ABSTRACT
The metapsychological correlate of the experience of pain is the ‘irruption’ of ‘excessively large’ quantum into the psychic apparatus and a ‘large rise’ in the level of excitation in it. The psychic apparatus, Sigmund Freud writes in the Project, is ‘taught biologically,’ emphasizing that it is within the bios that the logos metapsychologically manifest as writing by way of addition or subtraction emerges. Psychic inscription is a writing that lives, a writ(h)ing that is an index of the Thing beyond representation. In J. Lacan’s treatment of the Einziger zug in the seminar on transference, however, the synecdochic inscription that is the unary trait is delimited and specified in a way that aligns it with the primordial experiences Freud posited at the foundation of the psychic apparatus in the Project for a Scientific Psychology. The inscriptorial specifications of the Einziger zug as Lacan theorizes it after Freud, however, extend beyond the copy, etching, and coat of arms.
