed by both processes, and the distinction has clinical consequences for understanding symptom formation, desire, and interpretation.

“17- It is altogether different if, for example, by posing a question such as: “Why philosophers?”, I make myself more ingenuous than nature, since I am asking not only the question philosophers have always asked, but the one in which perhaps they are most interested.”

Lacan here subtly mocks the philosophical tradition, noting that to ask “Why philosophers?” is to risk an infinite regress or self-mirroring of the question. In psychoanalysis, unlike in philosophy, the question of the subject cannot be separated from the subject’s own implication in the signifying chain. The analytic act is not to ask why in the abstract, but to encounter the subjective effects and deadlocks produced by questioning itself.

“18-Fetischismus, G. W., XIV, p. 311.”

This is the citation of Freud’s case on fetishism, which Lacan references as a clinical example of how the letter, language, and lack operate in the structure of desire. The case of the patient fixated on “shine on the nose” is emblematic for Lacan: a fetish is not merely a displaced sexual interest but a signifying formation rooted in early childhood linguistic slippage and the structuring lack of the maternal phallus. The symptom thus reveals the letter in its most literal, structural sense.

“19- One of my colleagues went so far as to wonder if the id (Es) of the later doctrine was not the ‘bad ego’.”

Lacan reports the confusion, even among analysts, about the Freudian id (Es). Some read it as merely a “bad ego,” a repository of the negative or unacceptable. For Lacan, this misreading is symptomatic of a failure to grasp the radical ex-centricity of the subject. The id is not a simple alter ego, but the very locus of desire as structured by the signifier, a register irreducible to ego psychology.

“20- Nevertheless, note the tone in which at that time one could speak of the goblin tricks of the unconscious: Der Zufall und die Koboldstreiche des Unbewussten, this is a title by Silberer, which would be absolutely anachronistic in the present atmosphere of soul managers.”

The playful or “goblin” tone found in Silberer’s early writings on the unconscious (chance and mischief ascribed to unconscious processes) has become anachronistic in today’s clinical and managerial atmosphere. Lacan ironically highlights how the bureaucratic and therapeutic management of souls (the “soul managers”) has replaced the creative, surprising, and sometimes mischievous logic of the unconscious. The dimension of play, ambiguity, and wit is lost when the unconscious is reduced to a system to be managed.

“21- I note the latest to date in what comes quite simply from the pen of François Mauriac to excuse himself, in the Figaro littéraire of May 25, for his refusal to “tell us his life.” If no one can engage in it with the same heart anymore, it is, he tells us, because for half a century, Freud, “whatever we think of him,” has passed through there. And, after momentarily yielding to the received idea that it is to subject us to the “history of our body,” he quickly returns to what his writer’s sensitivity could not fail to notice: it is the deepest confession of the soul of all those close to us that our discourse would publish if it were to come to completion.”

Lacan notes that even in literary culture (as in Mauriac’s confession), the Freudian revolution has rendered any simple act of autobiographical confession impossible. The subject is no longer transparent to himself, because Freud has shown that our discourse is never merely our own; it is traversed by the unconscious, by the letter, by the desire of the Other. What is at stake in psychoanalytic discourse is not the linear telling of one’s story, nor the history of the body alone, but the profound confession of the soul’s relation to the Other, a process that never comes to full completion. For the Lacanian analyst, this is the horizon of analytic work: not to produce coherence or closure, but to bear witness to the incompletion and displacement of all confessional or subjective truth by the effects of the signifier.