Canonical lacan 360 occurrences

Metaphor

ELI5

In Lacan, metaphor means one word or idea taking the place of another one — but when that swap happens, something new gets created that wasn't there before, like a spark flying between the two. This isn't just about poetry: it's how we become subjects, how the father's authority replaces the mother's hold on us, and how the unconscious works.

Definition

In Lacanian theory, metaphor is not a rhetorical ornament but the fundamental structural operation of the signifying chain by which one signifier is substituted for another, producing a new signified effect. Lacan's canonical formula — most fully elaborated in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious" — defines metaphor as the crossing of the bar between signifier and signified: when S substitutes for S', the elided S' persists in the chain, and from this substitutive tension a poetic or creative spark of new meaning is produced. The displaced signifier does not simply vanish; it sinks below the bar (unterdrückt) and thereby structures the subject's unconscious discourse. Metaphor is thus co-extensive with Freudian condensation (Verdichtung) in the dream-work: both involve the compression of multiple associations into a single, overdetermined element. The structural equation runs: condensation = metaphor; displacement = metonymy.

Metaphor's scope in Lacan vastly exceeds rhetoric. The subject itself is "a species of metaphor" — subjectivity arises through metaphoric substitution as the constitutive act of symbolization. Most importantly, the Oedipus complex is re-described as the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the Mother's Desire, producing the phallus as the signified of desire and installing the symbolic order as such. Psychosis is defined structurally as the failure of this paternal metaphorization (foreclosure), which leaves the subject without the symbolic support normally provided by this constitutive substitution. Beyond the clinical, metaphor names the originary operation by which the symbolic order constitutes a "reality" for speaking beings — every designation is already metaphorical because the referent is always real (ungraspable), and language can only approach it through the mediation of another signifier.

Evolution

In Lacan's early "return to Freud" period (Seminars I–IV, early Écrits), metaphor first appears as the positive structural counterpart of Freudian condensation, mapped via Jakobson's distinction between the paradigmatic (similarity/substitution) and syntagmatic (contiguity/combination) axes. Seminar I (1953–4) already gestures toward metaphor as the originary mode of symbolic relation: "Every kind of usage, in a certain sense, is always metaphorical" (Seminar I, p. 238), and Lacan collapses Ernest Jones's distinction between metaphor and symbol. In Seminar III (1955–6), the metaphor/metonymy pair is systematically applied to psychosis: Schreber's hallucinations reveal the absence of metaphor at the level of content ("Even when the sentences may have a meaning, one never encounters anything that resembles a metaphor," p. 231), confirming that the symbolic in psychosis fails precisely at the metaphoric axis. Metaphor grounds the Name-of-the-Father's function, and Seminar IV (1956–7) formalizes the "paternal metaphor" — naming the phobic object as "metaphorical" substitute for the missing symbolic element — and announces the forthcoming matheme (Seminar IV, p. 404).

The 1957 essay "The Instance of the Letter" marks the theoretical apex of Lacan's formalization: metaphor receives its algebraic formula F(S'/S)S ≅ S(+)s, and is explicitly linked to condensation; the symptom is a metaphor ("if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so," Seminar XI, p. 156), and man's desire is a metonymy. In Seminar V (1957–8) the paternal metaphor is developed into a three-stage schema of the Oedipus complex, and love itself is theorized as metaphor — the substitution of the lover (erastès) for the beloved (erômenos) produces the signification of love (Seminar VIII). Seminar XI (1964) refines the formal logic of metaphor, warning against reading the formula's bar as simple mathematical proportion and insisting instead that metaphor is substitution: the displaced signifier falls below the principal bar as the unterdrückt, the repressed (Seminar XI, pp. 263–264).

In the later seminars (object-a period, Seminars X–XIV), metaphor proliferates into new domains: the anal drive is "the locus of metaphor" (substitution of faeces for phallus, Seminar XI, p. 119); the sexual act involves a metaphoric structure (the woman's body becomes "the metaphor for my jouissance," Seminar XIV, p. 244); and the objet petit a is described as "the metaphorical child of the One and the Other" (Seminar XIV, p. 188). In the topology-borromean period (Seminars XXII–XXV), the concept is partially displaced by topology: the Borromean knot is itself "a metaphor" but also "nothing more than metaphor of the chain" (Seminar XXIII, p. 158), and Lacan moves toward insisting on the distinction between metaphor-as-illustration and structure-as-operative (Seminar XXIV, p. 93: "not a metaphor but a structure; for the difference there is between the metaphor and the structure, is that the metaphor is justified by the structure"). By Seminar XXV, metaphor must be "superseded" by material topology, since "the art is also a metaphor."

The commentators (Hook et al., Fink, Boothby, McGowan) consistently preserve and develop the structural definition. Fink's "The Lacanian Subject" makes metaphorization and subjectification strictly co-extensive, with every substitutional metaphor precipitating a subject (pp. 89–92). Boothby maps the metaphoric/metonymic opposition onto positionality/dispositionality and Jakobsonian aphasia. McGowan emphasizes metaphor's primacy over metonymy in psychoanalysis as the site of constitutive loss rather than the metonymic evasion of loss.

Key formulations

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.156)

if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than it is to say that man's desire is a metonymy.

This sentence from 'Instance of the Letter' is the most compressed statement of the two master equations: symptom = metaphor, desire = metonymy. It names the culminating theoretical stakes of the entire essay and grounds the claim that these are not figures of speech but structural identities.

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.146)

The logic of the unconscious is mediated by metaphor and metonymy and the subject is a species of metaphor.

Elevates metaphor from linguistic trope to ontological operator: the subject is not merely described by metaphor but is constituted by it, as the effect of one signifier substituting for another in the symbolic chain.

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.263)

For psychoanalysis, metaphor has primacy over metonymy. The metonymic movement from object to object obscures the loss that transpires during metaphoric substitution.

McGowan's endnote formulation clarifies why psychoanalysis and deconstruction part ways: psychoanalysis insists on the constitutive loss installed by metaphoric substitution, whereas deconstruction privileges the endless metonymic displacement that evades this loss.

Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.16)

the only meaning is metaphorical meaning, meaning emerging only from the substitution of one signifier for another in the symbolic chain.

Lacan's most economical formulation from Seminar V: all meaning is metaphorical because it is produced only by signifier-to-signifier substitution, never by a transparent reference from signifier to pre-existing signified.

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation)Jacques Lacan · 1966 (p.38)

The signifier cannot signify itself, except precisely when it is not itself that it signifies, namely, when it uses metaphor. And there is nothing to prevent the metaphor which substitutes a different signifier for this T of the truth, from making the truth re-emerge at this moment, with the ordinary effect of metaphor, namely: the creation of a false signified.

Demonstrates why truth cannot be stated directly: the signifier of truth can only re-emerge through metaphoric substitution, which invariably produces a false signified, exposing the irreducible gap between signifier and truth at the heart of logic itself.

Cited examples

Victor Hugo's poem 'Booz endormi' — 'Sa gerbe n'était pas avare ni haineuse' ('His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful') (literature)

Cited by Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan · 1964 (p.262). Lacan uses this line as his canonical illustration of poetic metaphor: the unexpected substitution of 'his sheaf' for Boaz opens an entire dimension of meaning — procreative power, divine paternity — that neither term alone could produce. The metaphor is poetic precisely because the substituted signifier ('sheaf') is semantically remote from the position it fills.

Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) — the sled 'Rosebud' (film)

Cited by Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free MarketsTodd McGowan · 2016 (p.47). The sled metaphorizes loss itself rather than standing in for a recoverable object: it substitutes for what is not there, representing absence as such. McGowan uses Kane's dying word to distinguish the metaphoric object (which embodies constitutive loss) from the metonymic chain of accumulated possessions that attempt to compensate for it.

Little Hans's horse phobia (case_study)

Cited by Seminar IV · The Object RelationJacques Lacan · 1956 (p.392). The horse functions as a metaphorical substitute for the missing paternal signifier: 'the phobic object comes to play the role... which plays the same metaphorical role' as the sheaf in Hugo's poem, condensing the paternal dimension and allowing Hans to orient his anxiety. The horse is not imaginary symbol but structural signifier doing the work the Name-of-the-Father failed to perform.

Freud's forgetting of 'Signorelli' (case_study)

Cited by Seminar V · Formations of the UnconsciousJacques Lacan · 1957 (p.59). Lacan treats the Signorelli parapraxis as a 'failed metaphor': where successful metaphor produces new meaning by substituting one signifier for another, the forgetting produces a hole — the repressed signifier ('Signor'/Herr) passes underneath (unterdrückt) rather than generating creative sparks. This contrasts the 'inverse metaphor' of pathological substitution with the productive metaphor of poetic language.

Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus — 'These words are razors to my wounded heart' (literature)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.183). Vanheule uses this line to illustrate Lacan's structural definition of metaphor from 'On a Question': Saturninus's words are given the material qualities of razors, producing an induction of meaning (the new signified 's') from the substitution of one signifier for another. It demonstrates how metaphoric substitution disrupts the metonymic continuity of speech and creates new meaning.

Schreber's 'forced game of thought' — the psychotic's continuous metonymic displacement (case_study)

Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache'Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · 2019 (p.190). The 'forced game of thought' is diagnosed as continuous metonymy compensating for the failure of metaphor: because the paternal metaphor (Name-of-the-Father) is foreclosed, Schreber cannot substitute one signifier for another to anchor meaning, and instead chains substitutions endlessly without the interruption that productive metaphor provides.

The child's use of 'bowwow' for 'dog' (other)

Cited by Seminar VI · Desire and Its InterpretationJacques Lacan · 1958 (p.176). Lacan uses the child's substitution of an onomatopoeia for the adult signifier as the most elementary demonstration of metaphor: replacing 'dog' with 'bowwow' is not a naming mistake but the inaugural metaphoric operation that begins predication. 'To replace dog by bowwow is to create a first metaphor, and it is here that predication first begins to operate. Nothing is closer to the true genesis of language.'

Tensions

Within the corpus

Whether metaphor is primarily a grammatical/structural operator of the unconscious or a properly rhetorical figure present in the analysand's actual speech — and whether these are compatible or require different theoretical frameworks.

Hook et al. (Reading Lacan's Écrits commentary): the unconscious can be understood grammatically through metaphor and metonymy as linguistic operators, while the concrete discourse of the analysand should be understood rhetorically — these two senses are complementary, not opposed. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, p. 132 and p. 157
Lacan himself (cited in the same commentary): 'The dictionary has to do with diction... precisely not this dimension that has to do with the unconscious. Contrary to what the masses of candidates think, the unconscious has first and foremost to do with grammar.' Metaphor and metonymy describe a grammar of the unconscious, not a rhetoric. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t, p. 157

This tension runs through Lacan's own teaching: sometimes metaphor is purely structural/grammatical (the proper domain of the unconscious), sometimes the analyst needs rhetorical competence to interpret the concrete tropes analysands deploy.

Whether metaphor in psychoanalysis should be understood as substitution (Lacanian formula) or as analogical proportion (Perelman's reading), with significant implications for how the unconscious is structured.

