ABSTRACT
In later papers, such as the 1953 ‘Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse’), or the 1957 ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’ (‘L’Agence de la lettre dans l’inconscient’), Lacan identifies his clinical approaches with the analysis of speech as the vehicle through which the human being is brought into an already existing social order and thus as the means and form of expression of the unconscious. This structural and linguistic vision of the emergence of full subjectivity appropriates and transforms particular features of LéviStrauss, Saussure and Jakobson. Subjectivity for Lacan signifies not in the individual’s will, but only through the signifying chain to which it must belong, as well as in the unstable relation which it must negotiate between a signifier (or term) and its signified (or concept). Lacanian analysis does not, then, operate with any sense of a final cure; the inevitable immersion of the human in the Symbolic order tends rather towards the point where the subject of a discourse may fully inhabit the structure of meaning. This is in direct opposition to the aims of a psychology that
would wish to repair and fortify a battered ego, in the belief it is in the ego that personal identity is guarded and developed.
