ABSTRACT
From the moment when the first sound of the Freudian message echoed across the world from the great bell of Vienna, many incidental factors have been involved in the story. If Freud had brought to man’s knowledge nothing more than the truth that there is such a thing as the true, there would be no Freudian discovery. Freud would belong to the line of moralists in whom a whole tradition of humanist analysis is embodied, a milky way to the heavens of European culture in which Balthazar Gracian and La Rochefoucauld shine as stars of the first order, and in which Nietzsche features as a nova as dazzling as it is short-lived. A psychoanalyst should find it easy enough to grasp the fundamental distinction between signifier and signified, and to begin to use the two non-overlapping networks of relations that they organize.