Lacan: metaphor is the substitution of one signifier for another, not a proportional relation — the formula cannot be handled as a simple fractional transformation (S¹/S :: S/s), because there can be no relation between a signifier and itself. The displaced signifier falls below the principal bar as the repressed (unterdrückt). Misreading the bar as mathematical fraction is 'quite definitely unsatisfactory.' — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-14-1, p. 10 and p. 94
Perelman (engaged polemically by Lacan): metaphor is a function of analogy, derived from the proportional relation of one signifier to another insofar as a third reproduces it by giving rise to an 'ideal signified.' This reading promotes a 'reduced language' model in which metaphor grounds the unconscious through analogy rather than substitution. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-14, p. 10

Lacan explicitly rejects Perelman's analogical reading as a category error that naturalizes the unconscious as 'reduced language' and forecloses the properly Lacanian claim that no signifier can signify itself.

Whether the primary mechanism of the unconscious at work in forgetting and parapraxis is metaphor (substitution) or something more primordial (Unterdrückung/effacement that precedes and is distinct from metaphor).

Lacan in Seminar XI: in the Signorelli forgetting, what is operative is 'not metaphor, but the reality of the disappearance, of the suppression, of the Unterdrückung, the passing underneath.' Metaphor is explicitly set aside as insufficient — the material reality of the effacement is more primordial than any rhetorical figure. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-11, p. 42
Lacan in Seminar V and Seminar XII: the Signorelli forgetting is analysed as a 'failed metaphor' or 'inverse metaphor' — substitutions are produced, 'but it is a very singular metaphor... completely the inverse of the one whose function... is the creative function of sense.' Metaphor remains the organizing concept, only its direction is reversed. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12, p. 52

The tension is internal to Lacan's own teaching: in one register the parapraxis exceeds metaphor (Unterdrückung as structural effacement); in another it is a defective or inverse metaphor. These framings have different clinical implications for how one reads the symptom.

Across frameworks

vs Object Oriented Ontology

Lacanian: For Lacan, metaphor is the irreducible operation by which the Real is approached but never grasped — every designation is metaphorical because the referent is always real in the sense of being unattainable. Objects, as such, are always already effects of the signifying chain; they have no autonomous being anterior to their capture in language. The paternal metaphor installs symbolic reality by substituting the Name-of-the-Father for the maternal Thing, forever barring direct access to das Ding.

Object Oriented Ontology: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman, Morton) holds that objects withdraw from all relations — including linguistic ones — and that their being exceeds any metaphorical grasp. Metaphor, for OOO, is one mode of 'allure' by which objects partially disclose themselves to other objects and to thought, but the object's real qualities are never exhausted by any metaphorical translation. There is no linguistic bar that definitively forecloses access; instead, every metaphor is a partial, asymmetrical translation between objects.

Fault line: The deep disagreement is ontological: for Lacan the Real is constituted as inaccessible precisely through the operation of the signifier/metaphor (the bar is productive, not merely obstructive), whereas OOO posits a real object-being that pre-exists and exceeds all linguistic mediation, making the Lacanian 'bar' merely epistemological rather than ontologically constitutive.

vs Frankfurt School

Lacanian: Lacan treats metaphor as the mechanism by which ideology achieves its most intimate hold — the symptom as metaphor means that ideological formations are not external impositions but structural effects of the subject's insertion into the signifying chain. The subject is always already metaphorized (substituted) and cannot step outside this structure toward an unalienated standpoint.

Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer) is suspicious of metaphor as a vehicle of reification: 'enlightened' discourse deploys conceptual metaphors that freeze living particularity into dead abstraction. Yet critical theory still retains a regulative ideal — a 'non-identical' reality that concepts and metaphors falsify — and holds out the possibility of negative dialectics as a discourse that resists the closure of metaphorical totalization. The goal is to break open reified metaphors to expose what they conceal.

Fault line: Frankfurt School critique presupposes a non-identical remainder that critical thought can asymptotically approach against the grain of reified metaphor, whereas Lacan denies any such position of exteriority: the Real is not a repressed non-identity accessible through dialectics but the constitutive impossibility that metaphoric substitution both installs and is driven by.

vs Humanistic Self Actualization

Lacanian: For Lacan, the subject is the effect of metaphorical substitution — it comes into being only through the paternal metaphor that bars direct access to the maternal jouissance. There is no pre-linguistic self that metaphor could 'express' or distort; the subject is constitutively split, and metaphor is not a tool of self-expression but the structural condition of subjectivity as such.

Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Rogers, Maslow) holds that metaphor and creative expression are vehicles through which the authentic self comes to know and actualize itself. Metaphors in therapy help the person symbolize genuine inner experience that was previously inarticulate; the goal is to move from constricting, inauthentic metaphors to more growth-promoting ones that better capture the client's organism's genuine tendencies.

Fault line: The fundamental disagreement concerns whether there is a pre-given authentic self whose experiences metaphors can more or less accurately represent (humanistic), or whether the subject is entirely constituted through the metaphoric operations of the symbolic order and has no pre-linguistic nature to express (Lacanian).

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (335)

#01

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**(C) SOMATIC SOURCES OF DREAMS**

Theoretical move: Freud argues that somatic stimuli during sleep do not constitute an independent source of dreams but are subordinated to the psychic wish-fulfilment mechanism: bodily sensations are integrated into dream-formation as additional material, with the dream's essential nature remaining the fulfilment of a wish.

the horse came to be a symbolic representation of a lady patient (in the dream it is most intelligent)
#02

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**(A) THE CONDENSATION WORK**

Theoretical move: Through detailed dream analyses, Freud demonstrates how condensation works as the primary mechanism of dream-formation: multiple latent dream-thoughts are fused into single manifest elements via inversion, symbolic allusion, and associative chains, such that any one dream element may condense several distinct meanings simultaneously.

and this scene symbolises a course of events by recounting which Daudet tries to warn young men not to waste serious affection upon girls of humble origin or of questionable past.
#03

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**(E) EXAMPLES-ARITHMETIC SPEECHES IN THE DREAM**

Theoretical move: Freud demonstrates through concrete dream examples how the dream-work transforms abstract thoughts into concrete representations through literalization of idioms, wordplay, phonetic resemblance, and arithmetic distortion, arguing that these mechanisms reveal the psychic resistance and wish-fulfillment operative in dream formation.

The dream need only restore to these words their full significance, or follow the evolution of their meaning a little way back... a tight place is a hole, and that the dream uses symbolically his very words to his friend, 'Be careful, or you'll get yourself into a hole.'
#04

The Interpretation of Dreams · Sigmund Freud

**(A) FORGETTING IN DREAMS**

Theoretical move: Freud argues that apparently aimless free association is never truly without an end-presentation; when conscious end-presentations are relinquished, unconscious ones take over and determine the train of thought, while the psychic censor—rather than the absence of goals—accounts for the predominance of superficial, displaced associations over deep ones, a principle that forms the twin pillars of psychoanalytic technique.

It is as if in a mountainous region a general interruption of traffic, e.g., an inundation, should render impassable the long and broad thoroughfares; traffic would then have to be maintained through inconvenient and steep footpaths
#05

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.47

THE ALLUR E OF BU YIN G A BUN C H OF THIN GS

Theoretical move: The passage argues that capitalist accumulation operates by exploiting the subject's constitutive misrecognition of its own satisfaction: because satisfaction is located in the act of desiring (rooted in loss) rather than in the object obtained, the subject endlessly pursues objects via the fantasy of the Other's desire, and capitalism recruits this structural failure as its engine.

The sled metaphorizes loss: it substitutes for what is not there, representing loss as such.
#06

Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets · Todd McGowan · p.263

. THE SUBJEC T OF DE SIR E AND THE SUBJEC T OF C APITALISM

Theoretical move: This endnotes passage performs several interlocking theoretical moves: it grounds capitalism's logic in the structure of desire and the signifier (gap, mediation, lack), distinguishes psychoanalytic castration from mere frustration, aligns Hegel's ontology of nothing with the foundational role of absence in signification, and positions psychoanalysis against object-relations, deconstruction, and Heideggerian authenticity in their respective treatments of loss and the Other.

For psychoanalysis, metaphor has primacy over metonymy. Th e metonymic movement from object to object obscures the loss that transpires during metaphoric substitution.
#07

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.69

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > A sign of alarm

Theoretical move: This passage contextualizes Lacan's 1957 essay "Psychoanalysis and its Teaching" within the institutional conflicts of French psychoanalysis, arguing that Lacan's theoretical insistence on humanistic, structuralist, and intersubjective foundations for analytic training was simultaneously a militant political intervention against the positivist-medical orthodoxy represented by the IPA and Nacht.

Lacan powerfully contextualized the key concepts of psychoanalysis within his own take on a structuralist approach to language, and elaborated the structure of metaphor and metonymy as key to that of the symbolic order and therefore of the subject.
#08

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Abstract

Theoretical move: Against the imaginary reduction of psychoanalysis to ego-psychology, this passage argues that the unconscious must be understood as the locus of the Other's speech, structured by signifiers via metaphor and metonymy, with the death drive as the key to repetitive speech—and that analytic training requires restoring the symbolic chain rather than reducing analysis to an imaginary dyad.

Because of metaphor and metonymy (see 1966/2006c: 412–441), the symptom is always connected to other signifiers
#09

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Subjection to the laws of language

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the symbolic order structurally precedes and subjugates the individual subject, such that the signifier — carried by language across generations, dreams, jokes, and symptoms — is irreducible and indestructible even as individual speakers are not; Lacan's theses on the symbolic thus serve as a "key" to Freud's three major works on the unconscious, with condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy as the structural parallels.

the relationship between metaphor and condensation, and metonymy and displacement, for example
#10

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.95

[Psychoanalysis and its Teaching](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-004) > Approaching neurosis in the imaginary vs. the symbolic

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the IPA's ego-strengthening approach to neurosis deepens alienation by keeping the subject in the imaginary register, and that only orienting analysis through the symbolic Other—rather than the imaginary other of identification—can treat neurosis as a genuine question rather than a lure; this critique extends to all empiricist, biologistic, and behaviorist appropriations of psychoanalysis that destroy its symbolic foundation.

Skinner published Verbal Behavior in this same year as this essay (1957), in which he theorizes a behavioral functional analysis of speech—using such concepts as metaphor and metonymy!
#11

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.117

[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Defrosting the signifer

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Rabelais' frozen words allegory to establish the symbolic order's primacy and exteriority to the subject as the very definition of the unconscious, then develops this into a critique of Jungian archetypes, Jonesian symbolism, and existential listening practices—ultimately arguing that proper analytic technique consists in attentiveness to the literal, phonemic, polysemous signifier rather than to signification or meaning.

Lacan revisits Freud's break with Jung… moving away from the imaginary dimension of the symbol to meaning in all its potential errancy or nonsense, taking distance from the religious universalism of the 'archetype'
#12

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.132

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Context

Theoretical move: This contextual introduction argues that "The Instance of the Letter" must be read as a multi-front intervention — into structural linguistics, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Hegel via Kojève), the politics of psychoanalytic institutions, and the art of rhetoric — in order to grasp the full theoretical stakes of Lacan's reinvention of the Freudian unconscious through the concepts of metaphor, metonymy, and the letter.

