The Letter to the Letter

2022/07/06 by Jonathan Davidoff
#Lacan #post-structuralism #unconscious

paper · doi:10.5526/esj138

Abstract

In his 1957 text ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious’, French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan investigates the nature, composition and functions of the unconscious. Following the post-structuralist tradition, Lacan bases his re-reading of Freud on Saussure’s linguistics, and by doing so comes to the conclusion that the unconscious is structured like a language: composed of signifier chains and structured by the rules of language. Also, he investigates the nature of the signifier and sifts its most simple component and functions, namely the letter. This explanatory analysis of the foresaid text aims to follow step by step the development carried out by Lacan and to explain what we think he established in it.  

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