ABSTRACT
Three times Lacan missed a rendez-vous with Ernest Jones. Maybe these problematic curtain calls were symptomatic for Lacan’s struggle with the orthodoxy of symbolism in psychoanalysis. Examining the critique of Ernest Jones on Silberer’s theory of symbols, Lacan unfolds his vision on the symbolic. Criticizing not only Jones’s critique on Silberer’s theory of symbolism, but also Jones’s attempts to theorize symbolism, Lacan writes on the pitfalls of symbolic interpretation while digging into the work of Jones and Silberer on symbolism. Lacan’s research line makes me think of a Matryoshka or Russian doll, a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. The result is a text with a circular movement, analytical in its core. It testifies of a paradigm shift in Lacanian psychoanalysis under the influence of the linguistic turn. In the centre of this shift the phallic symbol is revealed in its status as an empty signifier. Written at a crucial moment in the history of psychoanalysis, this ‘Écrit’ is no coincidence. Conceived in the background of the splitting of the Société Psychanalytique de Paris.