I will argue here that the unconscious in Lacan's work can be understood grammatically, through metaphor and metonymy as employed by linguists, while the spoken discourse of an analysand should be understood rhetorically
#13

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.143

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious

Theoretical move: Lacan's alignment of metaphor/metonymy with condensation/displacement establishes the signifier's logic as constitutive of both the unconscious and the subject itself: the subject is not the ego-cogito but the effect of signifying operations, and symptoms/desire are the two modes in which the letter insists through these operations.

it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that a signification effect is produced that is poetic or creative
#14

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.146

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter in the unconscious

Theoretical move: Lacan's deployment of rhetorical trope (via Quintilian) over mere figure reframes metaphor and metonymy as active, structural operations of the unconscious that work independently of conscious intention—thereby establishing the primacy of the signifier and positioning psychoanalysis as necessarily interdisciplinary, in explicit opposition to ego psychology's "autonomous ego."

The logic of the unconscious is mediated by metaphor and metonymy and the subject is a species of metaphor.
#15

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.151

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is a symptomatic compromise-formation that covers over the radical heteronomy of the subject, while the unconscious, understood as the Other's discourse, is the true object of psychoanalysis; the letter's insistence through metaphor and metonymy links being to desire and repetition, grounding Lacan's claim that subjects are spoken by signifiers rather than speaking them.

The statement that metaphor is linked to the question of being and metonymy is linked to its lack (439, 2) should be read in this context.
#16

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.156

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The letter, being, and the other

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's account of the letter (metaphor/metonymy) constitutes an implicit but sustained response to Heidegger: where Heidegger sees language as the "house of being," Lacan insists that language captures, mutilates, and tortures the subject, making the unconscious the condition of any question of being and symptom/desire the structural correlates of metaphor/metonymy respectively.

if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than it is to say that man's desire is a metonymy.
#17

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.157

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > Conclusion

Theoretical move: The passage argues that in Lacan's thought, metaphor and metonymy operate on two registers simultaneously—as a grammar of the unconscious (structural/linguistic) and as genuinely rhetorical figures in the concrete discourse of analysands—and that attentiveness to rhetoric as an art is therefore indispensable for clinical psychoanalytic practice.

metaphor and metonymy describe a grammar of the unconscious, rather than a rhetoric, which depends on the contrasts between speech and the connections of the Symbolic
#18

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.165

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > Context

Theoretical move: This passage provides a contextual and structural overview of Lacan's 'On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,' arguing that the text marks a pivotal shift in Lacan's theorization of psychosis as a unitary clinical structure grounded in the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, situated within a four-period developmental arc in Lacan's broader work on psychosis.

It was particularly around the mid-nineteen fifties that Lacan began to focus on concepts like the signifier and signified, symbolic structure, metaphor and metonymy and the shifter.
#19

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.182

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.

Lacan explains the structure of the paternal metaphor, also named the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father. The framework of this metaphor is made up by Lacan's general formula of metaphor
#20

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.183

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud

Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.

metaphor is a process in the signifying chain, expressed by the dot that connects the two fractions in the left part of the formula, in which a signifier S replaces another signifier that was not uttered but was metonymically anticipated in the signifying chain
#21

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.190

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.

The 'forced game of thought' comes down to a continuous use of metonymy to compensate for the failure at the level of metaphor.
#22

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)

[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > V. Postscript

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's central thesis in "On a Question" is that psychosis is constituted by the Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which prevents metaphorization of the lack-of-being and produces a fundamental disorder in the subject's relation to the Other, the Symbolic, and the Real—a structural claim that post-Freudian authors systematically miss by failing to distinguish the symbolic father function from its imaginary and real counterparts.

the metaphorization, by means of which the lack-of-being is processed in neurosis, fails to occur (479, 4).
#23

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.212

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > I. Who analyzes today?

Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of post-Freudian (especially ego-psychological) psychoanalysis is mobilized to argue that authentic analytic practice requires orienting from the symbolic axis (Other, lack, desire) rather than from imaginary ego-to-ego relations, with the L-schema formalizing why the analytic situation must be understood as four-positional rather than dyadic.

Lacan uses the metaphor of the game of bridge to understand the analytic situation as a situation with four players: 'two subjects each of whom is provided with two objects'
#24

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.217

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > II. What is the place of interpretation?

Theoretical move: Lacan's account of interpretation displaces ego-psychological and Gestaltian frameworks by grounding interpretation exclusively in the function of the signifier and the place of the Other, arguing that subjective transmutation occurs through the signifier rather than through ego-adaptive understanding, and that analytic direction must begin from subjective rectification rather than adaptation to reality.

there is no stable bound between signifier and signified, but rather a process in which the illusion of the signified is produced via metonymy and methaphor
#25

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.234

[The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-008) > V. Desire must be taken literally

Theoretical move: By reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams through the butcher's wife dream, Lacan argues that desire operates through the linguistic mechanisms of metonymy (desire as sliding lack-of-being) and metaphor (surplus of meaning), and that analytic treatment must preserve the literal, signifier-structured dimension of desire rather than reducing it to ego-psychological normalization.

the effect of the substitution of one signifier by another in metaphor is that a surplus of meaning emerges… the salmon can thus be read as a metaphor in which a desire (caviar) is substituted for another desire (salmon) with an addition of meaning.
#26

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.282

[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person

Theoretical move: The passage uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.

This signifying substitution, this negation of a signifier that is made possible by the structure of language itself
#27

Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.141

[The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-006) > The meaning of the letter

Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's concept of the 'letter' — the insistence of a structural element of language within concrete speech — reformulates the Saussurean sign by elevating the signifier over the signified and exposing the bar as a resistance to signification, such that the operations of metonymy and metaphor reveal how the unconscious is structured like a language, producing truth-effects that exceed the speaking subject's intent.

Metaphor is the replacement of one signifier with another, but its 'creative spark' for Lacan comes from the dynamism of this replacement, where the 'occulted signifier remain[s] present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection with the rest of the chain'
#28

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.66

Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > Behind the Wall of the Law

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates a double function with respect to das Ding: it defensively separates the subject from the Thing (through the big Other, law, grammar, the paternal metaphor) while simultaneously, through its constitutive excess over the signified and its horizon of semantic indeterminacy, reopening pathways toward the Thing — making the signifier both the wall against and the route back to the abyssal Real.

The 'resistance' of the bar separating signifier and signified is what makes possible the metaphoric conjunction between two distinctly different terms. It provides the wiggle room across which the poetic spark can fly.
#29

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.72

Rereading Lacan (or, What Is the Other?) > The Disappearing Thing > The Signifying Matrix > It Speaks

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the signifier operates on two irreducible dimensions—a semantic pole anchoring definite meaning and a "mantic" pole opening toward das Ding as pure lack—and that this bifold matrix grounds both the psychoanalytic method (free association, the slip of the tongue) and the quasi-religious capacity to create ex nihilo, illustrated by Heidegger's vase as the originary signifier of signifying itself.

Lacan is intensely interested in such an allusive penumbra of meaning, particularly in his analyses of metaphor and metonymy.
#30

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred · Richard Boothby · p.248

Rethinking Religion (or, What Is the Sacred?) > Index > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is a back-matter index passage (pages 248–249) listing key terms, persons, and concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but surfaces the book's central conceptual architecture through its entry clusters.

metaphor: as conjunction, 56; Lacan on, 57, 63; paternal, 22, 55–56, 192–93, 209n23
#31

Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.342

I > Th e Case of the Missing Signifi er > Notes > 9. Beyond Bare Life

Theoretical move: This endnotes section theoretically anchors the main argument by linking the capitalist valorization of "bare life," the death drive's role in value-creation, the fetishistic function of afterlife imagery, and the structural necessity of the unconscious (as science's elided gap) to Lacan, Heidegger, Marx, and Agamben — positioning psychoanalysis as the discipline that occupies the subject-shaped gap that science must repress.

The two sets of camps function as a metaphor for the overall process that the Nazis unleashed on the Jews: the isolation of the Jewish excess and then its elimination.
#32

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***M*** > **metaphor**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metaphor, derived from Jakobson's linguistic theory, redefines metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another that produces signification by crossing the bar of the Saussurean algorithm, and deploys this structure across the Oedipus complex, repression, condensation, identification, and love.

Lacan defines metaphor as the substitution of one signifier for another (E, 164), and provides the first formula of metaphor
#33

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > ***point de capiton***

Theoretical move: The point de capiton is theorized as the minimal quilting operation that arrests the endless sliding of the signified under the signifier, producing the necessary illusion of fixed meaning; it operates on two axes—diachronically as the retroactive effect of punctuation, and synchronically as metaphor—and its absence or dissolution is the structural condition of psychosis.

The synchronic aspect is METAPHOR, by which the signifier crosses the bar into the signified... 'It is metaphor' (E, 303)
#34

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***P*** > **paternal metaphor**

Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor is established as the founding metaphoric substitution (Name-of-the-Father for the desire of the mother) that structures the Oedipus Complex, grounds all signification as phallic, and whose foreclosure in psychosis abolishes phallic signification entirely.

the metaphoric substitution of 'sheaf' for 'Boaz' produces a poetic effect of SIGNIFICATION
#35

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Symptom**

Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of the symptom across his work: from a linguistic conception (symptom as signifier, signification, metaphor, message) grounded in the unconscious-structured-like-a-language thesis, through to a post-1962 shift toward the symptom as pure jouissance culminating in the concept of the sinthome — while consistently distinguishing symptom from clinical structure as the proper focus of psychoanalytic diagnosis and treatment.

In 1957, the symptom is described as a METAPHOR, 'the symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element' (E, 166).
#36

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **linguistics**

Theoretical move: Lacan's engagement with linguistics is neither a straightforward application nor a faithful borrowing: he selectively imports Saussurean and Jakobsonian concepts (signifier, metaphor/metonymy, enunciation/statement) and deliberately modifies them for psychoanalytic ends—coining 'linguistérie' to mark this irreducible difference between linguistics and psychoanalysis.

From Jakobson, Lacan borrows the concepts of METAPHOR and METONYMY as the two axes (synchronic and diachronic) along which all linguistic phenomena are aligned
#37

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***N***

Theoretical move: This passage from Evans's dictionary provides canonical Lacanian definitions for five interconnected concepts — Name-of-the-Father, narcissism, nature, need, negation, and neurosis — showing how each is structured around the primacy of the symbolic order over biological/imaginary registers, and how Lacan transforms Freudian clinical categories into structural ones.

Lacan represents of the Oedipus complex as a metaphor (the PATERNAL METAPHOR), in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) substitutes another (the desire of the mother).
#38

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **signifying chain**

Theoretical move: The signifying chain is theorized as simultaneously linear/syntagmatic/metonymic and circular/associative/metaphoric, with the two dimensions cross-cutting each other — a move that integrates Saussure's two axes of linguistic relationship while displacing the unit from sign to signifier, and grounds the metonymic structure of desire in the chain's irreducible incompleteness.

which Lacan, following Jakobson, locates on the metaphoric axis of language
#39

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Signification**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of 'signification' undergoes a trajectory from a vague association with meaningfulness to a precise, imaginary-order process in which the play of signifiers produces the illusion of the signified through metonymy and metaphor, with the bar in the Saussurean algorithm marking not a bond but a rupture—a theoretical move that radically inverts Saussure's stable sign relation.

