ABSTRACT
"Lallation" comes from the Latin lallare, which the dictionaries say designates the act of singing "la, la" to send infants to sleep. The term also designates the babbling of the infant who does not yet speak but who already makes sounds. Lallation is sound separated from meaning, but nonetheless, not separated from the infant's state of satisfaction. Lalangue evokes the speech that is transmitted before syntactically structured language. Lalangue is an impregnable knowledge, but not without effects. The method in question is the one that S. Freud invented and elaborated in the series of texts, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Jacques Lacan makes a big deal of the fact that the child receives discourse before this very early period of life. The symptom indeed comes from the Real, and doubly so: from the real of the substance of jouissance and from the real of lalangue.
