ABSTRACT
Lacan has compared these two Freudian processes to the stylistic figures known as metonymy. This supremacy of the signifier was defined by language's peculiar aptitude for signifying something other than what it is literally saying. For Lacan, then, metaphor and metonymy in linguistics and condensation and displacement in psychoanalysis account for the alienation of a thought or a signifier by the simple fact that it must be mediated in language. The alphabetic and analogical dictionary of the French language (Robert) will allow us to make the connexion between the literary definition of metaphor and the definition accepted by modern linguistics. Lacan uses the formula 'desire is a metonymy' to indicate the fundamental and progressive alienation of the need for union with the mother which results from the mediation of this need through language. In the demand, the primal need is no more than a shadow of its former self.