Signification is metaphoric because it involves the crossing of the bar, the 'passage of the signifier into the signified' (E, 164).
#40

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***S*** > **Signified**

Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the Saussurean symmetry between signifier and signified by asserting the supremacy of the signifier: the signified is not a pre-given conceptual entity but a retroactive effect produced by the play of signifiers through metaphor, opposing any expressionist view of language.

an effect of the process of signification produced by metaphor
#41

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***M*** > **metonymy**

Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of metonymy, derived from Jakobson, defines the diachronic, combinatorial relation between signifiers along the signifying chain as the structural condition for signification and the very logic of desire; the formula for metonymy shows that the bar between signifier and signified is maintained (no new signified produced), and metonymy is identified with displacement and posited as the condition of possibility for metaphor.

metonymy is the condition for metaphor, because 'the coordination of signifiers has to be possible before transferences of the signified are able to take place'
#42

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***L*** > **love**

Theoretical move: Love is constituted as an imaginary, narcissistic, and fundamentally deceptive phenomenon whose relationship to transference, desire, and demand reveals both its structural opposition to and its entanglement with desire — love as metaphor versus desire as metonymy — while simultaneously functioning as an illusory substitute for the absent sexual relation.

Love is a metaphor (S8, 53), whereas desire is metonymy.
#43

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***F*** > **formation**

Theoretical move: The passage maps the concept of "formation" across three Lacanian registers—unconscious, analytic training, and ego—showing how Freud's laws of condensation and displacement are recast by Lacan as metaphor and metonymy, constituting the structural grammar of the unconscious.

condensation and displacement, which Lacan redefines as metaphor and metonymy
#44

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

***R*** > **repression**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that repression, understood through Lacan's reworking of Freud, is the structural operation that defines neurosis among the clinical structures; primal repression is recast not as a datable psychical act but as the structural incompleteness of language itself, while secondary repression is formalised as a metaphoric operation in which repression and the return of the repressed are identical.

Secondary repression is structured like a metaphor, and always involves 'the return of the repressed', whereby the repressed signifier reappears under the guise of the various formations of the unconscious.
#45

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures · Mark Fisher

Hauntological Blues: Little Axe

Theoretical move: Fisher develops a theory of sonic hauntology through Little Axe's music, arguing that the combination of blues and dub constitutes a political-aesthetic practice that confronts American slavery as unassimilable trauma by detaching sound from presence (acousmatic production), producing a "dyschronic contemporaneity" that refuses to let the dead be silenced.

blues has a privileged position in pop's metaphysics of presence: the image of the singer-songwriter alone with his guitar provides rockism with its emblem of authenticity and authorship.
#46

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.229

xvra > **The symbolic order**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the holophrase and a critique of Balint's displacement-theory of transference to establish that the symbolic order constitutes, rather than merely represents, reality: speech introduces the dimension of truth/falsity/being into the real, making the symbolic order irreducible to any psychological or two-body imaginary relation.

Balint then reminds us what a metaphor is - the face of a mountain, the foot of a table, etc. Are we finally going to investigate the nature of language? No.
#47

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.308

xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is a non-substantive index passage from Seminar I, listing terms and page references; it contains no original theoretical argument but maps the seminar's conceptual terrain through cross-referenced entries.

metaphor 238
#48

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.307

xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is an index page (partial, letters I–L) from Seminar I, listing page references for key concepts and proper names; it is non-substantive in itself but registers the conceptual vocabulary in use across the seminar.

metaphor 238
#49

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.238

**XIX**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that signification never refers to an extra-linguistic reality but only ever refers back to another signification, and that speech — defined as the demand for recognition — constitutes a new order of being irreducible to emotion, organic index, or mechanical communication; transference is then reframed within this symbolic order rather than as a merely imaginary (delusional) phenomenon.

Every kind of usage, in a certain sense, is always metaphorical. Metaphor is not to be distinguished, as Jones thought, at the beginning of his article on 'The theory of symbolism', from the symbol itself and from its usage.
#50

Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.312

xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**

Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.

and metaphor 238
#51

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.243

**x** > **THE MOUTH AND THE EYE**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the oral drive must be re-examined to show that the anxiety-point (located at the level of the mother/Other) and the point of desire (located at the mamma as partial object) are structurally distinct and non-coincident, with the mamma functioning as an 'amboceptive' object internal to the child's own sphere — thereby reframing the castration complex not as a dead end but as misread through an oral reduction that only metaphorically displaces it.

Such as it currently functions it is merely a metaphorical way of approaching what happens at the level of the phallic object by eluding the impasse... Although the metaphor is correct, however, we ought to uncover at the very level of the oral drive a hint of why it is no more than metaphor here.
#52

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.227

**x** > **XVI BUDDHA'S EYELIDS**

Theoretical move: Lacan regrounds the philosophical function of "cause" — irreducible to critique across all of Western philosophy — in the structural "syncope" of the objet petit a within the fantasy: cause is not a rational category but the shadow of anxiety's certainty, which is the only non-deceptive certainty, and this move radically challenges any cognizance that attempts to domesticate desire into objectivity.

This heart might mean a good many things, metaphorizing different things depending on different cultures and languages... the heart is to be taken to the letter. It functions as a part of the body, as, if I may say, part of the innards.
#53

Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.261

**x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.

a system of oppositions, along with what that introduces by way of possibilities of substitution and displacement, metaphors and metonymies
#54

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.207

FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the activity/passivity opposition functions as a metaphor that covers over the unfathomable character of sexual difference, and that sado-masochism is not simply a 'ready money' sexual realization but rather an injection structuring the field of love and desire; he further challenges the notion of 'feminine masochism' as a masculine fantasy rather than a clinical fact.

Freud explains in short that the polar reference activity/passivity is there in order to name, to cover, to metaphorize that which remains unfathomable in sexual difference.
#55

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.119

THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto a hierarchy of structural positions—demand, metaphor/gift, desire, unconscious—culminating in the argument that the gaze functions as objet petit a precisely because it operates through a constitutive lure, placing the subject at the level of lack.

The anal level is the locus of metaphor—one object for another, give the faeces in place of the phallus.
#56

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.263

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: The passage argues that paternity is fundamentally transbiological—a symbolic, not natural, function—and uses the matheme of metaphor to formalize this, while cautioning against reducing the bar between signifier and signified to a simple mathematical fraction, since it also carries an irreducible "effect of meaning."

Transformed formula — Formula of the metaphor in the article in question
#57

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.61

OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively reads Freud's Wahrnehmungszeichen as signifiers, establishing that the unconscious is structured by the interplay of signifying synchrony and constituent diachrony (metaphor/metonymy), and grounds psychoanalysis in the Cartesian subject rather than any pre-modern notion of the soul, thereby distinguishing analytic 'recollection' from Platonic reminiscence.

those functions of contrast and similitude so essential in the constitution of metaphor, which is introduced by a diachrony
#58

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.264

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metaphor cannot be handled as a simple fractional transformation of signifiers, because the signifier cannot stand in relation to itself without logical error; instead, metaphor operates by substitution where the displaced (repressed) signifier falls below the bar, not by a proportion between signifiers.

It was thought to be very clever to do this with metaphor, arguing from the following—to that which carries the weight, in the unconscious, of an articulation of the last signifier to embody the metaphor with the new meaning created by its use
#59

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.42

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

Theoretical move: Through the Signorelli example, Lacan argues that the most primordial operation of the unconscious is not repression but a strictly material effacement (Unterdrückung — "passing underneath"), and further that the mytheme of the dead God/dead father functions as a shelter against the threat of castration rather than as a straightforward theological or existential statement.

not metaphor, but the reality of the disappearance, of the suppression, of the Unterdruckung
#60

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.169

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire, as the metonymic remainder left by demand's articulation in signifiers, constitutes the nodal point linking the pulsation of the unconscious to sexual reality, and that this 'Freudian cogito' (desidero) is the essential locus of the primary process—a claim grounded in the irreducible split between the subject of the statement and the subject of the enunciation.

Only the presence of the desiring and sexually desiring, subject, brings us that dimension of natural metaphor from which the supposed identity of perception is decided.
#61

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.262

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the example of Hugo's poem about Booz to demonstrate how the paternal metaphor operates through signifying condensation: the metaphorical substitution ('His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful') opens a dimension of meaning that reveals the structure of the unconscious, showing metaphor and condensation to be co-extensive operations.

the formula that I gave of the metaphor. This formula was essential and usable, since it manifests the dimension in which the unconscious appears, in as much as the operation of signifying condensation is fundamental to it.
#62

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.42

THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS > THE FREUDIAN UNCONSCIOUS AND OURS

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Signorelli forgetting as a privileged example to argue that the operative mechanism of the unconscious is not (primarily) repression but a more primordial 'effacement' — the Unterdrückung, or passing-underneath — which he links structurally to censorship, to the figure of death as absolute master, and ultimately to the threat of castration as the motor of unconscious dynamics.

Is it possible not to see emerging from the text itself; and establishing itself, not metaphor, but the reality of the disappearance, of the suppression, of the Unterdruckung, the passing underneath?
#63

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.61

OF THE NETWORK OF SIGNIFIERS > THE UNCONSCIOUS AND REPETITION

Theoretical move: Lacan retroactively reads Freud's Wahrnehmungszeichen as signifiers, arguing that the synchronic network of the unconscious is grounded in a structurally orientated diachrony (metaphor/metonymy), and that the entire Freudian field presupposes the Cartesian subject—making psychoanalytic 'recollection' a structural necessity, not Platonic reminiscence.

those functions of contrast and similitude so essential in the constitution of metaphor, which is introduced by a diachrony.
#64

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.119

THE LINE AND LIGHT > OF THE GAZE

Theoretical move: The passage maps the partial drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) onto distinct registers of lack and desire, arguing that at the scopic level the gaze functions as objet petit a through a constitutive lure whereby the subject is presented as other than he is and what is shown is not what he wishes to see.

The anal level is the locus of metaphor—one object for another, give the faeces in place of the phallus.
#65

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.169

SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is the nodal point linking the pulsation of the unconscious to sexual reality: it is the metonymic remainder left by demand's articulation in signifiers, and as such constitutes the Freudian cogito ('Desidero') — the essential site where the primary process is established.

Only the presence of the desiring and sexually desiring, subject, brings us that dimension of natural metaphor from which the supposed identity of perception is decided.
#66

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.207

FROM LOVE TO THE LIBIDO > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE

Theoretical move: Lacan, reading Freud, argues that the activity/passivity opposition does not map onto masculine/feminine but rather serves as a metaphorical cover for an unfathomable sexual difference; furthermore, the injection of sado-masochism into the sexual relation cannot be taken at face value, and feminine masochism is exposed as a masculine fantasy rather than a natural given.

the polar reference activity/passivity is there in order to name, to cover, to metaphorize that which remains unfathomable in sexual difference.
#67

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.262

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Victor Hugo's poem 'Booz endormi' as the exemplary case of the paternal metaphor to demonstrate how signifying condensation produces meaning, showing that metaphor's operation in the unconscious is structurally identical to its operation in poetic language.

an attempt has been made, in an effort that is not without merit, to give form to certain notions I have introduced concerning the structure of language inherent in the unconscious. What emerged was a formula that consists, in short, in translating the formula that I gave of the metaphor.
#68

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.263

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > THE FIELD OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that paternity is fundamentally transbiological—exceeding biology and grounded in the symbolic order—and uses the matheme of metaphor to formalize the relation between signifier and signified, warning against a purely mathematical reading of the bar as fraction while insisting on the irreducible 'effect of meaning' that the bar also carries.

