ABSTRACT
A classic play of language should be seen in symptoms of mental illness and the relations between unconscious signifiers and conscious signifiers should be brought to light. The double-triggered mechanism of metaphor is the very mechanism by which the symptom, in the analytic sense, is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of a sexual trauma and its substitute term in the actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject, a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life provides Lacanian analysis of the formations of the unconscious with a series of examples of psychical phenomena determined by the unconscious. Most of the associations are of a metaphoric nature, although in referring to the substitute names Lacan does speak of 'metonymie ruins'.
