ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud argued that subjects could only deal effectively with unconscious material when they could talk about it with their analysts—by bringing it into language, in other words. It took the work of Jacques Lacan to draw out fully the significance of language for psychoanalysis. This chapter provides an outline of Lacanian thought in relation to its forebears: Saussurian linguistics and Freudian psychoanalysis. Behind Lacan’s ideas about language lies the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, as found in an edited version of his lecture notes, The Course in General Linguistics. Freud provided a model of the construction of subjectivity that emphasised the place of gender in influencing family relations and defining social place. The subject seems to agree to inhabit the symbolic order, but maintains, at an unconscious level, its pursuit of the intense satisfaction, the sense of completion and self-identity, that it felt it had momentarily in the imaginary, but that it has lost.