Formula of the metaphor in the article in question
#69

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.264

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier cannot stand in a relation to itself without logical error, and that the correct formal account of metaphor requires the repressed signifier to occupy the denominator position beneath the principal bar — not a simple fractional cross-multiplication of signifiers. This critique grounds a restriction on the freedom of analytic interpretation.

a substitutive signifier has been put in the place of another signifier to constitute the effect of metaphor. It refers the signifier that it has usurped elsewhere.
#70

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.266

FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO TRE TRANSFERENCE

Theoretical move: Through the Wolf Man case, Lacan demonstrates that the subject is constituted around an originary repressed signifier (Urverdrängung) — a non-sensical, traumatic kernel that cannot be replaced by another signifier — and that the dialectic of the subject's desire is structured by successive reshapings of this founding index in relation to the desire of the Other.

this would require the representation of one signifier for another, whereas here there is only one, the first
#71

Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.291

IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE

Theoretical move: This concluding passage of Seminar XI makes two theoretical moves: first, it articulates the analyst's desire as a desire for "absolute difference" that enables a love beyond the law; second, the appended glossary (translator's note) provides operational definitions of Lacan's key concepts—desire/need/demand, the three orders (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real), jouissance, objet petit a, and Name-of-the-Father—framing them as evolving and best understood contextually rather than statically.

any shelter in which may be established a viable, temperate relation of one sex to the other necessitates the intervention—this is what psycho-analysis teaches us—of that medium known as the paternal metaphor.
#72

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.232

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analysable symptom is constitutively structured as a reference to Knowledge—always indicating that something is known (or unknown) somewhere—and uses this to distinguish neurosis, psychosis, and perversion, while simultaneously positioning the psychoanalyst as the Subject Supposed to Know who enters the signifying operation rather than standing outside it as a classifier; this framework is then set against Hegel's Absolute Knowing and modern epistemology to articulate that knowledge is itself a signifying articulation contingent on its moment of constitution.

the substitution that the couple of her father and Mrs K bring to this impotence, specifically what Freud articulates … as an oralgenital relationship.
#73

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.185

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the successful termination of analysis consists in the analysand's "conquest of the name" — the separation from identificatory names (father's name, analyst's name) and the founding of a singular subjective identity — with transference liquidation as the structural hinge between alienated and autonomous subjectivity.

according to the expression of Jean Paulhan, it is an enlarged language where metaphor and metonymy appear as seen in a microscope.
#74

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.184

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

Theoretical move: The passage uses clinical case presentations (the "Poord'jeli" formula, the story of Norbert, and Philip's dream) to demonstrate how a signifying formula plugs a gap in the signifying chain, how the Name-of-the-Father's failure to operate as a separating metaphor leaves the subject arrested in a repetitive displacement, and how analysis functions as a reincarnation of the signifier that puts the chain back in motion.

Therefore the original metaphor did not operate. It did not come to separate what should have been separated establishing thus the subsequent oppositions, conditions of the discourse.
#75

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.63

**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle and its non-orientability to ground a structural account of the subject and language — specifically Identification — that supersedes the crude imaginary of Freud's second topology (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously critiquing Russell's theory of types/metalanguage as an evasion of the real problems of language and the subject.

without which no exchange, no substitution, no metaphor, metabolism of tendency, is ever grasped
#76

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

http://www.lacaninireland.com

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the signifier is irreducible to the sign and to meaning, and that language's attempt to account for itself necessarily produces a loss that cannot be recuperated—a "non-sense" that is the face the signifier presents to the signified side; against Hegelian dialectics and developmental psychology (Piaget), this loss grounds the subject's relation to the signifier and is the proper pivot of analytic praxis.

the man-woman example that I evoke, as evoking by its signifying coupling the meaning of a urinal, not by the opposition between the sexes, but as inserting itself, because of the masking of this sense, for two small children who come into a station in a train, a henceforth irremedial division
#77

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.5

http://www.lacaninireland.com

Theoretical move: Through a sustained engagement with Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," Lacan argues that grammaticality and signification must be rigorously distinguished: any grammatical chain generates meaning when placed in a context/dialogue, which means meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on a referent and the function of sense — and crucially, the unconscious cannot be located through metaphorical meaning-hunting in grammatical structures.

I would have no trouble... in proving to you that it is perfectly conceivable, that if we grant to sleep, dorment, something of the metaphorical, there is a sleep accompanied by some fury.
#78

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.211

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Foucault's *The Birth of the Clinic* independently converges with his own theory of the gaze and the o-object, using this convergence as structural confirmation that both inquiries touch the same real of vision — and he frames the passage through the lens of fantasy, metonymy-becoming-metaphor, and the genesis of the partial object in sensoriality.

this metonymical association becoming metaphorical by its effects
#79

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

Theoretical move: The passage deploys the analysis of Philip's proper name and fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) to articulate the interweaving of transference, the unconscious, drive, repetition, and the incestuous encounter as the conditions under which a desiring subject emerges from the analytic situation—turning the phonematic transcription of the fantasy into a site where metaphor, metonymy, castration, and the analyst's desire converge.

He has illustrated for us the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious metaphorical substitution and metonymical displacement.
#80

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.16

http://www.lacaninireland.com > **Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1964**

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys topological figures—the Möbius strip, cross-cap, and internal eight—to argue that these surfaces can replace Euler circles (extensional logic of classes) in formalising the logic of the signifying chain, suggesting topology offers a richer structural account of syllogistic relationships than classical set-theoretic diagrams.

quite often metaphors reach a goal only as a preliminary, they only try to target things in an approximate fashion
#81

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.203

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

Theoretical move: The passage performs two theoretical moves: first, it shows how the proper name functions as a signifier that splits the subject between objectification ("I am so-and-so") and self-identity ("I am me"), and second, through a clinical case and Leclaire's contribution, it argues that the phonematic decomposition of proper names enacts the primary mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, while the signifier itself is defined as a pure connotation of antinomy constitutive of the subject — with objet petit a precisely as what escapes this antinomy.

What is primary there, is the pure possibility of the phonematic decomposition and recomposition, namely of metonymy and metaphor reduced to phonemes with their amputations, the forbidden contacts
#82

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.52

**Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's forgetting of "Signorelli" not merely as repression but as a structural disturbance of identification: the subject's point of self-regard (the unary trait, the "S" of the schema) is eclipsed at the precise moment of false identification with the Herr/Master, so that what persists in the forgetting is the gaze of the lost name's bearer—linking the mechanisms of memory/forgetting to the topology of the subject's desire and the function of the look.

A metaphor occurs, substitutions are produced, but it is a very singular metaphor… this metaphor is completely the inverse of the one whose function, whose creative function of sense
#83

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.247

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological phenomenon of meiosis and the expulsion of polar globules as a speculative material analogue for the lost object in fantasy, then turns this into a critique of psychoanalysts' systematic avoidance of biological discoveries about sex—arguing that this avoidance is symptomatic of the analyst's own structural exclusion from knowledge of the sexual relation, which aligns the analytic position with the subject defined only by the missing signifier rather than by any positive knowledge.

what experience teaches us is... this metaphor regarding which, all the same, it is not for nothing that a little earlier I evoked for you the correspondence that it has with respect to one of the most fundamental realities of sex
#84

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.282

**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a general structural category—not reducible to the analyst's clinical non-suturing practice—by arguing that a sutured discourse is constituted by an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain whose occultation is the condition of discourse, while the signifier is identical to itself precisely insofar as it is constituted at its root by the non-identical to itself (the barred subject/lack).

The analysed subject sutures his lack of being, the metonymical effect of desire, the metaphorical cause.
#85

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.73

**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle—contrasted with the ordinary torus and the Euler circle—to demonstrate that the two halves of a predicative proposition (subject-term and predicate-term, e.g. "Socrates" / "is mortal") are topologically non-homogeneous, thereby grounding a structural critique of the classical syllogism and showing that the function of the proper name (nomination) cannot be treated as equivalent to membership in a universal class.

the usage of the metaphor will leave us with some work to do in calculating what is involved between the priority of gooseness or of whiteness.
#86

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.24

All men are mortal Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Socrates syllogism and the linguistics of the proper name to argue that logical form is grounded in—not prior to—language and the signifier; the passage turns on the claim that grammatical/linguistic structure is constitutively primary over logic, and that the child's early use of the signifier (illustrated by Darwin's 'quack' example) already enacts the fundamental function of denomination, connecting cry, name, and monetary exchange as the two extreme poles of signifier-function.

he is going to transfer from the duck to the water in which it splashes about, from the water to everything which splashes about in it, this without prejudice to the preservation of the flying form, because this quack also designates all birds
#87

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.282

**PRESENTATION BY JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER**

Theoretical move: Miller defends his concept of suture as a structural (not merely psychoanalytic) category that describes how a subject is produced in discourse through the articulation of an apparent chain and a dissimulated chain, arguing against Leclaire's reduction of his theoretical discourse to the position of an analysand's speech, and insisting that the signifier's identity is constituted at its root by the non-identical-to-itself, i.e., by lack.

The analysed subject sutures his lack of being, the metonymical effect of desire, the metaphorical cause.
#88

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.211

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural homology between his own theory of the o-object and the gaze, and Foucault's account of the birth of the clinic, arguing that autonomous intellectual developments at distinct levels can converge on identical theoretical coordinates — and uses this convergence to orient his seminar participants toward Foucault's work as a key supplement to his teaching on vision, the gaze, and the genesis of the objet petit a at the level of sensorality.

this metonymical association becoming metaphorical by its effects could not correspond to some kind of phantasy
#89

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.247

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 5 May 1965** > **Seminar 18: Wednesday 12 May 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the biological figure of meiosis and polar body expulsion as a speculative metaphor for the lost object, then pivots to argue that the analyst's position is no less excluded from knowledge of sexual difference than any other subject — and that psychoanalytic knowledge must be sharply distinguished from 'oriental' (e.g. Taoist) traditions that begin from the male/female signifying opposition, since analysis belongs to the Western tradition of the subject in relation to the missing signifier.

this metaphor regarding which, all the same, it is not for nothing that a little earlier I evoked for you the correspondence that it has with respect to one of the most fundamental realities of sex.
#90

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.188

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega** > **Presentation by Melle Markovitz (not in French typscript)**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the argument that the fundamental fantasy (Poord'jeli) is legible as the intersection of the proper name, the unconscious signifying chain, transference, and the drive—showing that the analytic encounter is constitutively structured as an "incestuous adventure" in which the analyst's desire and the subject's becoming are articulated through phonematic and metonymic condensation, culminating in the subject's constitution as desiring through the analyst's name.

He has illustrated for us the fundamental mechanisms of the unconscious metaphorical substitution and metonymical displacement.
#91

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.184

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

Theoretical move: The passage advances, through clinical presentations and commentary, that the signifying chain—animated by the proper name, desire's arrow, the Name-of-the-Father, and displacement—constitutes the very medium in which anxiety is covered over, condensed, and potentially traversed; the failure of the paternal metaphor to operate leaves the subject in a marsh of endless metonymic substitution, with the death drive "gaping" beneath.

Therefore the original metaphor did not operate. It did not come to separate what should have been separated establishing thus the subsequent oppositions, conditions of the discourse.
#92

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.5

http://www.lacaninireland.com

Theoretical move: By working through Chomsky's "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" example, Lacan argues that grammaticality and meaning (signification) are structurally distinct: any grammatical signifying chain will always generate meaning, which means that meaning is not intrinsic to the chain itself but depends on an external referent/context, pointing toward the real function of sense beyond semantics.

