ABSTRACT
If ‘The Mirror Stage’ represented Lacan’s first innovation within the field of psychoanalysis, it was one that remained recognizably within the limits of accepted theory and practice. It was almost 15 years before a distinctively Lacanian reading of psychoanalysis began to emerge when, in 1951, Lacan made his call for a ‘return to Freud’. Two years later, at the Rome Congress of Romance Language Psychoanalysts, Lacan delivered a paper entitled ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’ (1977b [1956]), subsequently known as ‘The Rome Discourse’. This paper set out his major concerns for the following decade, the distinction between speech and language, an understanding of the subject as distinct from the I and, above all, the elaboration of the central concepts of the signifier and the symbolic order. Also in 1953, Lacan and a group of colleagues left the Paris Psycho-Analytical Society to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). The Rome Discourse came to be seen as the founding document of the new school and of a new direction in psychoanalysis.
