ABSTRACT
People will see the justification for Lacan's assimilation of linguistic metonymy to Freudian displacement and metaphor to condensation. The Lacanian analytic cure then seeks to unfold in reverse order the sequence of signifiers in which the subject's desire has gradually been alienated. Through the mediation of demand, the whole past opens up right down to early infancy. Regression shows nothing other than a return to the present of signifiers used in demands for which there is no prescription. In connexion with the analysis of Philippe's dream, people said that the dream fulfils a cascade of wishes linked together by connexions which become looser and looser as one moves from the deepest wish- the most primitive- to the most superficial- the most recent. Coming to the end of his spontaneous associations, Freud then turns to the 'herbarium' element in the manifest text of the dream.