I commit myself, in varying, and one can vary to infinity, the surrounding conditions, the situation, but what is more, the situations of dialogue, I can make this sentence mean whatever I want
#93

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.52

**Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 January 1965**

Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Freud's forgetting of "Signorelli," Lacan argues that the disturbance is not a matter of repression (Verdrängung) but of suppression (Unterdrückung) tied to identification: what is lost at the "hole" of the forgotten name is precisely the subject's point of self-identification (the unary trait, the gaze's origin), such that the emergent substitutions (Botticelli, Boltraffio) mark the place where the subject's desire and identification find themselves at a scotoma—linking the forgetting of a proper name to the structural function of the gaze and the lack that constitutes the subject in language.

A metaphor occurs, substitutions are produced, but it is a very singular metaphor, for this metaphor is completely the inverse of the one whose function, whose creative function of sense, of meaning, of sounds, of pure sounds, I articulated for you
#94

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.64

**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topological analysis of the Klein bottle/false torus grounds a theory of the 'structural unconscious' that surpasses Freud's second topology and its crudely imagistic concepts (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that language is non-orientable and cannot be mastered by any metalanguage—a critique directed at Russell's theory of types and its attempt to resolve the liar paradox through hierarchical meta-languages.

no exchange, no substitution, no metaphor, metabolism of tendency, is ever grasped... without which
#95

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

**Presentation by Monsieur Valabrega**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analytic process culminates in the subject's "conquest of the proper name" — a symbolic achievement of identity through the liquidation of transference, separation from parental figures, and the re-knotting of the signifying chain, with literature positioned as a magnified analogue of this process via metaphor and metonymy.

it is an enlarged language where metaphor and metonymy appear as seen in a microscope.
#96

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.203

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 31 March 1965**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the proper name functions as a signifier that simultaneously marks, objectivises, and alienates the subject, while Leclaire's contribution extends this by proposing that the signifier is constitutively an antinomy—a pure connotation of opposition—whose bodily materialisation (the cupped hands gesture) reveals obsessional mastery as an attempt to hold together the irreducible split that is constitutive of the subject, with Objet petit a defined as precisely that which escapes this signifying antinomy.

What is primary there, is the pure possibility of the phonematic decomposition and recomposition, namely of metonymy and metaphor reduced to phonemes with their amputations, the forbidden contacts, the terrible confusions that they lead to
#97

Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.73

**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 20 January 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the topology of the Klein bottle to demonstrate that identification is structurally non-homogeneous: the circuit of demand, when traced on a Klein bottle rather than a torus, is necessarily reflected and reversed, showing that the two halves of any predicative proposition ("all men" / "are mortal"; "Socrates" / "is mortal") occupy non-equivalent fields — thereby grounding a structural critique of classical syllogistic logic and revealing the irreducible function of the proper name and the speaking subject.

the usage of the metaphor will leave us with some work to do in calculating what is involved between the priority of gooseness or of whiteness
#98

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Voice as an object has yet to be properly established as a category in clinical thought, then pivots to show why neither Socrates nor Freud produced social critique: in the ancient world, jouissance was 'resolved' by being delegated to slaves, and it was precisely this reserved park of jouissance—not any theoretical lack—that prevented the emergence of science and of the subject; this historical-economic argument positions the problem of jouissance as the hidden thread connecting ancient Greek knowledge-practice to Freudian psychoanalysis.

it is not a metaphor to say that symbolism is constructed like a metaphor, that it is a true metaphor... in the end it is false all the same because it is not a metaphor, it is a metonymy
#99

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.39

B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Objet petit a cannot be reduced to perception but must be understood as a structural "representative of representation" — a trajectory of the subject through registers — that grounds desire through aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object, while also proposing a systematic mapping of the object across synchronic and diachronic axes of Freudian theory.

The metaphor is infiltrated even into the metonymical enchaining.
#100

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.33

II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan argues that the structure of numerical concatenation (zero as both excluded object and naming integer) mirrors the subject's constitutive exclusion from the signifying chain, and that the objet petit a is precisely what "subsists" from this nullifying operation, linking suture and cut to the subject–signifier relation.

if the succession of numbers, metonymy of zero begins by its metaphor
#101

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan

E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

Theoretical move: The passage theorises the objet petit a as the cause of desire by articulating its double register: it marks both the lack in the Other and the loss inscribed in the process of meaning, while its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to mis-identify with knowledge in order to cover over that constitutive loss.

the metonymical and metaphorical structure of the o-object in the mapping out that Lacan gives in Plato's text about the particular position of the agalmata
#102

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.205

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the gaze: the painting-within-the-painting operates as a *Vorstellungsrepräsentanz* that reveals how pictorial representation does not represent but rather stages (en représentation), and Velázquez's self-insertion as the looking subject (sujet regardant) marks the point where the subject is captured by the gaze, designating the space in front of the picture as the topological site of the viewing subject.

the mannerist discourse and which is, properly, what I call that in this discourse there is no metaphor, that the metaphor enters into it as a real component
#103

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.265

**Seminar 21: Wednesday 8 June 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topology is not an optional supplement to psychoanalytic training but its very operative 'stuff' — the medium in which the analyst cuts the subject — and uses the mathematician's structural concealment of his object as a foil to show that the analyst's non-saying differs because an irreducible unconscious (Urverdrängung) prevents knowledge, while jouissance, caught in the net of language as sexual jouissance, is the hidden ground that desire defends against, pointing toward the death drive as the only genuine philosophical question.

the primordial masochism of *jouissance,* namely, metaphors, the lightning reflections that our experience projects onto this question
#104

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.170

Mademoiselle Grazien

Theoretical move: Lacan's seminar uses Jones's 1927 article on female sexuality as a platform to reconceptualise 'aphanisis' as the disappearance of desire, and to reframe the 'unseen man' in female homosexuality as a structural-symbolic operation involving identification and the phallic gaze, distinguishing Jones's proto-structural insights from his failure to organise them rigorously.

Jones makes great efforts to show us metaphor - since when all is said and done he is forced to adopt this linguistic reference - to show us metaphor developing in two directions.
#105

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan

E - The (o) object of lack, cause of desire

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a functions as the cause of desire precisely through its status as objective lack: it operates in a double register — revealing the lack of the Other and the loss internal to signification — and its non-specularisable nature forces the barred subject to misidentify with knowledge in order to cover over the irreducible remainder left by castration.

the metonymical and metaphorical structure of the o-object in the mapping out that Lacan gives in Plato's text about the particular position of the agalmata
#106

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.39

B - The problem of the differential distribution of the mode of representation

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is not a perceived object but a structure of transformation — the trajectory/circuit of the subject across registers — grounded in the differential distribution of representations, where aphanisis, negative hallucination, and the mourning of the primordial object together constitute the inaugural narcissistic identification and the condition for desire as desire of the Other.

The metaphor is infiltrated even into the metonymical enchaining.
#107

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161

**Seminar 14: Wednesday 20 April 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the status of the Voice as a psychoanalytic object is still to be established against naive empiricism, and links this problem to the Socratic/modern science distinction: the absence of ancient science (and thus of the unconscious) is explained by the slave's function as the reserved site of jouissance, whose structural resolution was the precondition for modern subjectivity and psychoanalysis.

it is not a metaphor to say that symbolism is constructed like a metaphor... it is not a metaphor, it is a metonymy
#108

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.33

II -THE SUTURING OF THE SIGNIFIER, ITS REPRESENTATION AND THE o-OBJECT

Theoretical move: By reading Frege through Miller's logic of the signifier, Lacan articulates the structure of suture: the subject is constituted by the same operation of evocation-and-exclusion that generates the number zero, such that the subject is repeatedly expelled from the signifying chain it produces, with the objet petit a as the trace-remainder (the 'having') that subsists under the chain.

if the succession of numbers, metonymy of zero begins by its metaphor
#109

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.7

**Seminar 2: Wednesday 8 December 1965**

Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the symbolic order in the primacy of the hole (lack/void) over presence, arguing that the object of science, the vase as symbolic creation, and energetics all converge on the same structural point: what matters is not what fills the void but the void itself — a thesis that links the subject of science (Descartes/Frege) to the functioning of the signifier and forecloses any meta-language.

the little schema on top is to remind you that at the beginning of an article which is called The purloined letter you have a certain number of concatenations concerning the signifying chain
#110

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.205

**Seminar 17: Wednesday 11 May 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a structural demonstration of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz: the picture-within-the-picture does not represent but rather *presentifies* the window-space of the gaze, showing that what constitutes the picture in its essence is not representation but the capture of the looking subject (sujet regardant) — a topology that introduces the dialectic of the subject via the scopic drive.

there is no metaphor, that the metaphor enters into it as a real component, this presence of Velasquez in his canvas
#111

Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

Mademoiselle Grazien

Theoretical move: By tracing Jones's concept of aphanisis and the structural logic of the "unseen man" in female homosexuality, Lacan argues that Jones — despite himself — arrives at structural (symbolic/metaphorical) references that he cannot properly organise, and that what Jones calls aphanisis corresponds clinically to the disappearance of desire, while the "unseen man" scenario turns on a symbolic operation in which the Gaze (the phallic eye of the father) is the true object of the ritual.

Jones makes great efforts to show us metaphor - since when all is said and done he is forced to adopt this linguistic reference - to show us metaphor developing in two directions.
#112

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.48

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the Klein group as a four-term topological structure to ground Metaphor and the logic of the Unconscious, arguing that the formula of metaphor (signifying substitution) shares the same structural cell as the Klein group, and that this structure supports the claim that there is no Universe of discourse — a formal condition for the subject of the unconscious that is co-extensive with, yet irreducible to, the Cartesian cogito.

the function of metaphor, as I represented it by the structure: S, a signifier, in so far as it posits itself in a certain position which is properly the metaphorical position or that of substitution with respect to another signifier
#113

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.10

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that because no signifier can signify itself, language cannot constitute a closed set—there is no Universe of discourse—which defeats any 'reduced language' account of the unconscious and grounds the necessity of distinguishing the One (which repeats to establish itself) from totality, thereby locating the foundational lack constitutive of the subject.

he grounds the function of metaphor. To which I replied, at the appropriate time. It is only from such a metaphor that there can emerge the formula
#114

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.15

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the axiom that "no signifier can signify itself" as the founding structural principle of the Universe of discourse, and demonstrates—through a self-referential paradox of writing—that this axiom introduces a constitutive gap or exclusion within that very Universe, raising the question of whether what the axiom specifies can itself be said.

two dimensions of metaphor - in as much as the chain can always graft itself (se enter) with another chain along the path of the operation of substitution
#115

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.191

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the objet petit a through the golden number equation (1 + o = 1/o), arguing that this mathematical structure captures the objet a's incommensurability with sex, and deploys the unary stroke as the necessary precondition for measurement of the objet a within the locus of the Other, linking metaphor's substitutive logic to the emergence of the sexual subject.

the symbolisations that I gave of the metaphor... when I write the sequence of signifiers, with the indication that this chain includes underneath a substituted signifier... takes on the value of the origin of a new signified dimension
#116

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.100

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 9: Wednesday 25 January 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes his concept of alienation from both Marxist and idealist versions, and uses this to argue that the objet petit a — exemplified by the breast as an unrepresentable object — is what supplies for the lack in Selbstbewusstsein, with the analyst necessarily occupying the position of this object, which grounds a legitimate anxiety in the analyst.

'Colourless green ideas… sleep furiously'! That is what breasts are!
#117

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.244

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the sexual act installs the subject precisely at the disjunction between body and jouissance: the body of the woman becomes the metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinguished from the penis) functions as the symbol of a withdrawn jouissance that underlies social exchange — yet this structural arrangement leaves feminine jouissance unresolved and adrift, mirroring the slave's displaced jouissance in the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

My… Henceforth I enjoy your body, namely, your body becomes the metaphor for my jouissance.
#118

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.188

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates in the structural lack inaugurated by the castration complex, which reverses subjective enjoyment into objectal libido — irreducible to narcissistic libido — and that the objet petit a is the product ('waste-product') of the operation of language on the One/Other dyad, serving as the cornerstone for rethinking logic, the subject, and the analytic act.

the small o is the metaphorical child of the One and the Other
#119

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.166

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure—the fact that the subject is an effect of language—must be the founding premise of psychoanalysis, just as Marx had to expose the latent structural difference within the equation of value before political economy could become rigorous; and he culminates this argument with the provocative thesis that "there is no sexual act," positioning the unconscious as speaking *about* sexuality through metaphor and metonymy rather than expressing a libidinal drive-force like Eros.

it is by being in a relation of metaphor and metonymy to sexuality that these objects are established
#120

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.38

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the relation between the signifier and truth grounds logic itself: the fundamental axiom of implication (that the true cannot imply the false) is the condition of possibility for any logical handling of the signifying chain, and the introduction of the enunciating subject ('sujet de l'énonciation') suspends the automatic functioning of written truth-values, demonstrating that what can and cannot be written is the crux of both logic and analytic experience.

The signifier cannot signify itself, except precisely when it is not itself that it signifies, namely, when it uses metaphor. And there is nothing to prevent the metaphor which substitutes a different signifier for this T of the truth, from making the truth re-emerge at this moment, with the ordinary effect of metaphor, namely: the creation of a false signified.
#121

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.8

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject originates through the cut — topologically modeled on the cross-cap/projective plane — whereby the o-object is separated and Urverdrängung (primal repression) is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier; the barred subject emerges only in alienated form, and desire is re-formulated not as the essence of man but as the essence of reality, displacing Spinoza's anthropology into a strictly structural, a-theological account.

it is in the measure that with respect to this primary signifier… the barred subject that it abolishes comes to emerge… In the same way… I structured, formerly, the function of metaphor in so far as it is the model of what happens as regard the return of the repressed
#122

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.195

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.

the little optical schema that I gave of it which, for its part, is only a metaphor, while this has nothing metaphorical about it, since they are metaphors which precisely are operative in the structure!
#123

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.53

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "One too many" signifier—structurally outside the signifying chain yet immanent to it—enables interpretation to function not as a mere meaning-effect (metaphor) but as a truth-effect; he then complicates the Cartesian cogito through material implication and the middle voice (diathesis) to show that the subject is constituted through the act of language rather than through the intuition of self-thinking.

capable of producing in it this effect of metaphor, which here is going to be what? Is it by a signified effect (as the metaphor seems to indicate) that interpretation operates?
#124

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.48

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Klein group's four-term structure provides the formal skeleton for both the metaphor/repression formula and the unconscious-as-language thesis, and that S(Ø)—the signifier of the barred Other—marks the constitutive 'One too many' that replaces the absent Universe of discourse, linking the logical structure of the subject to the Cartesian cogito.

the function of metaphor, as I represented it by the structure: S, a signifier, in so far as it posits itself in a certain position which is properly the metaphorical position or that of substitution with respect to another signifier
#125

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.15

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the paradox of self-reference (the smallest whole number not written on the board) to establish a foundational axiom for his theory of the signifier: that no signifier can signify itself. This axiom, when introduced into the Universe of discourse, generates a structural gap — a specification that simultaneously belongs to and threatens to exceed the totality of what can be said — linking the logic of writing, the Graph of Desire, and the structure of the unconscious as language.

What is involved in this Universe of discourse, in so far as it implies this operation of the signifier? In so far as it defines these two dimensions of metaphor - in as much as the chain can always graft itself with another chain along the path of the operation of substitution
#126

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.10

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious cannot be reduced to a "language of reduced language" (analogy-based metaphor) because no signifier can signify itself, which entails—via Russell's paradox / set-theoretic axiom of specification—that there is no closed universe of discourse, and that the One of the subject must be distinguished from countable totality, grounding the constitutive lack of the subject.

articulates metaphor, seeing in it the function of analogy, and that it is from the relation of one signifier to another in so far as a third reproduces it by giving rise to an ideal signified that he grounds the function of metaphor.
#127

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.243

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 22: Wednesday June 7 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the sexual act is constitutively structured by the disjunction between body and jouissance, with the subject emerging precisely at that gap; the woman's body functions as a metaphor for masculine jouissance, while the phallus (distinct from the penis) marks the withdrawal of jouissance into exchange value — yet feminine jouissance remains radically unresolved and adrift, beyond any structural accounting.

My… Henceforth I enjoy your body, namely, your body becomes the metaphor for my jouissance.
#128

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.191

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the golden ratio formula (1 + o = 1/o) as a matheme for the Objet petit a's incommensurability to sex, arguing that the iterative algebraic unfolding of this relation enacts both metonymy (the sliding chain) and metaphor (the substitution of the One for the enigma of sex), while grounding the operation of measurement in the unary stroke as the condition for the Other's locus.

this enigma of sex is going to present itself to us as being able to realise the substitution, the metaphor, overlapping with its proportion the **small o** itself.
#129

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.188

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that jouissance-value originates from the lack instituted by the castration complex, which produces an irreversible reversal: jouissance becomes objectal (not narcissistic), the phallus functions as the unit marking the distance between Objet petit a and sex, and the o-object itself is revealed as the product of the operation of language — the "metaphorical child" of the One and the Other, born as refuse from inaugural repetition, and the foundational starting-point for rethinking logic and the analytic act.

For the small o is the metaphorical child of the One and the Other, in so far as it is born as a piece of refuse from the inaugural repetition
#130

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.8

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 16 November 1966**

Theoretical move: Through topological figures (cross-cap, projective plane) and set-theoretic logic (Euler circles), Lacan argues that the subject originates not as a pre-given entity but is *engendered* by the signifier through a primary cut; the objet petit a is the first "Bedeutung" — the residue of the subject's alienation from the Other — and desire is redefined as the essence of *reality* rather than of man, displacing Spinoza's formula into a properly psychoanalytic, a-theological one.

it is in the measure that with respect to this primary signifier… the barred subject that it abolishes comes to emerge at a place… the barred subject, as such, is what represents for a signifier this signifier from it has arisen - a sense.
#131

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.166

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 16: Wednesday 12 April 1967**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is a structural effect of language — not a psychological substance — and that the unconscious, far from "speaking sexuality" in the manner of a life-instinct, speaks *about* sexuality by producing partial objects in relations of metaphor and metonymy to it; the climactic theoretical move is the assertion that "there is no sexual act," grounding the entire argument in the constitutive impossibility of the sexual relation.

it is by being in a relation of metaphor and metonymy to sexuality that these objects are established.
#132

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.38

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 7 December 1966**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the relation between signifier and truth short-circuits all supporting thought and grounds logic in the signifying chain alone; by demonstrating through truth tables and Stoic propositional logic that the signifier cannot signify itself except through metaphor, he establishes that what "can be written and what cannot" is the fundamental limit-question linking the subject of enunciation to the operation of logic.

The signifier cannot signify itself, except precisely when it is not itself that it signifies, namely, when it uses metaphor… making the truth re-emerge at this moment, with the ordinary effect of metaphor, namely: the creation of a false signified.
#133

Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.53

the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > KLEIN GROUP

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates how the "signifier too many" (the barred signifier outside the chain) operates as the structural condition for interpretation, whose effect is properly a "truth-effect" rather than a mere meaning-effect; he then uses the Cartesian cogito and Benveniste's active/middle voice distinction to argue that the subject is constituted not through intuition of being-who-thinks but through the very structure of language and the act of speaking.

in conformity with the system of the metaphor, by the intervention, in the chain, of this signifier which is immanent to it as One too many, and as One too many capable of producing in it this effect of metaphor
#134

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.167

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the dream as a phenomenon with multiple dimensions from the unconscious proper (of which the dream is merely the "royal road"), defends the thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language against conflation with dream-work distortions, and pivots to the problem of the subject in logic and linguistics: the universal quantifier always covertly implies the "stating subject" (sujet de l'énonciation), and no formal system has succeeded in fully eliminating this enunciating subject from its statements.

If the dream interests me in so far as there appears in it, and from the first, this mechanism that I identified to metaphor and to metonymy because it forces itself on us
#135

Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.167

**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 21 February 1968** > **Seminar 13: Wednesday 13 March 1968** > **Seminar 15: Wednesday 27 March 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language cannot be reduced to an act of the subject, and pivots to the logic of quantification to show how the universal proposition always secretly harbours an irreducible "stating subject" that cannot be elided — which is precisely what makes quantificational logic (and psychoanalysis) interesting beyond formal demonstration.

this mechanism that I identified to metaphor and to metonymy because it forces itself on us, it is precisely in the measure that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious.
#136

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.189

Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian unconscious apparatus — grounded in the pleasure principle, repetition, and homeostatic return to perceptual identity — is not a neurophysiological mechanism but a minimal logical structure of signifying articulation (difference and repetition), such that the dream functions as a 'wild interpretation' whose analysis reveals desire precisely at the point where the reconstituted sentence fails as a sentence, not as meaning.

it is of the nature of the signifier qua pinpointing to allow the substitution of one signifier for another, with certain expected effects that are effects of sense.
#137

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.87

**Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 January 1969**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the minimal requirement for renewing psychoanalytic questioning is restoring the subject's dependency on the signifier, and that this project must move beyond phonology/linguistics toward a 'logical practice' (mathematical logic) as a discipline that maps an isomorphism—possibly an identity of material—between the structure of the subject and formal discourse; he also insists on the distinction between form and formalism as a structural, not specular/imagistic, operation.

It is an opportunity to recall that the recourse to the image to explain metaphor is always false. Any domination of metaphor by the image ought to be suspect
#138

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.5

**Seminar 1: Wednesday 13 November 1968**

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar XVI by arguing that psychoanalytic theory is constitutively 'a discourse without words' — that is, grounded not in phenomenological sense but in the cause-structure of the unconscious — and uses this to distinguish psychoanalytic discourse from both philosophy and structuralism as a worldview, while announcing that the seminar will develop the function of the objet petit a through a homology with Marx's analysis of the labour market.

The meteor lends itself to metaphor and why? Because it is already made up of signifiers.
#139

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.39

Am I making myself understood?

Theoretical move: Lacan revisits the two-tier structure of the Graph of Desire—signifying chain vs. circle of discourse—to show how the Witz (joke/wit) demonstrates the subject's triple register and its entanglement in the big Other, culminating in the claim that the subject is defined as what a signifier represents for another signifier, and that primal repression (Urverdrängung) is the originary fading of the subject into opaque knowledge.

it remains permeable to the effects of metaphor and metonymy, the formation of the word 'famillionairely'.
#140

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.294

Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan articulates the stain/gaze as the structuring lack in the field of vision that inserts vision into desire via the o-object, then leverages this to distinguish perversion (where objet a fills/masks the phallic lack, restoring o to the Other) from neurosis (where the signified of the barred Other reveals the conflictual articulation at the level of logic itself), with the neologism 'hommelle/famil' marking the transition between these clinical structures.

is this famil not truly something that appears to show us, like a sort of flash between two doors, what is involved in the metaphorical function of the family itself?
#141

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.317

Seminar 18: Wednesday 30 April 1969 > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 14 May 1969**

Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the subject's structure in the logic of the signifier as self-othering: the signifier can only represent the subject for another signifier, and this irreducible alterity of the signifier to itself constitutes the big Other as necessarily incomplete (holed by objet petit a), while the subject is redefined as "what effaces its tracks," making the trace-effacement the originary operation from which the signifier and language emerge.

what the trace becomes through metaphor, the sign if you wish, through metaphor also, these words are not in the right place because I have just ruled them out, what a subject signifies qua this trace
#142

Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.213

Seminar 12: Wednesday 26 February 1969 > Seminar 13: Wednesday 5 March 1969

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation, as Freud formulates it, is a mode of drive satisfaction that operates *with* the drive (mit dem Trieb) rather than through repression, and that its satisfaction is achieved precisely by being goal-inhibited (zielgehemmt) — eliding the sexual goal while still satisfying the drive. This pivot is used to distinguish sublimation structurally from repression and to set up the question of what exactly is satisfied when the drive bypasses its sexual goal. The passage also stages a critical dialogue with Deleuze's appropriation of Lacanian concepts, particularly around the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.

the possibility of any sense, it is written there, is produced from this veritable identity of the signifier and the signified that results... from a certain way of manipulating the metaphorical function, a little bit beyond the way I had done it.
#143

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.208

Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970 > (16) That's fine.

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a scholarly exchange on Sellin's biblical exegesis and Freud's reliance on it to probe the structural problem of textual latency and unconscious inscription, while the discussion of Hosea's conjugal metaphor (Yahweh as spouse/Baal) is positioned as an archaic precursor to the logic of the Other's desire and the formation of a community through symbolic substitution.

It is the conjugal metaphor. This is the first time it appears in the Bible.
#144

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.174

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the 'no smoke without fire' sign-logic to argue that the signifier (smoke/sign) does not point to a supreme subject-guarantor behind appearances, but rather to the materialist productivity of surplus-jouissance; he then defends his independent deployment of metaphor and metonymy against claims of mere Jakobsonian borrowing, insisting he was saying something categorically different.

Would not one of the possible articulations between psychoanalysis and linguistics be the privilege accorded to metaphor and metonymy, by Jakobson on the linguistic plane and by you on the psychoanalytic plane?
#145

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.185

Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a dialogue with biblical scholar Caquot about Sellin's Moses to argue that Freud's Oedipus complex is a 'dream' requiring interpretation—a displacement-effect that short-circuits the real father's function (castration) by substituting the imaginary father's prohibition of enjoyment, while positioning the analyst's neutrality against the passionate 'fierce ignorance' of Yahweh as the paradoxical figure of the discourse of the Master.

the falsum, with the ambiguity that around this word there can be established the fall (chute) of the false... this falsity of interpretation may even have its impact by displacing the discourse
#146

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.136

Seminar 8: Wednesday 11 March 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian schema of "murder of the father – enjoyment of the mother" is insufficient because it elides the tragic dimension of the Oedipus myth; beyond the axes of desire and jouissance, truth must be introduced as a third, irreducible dimension. He reinforces this by contrasting the paternal metaphor (his own formalization) with Freud's literal-historical reading in Totem and Taboo, and by reading Hosea as evidence that the prophetic tradition concerns a relation to Truth rather than to enjoyment.

I spoke therefore at that stage about the paternal metaphor. I introduced it, I have never spoken of the Oedipus complex except in that form.
#147

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.164

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the usual claim about the Freud-Saussure relationship by arguing that the unconscious is the condition of linguistics (not the reverse), and that language is the condition of the unconscious — positioning the Lacanian reading of Freud as what makes modern structural linguistics possible rather than derivative of it.

why would Saussure not have realised... what Freud anticipated, specifically the Lacanian metaphor and metonymy, the locus where Saussure generated Jakobson?
#148

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170

Seminar 10: Wednesday 8 April 1970

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that structure is the effect of language already operative in reality—not a representational function of any subject—and uses this to demarcate psychoanalysis from linguistics and ethnology: neither can master the unconscious because psychoanalysis operates within a particular tongue where there is no metalanguage, the signifier represents a subject (not another signifier), and sexual non-relation is the irreducible structural remainder that myth and linguistics cannot formulate.

The myth does not operate either from metaphor nor even from any metonymy. It does not condense, it explains.
#149

Seminar XVII · The Other Side of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.191

Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 April 1970

Theoretical move: Through a detailed biblical-exegetical seminar with Caquot, Lacan stages the problem of how a founding traumatic event (the death of Moses) becomes legible only through retroactive textual manipulation and mis-reading — showing that the original 'text' is always already corrupt, never transparently present, and that the truth of an origin emerges only through the distorting operations of its inheritors.

the suffering servant of Deutero-Isaiah, whose death has a redemptive value, is Moses himself. And starting from there, he set about trying to rediscover, in the earlier prophetic books, allusions to the death of Moses.
#150

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.132

**Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the neologism *lituraterre/litturaterrir* to theorise writing as furrowing (not metaphor), arguing that the Japanese writing system — where a character can be read in two distinct pronunciations — exemplifies how the letter, distinct from the sign, supports the signifier and divides the subject between writing-register and speech-register; this division exposes that there is no sexual relationship, only an "impossible 'it is written.'"

the law of metaphor which I reminded you in recent times constitutes the essence of language
#151

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.184

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 16 June 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the argument that all language functions through metaphor and metonymy with the phallus as the sole Bedeutung (denotation) that language gestures toward but never reaches, and uses Frege's Sinn/Bedeutung distinction to reframe the paternal metaphor: the Name of the Father is efficacious not as a signifier producing sense alone, but as a name that summons someone to speak — revealing the Father as ultimately a numeral (a position in a series) rather than a presence, and castration as the reduction to number.

nothing of what language allows us to do is ever anything but metaphor, or indeed metonymy.
#152

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.53

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Chinese concepts of *hsing* (nature) and *ming* (heavenly decree) from Meng-Tzu as theoretical coordinates to triangulate the elusive status of surplus-jouissance, arguing that neither 'nature' nor decree adequately locates what psychoanalysis (via Freud's discovery of the symptom) must grasp, and that linguistics—understood as a deliberately fabricated metaphor—can model for us how to sustain a metaphor without neutralizing its action.

linguistics properly filtered, criticised, focussed, in a word, on condition that we make of it exactly what we want... If linguistics is what I was saying earlier, a metaphor that is deliberately fabricated in order not to work, this may perhaps give you ideas about what may well be for us the goal.
#153

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.42

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan defends his use of linguistics against charges of mere metaphor by grounding it in the structural necessity that the unconscious is structured like a language, while simultaneously arguing that no discourse — including the University discourse from which linguistics polices its borders — can claim to know what it is saying, since the introduction of the Freudian unconscious forecloses any such self-transparent mapping of knowledge.

we also are supposed to be making of linguistics a use, I quote, 'a metaphorical use'.
#154

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.44

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 10 February 1971**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that language is irreducibly metaphorical—the referent is always "real" precisely because it is ungraspable—and uses this to ground both surplus-jouissance (whose support is metonymy) and psychoanalysis's relationship to linguistics: psychoanalysis does not borrow from linguistics but rather moves within the same constitutive metaphoricity, with surplus-jouissance functioning as the sliding metonymic object that keeps discourse in motion.

Every designation is metaphorical; it can only be done through the mediation of something else.
#155

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.159

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 19 May 1971** > - We can't hear you!

Theoretical move: Language has only one Bedeutung — the phallus — because it is constituted from the impossibility of symbolising the sexual relationship; writing provides the "bone" that jouissance lacks, and the semblance that structures discourse is irreducibly phallic, meaning sexual enjoyment forever remains barred from the field of truth.

it is because language is only constituted from a single Bedeutung that it borrows its structure, which consists in the fact that one can only, once one inhabits it, make use of it for metaphor, from which there result all these mythical insanities on which its inhabitants live
#156

Seminar XVIII · On a Discourse That Might Not Be a Semblance · Jacques Lacan · p.122

**Seminar 6: Wednesday 17 March 1971** > *Lituraterre*

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces "lituraterre" as a neologism to theorise the letter not as a frontier between knowledge and jouissance but as a *littoral* — the edge of the hole in knowledge — thereby distinguishing the letter from the signifier and from psychobiographical reduction, while implicitly critiquing the Discourse of the University for conflating letter and signifier.

I use it to show the operation of what your man, someone called Jean Tardieu, called one word taken for another, indeed the word taken by another, in other words metaphor and metonymy, as an effect of the sentence.
#157

Seminar XIX · …or Worse · Jacques Lacan · p.152

accommodate yourselves.

Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the quantifying logic of "not-all" to correct the Oedipal myth of the primal father, then pivots to argue that the sexual non-relationship is what generates desire as a language-effect, before closing with a meditation on the analyst's intolerable position as objet petit a (semblance) in the analytic discourse—a position only made liveable through logic.

to hesitate, as regards this fourmidable, as to whether it should be classified as a metaphor or as a metonymy and to say that, there is something that is neglected then in Jakobson's theory.
#158

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.41

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a Klein bottle topology and a playful six-verse poem to demonstrate that the relation between man and woman passes through love, then substitutes the world for the sexual partner, and terminates at a wall that is not a cut but the locus of castration — the point where truth and knowledge are held apart. This topological demonstration grounds the claim that the discourse of capitalism forecloses castration, and that it is only the analytic discourse (emerging from logic, the four discourses, and language) that re-introduces castration as the hinge between truth and knowledge.

analytic discourse has not yet been able to give even an outline articulation of it, but anyway it has multiplied its metaphor and it has noticed that all metonymies emerge from it.
#159

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.105

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge > **4 1 \* May 1972**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the absence of the sexual relationship is grounded not in biological or metaphysical mythology (Eros-as-fusion) but in the formal structure of the sexuation formulae and set theory: the One emerges from a foundational lack (the empty set), which means sex as the dual-real can never produce a relationship, only two irreducible ones.

As if there were the slightest relationship between this reference which does not have the slightest relationship, except in the crudest metaphor, with what is involved in copulation.
#160

Seminar XIX bis · The Knowledge of the Psychoanalyst · Jacques Lacan · p.70

The Psychoanalyst's Knowledge

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's knowledge is constituted by a "scrap of knowledge" drawn from the subject's own jouissance—unconscious knowledge that is not "supposed" but emerges from slips, dreams, and the analysand's work—and locates this within the Four Discourses structure where S2 occupies the place of truth and $ occupies the place of enjoyment, distinguishing scientific (mathematical/topological) writing from the zone of discourse where meaning is always partial and borrowed from another discourse.

there is a little adjunct which I call: 'The metaphor of the subject'.
#161

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.125

THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > From the Entwurf to the Traumdeutung

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's progressive theorisation of the psychic apparatus traces a "negative dialectic" in which the same antinomies recur in transformed guises, and that this progression—from a mechanical/neurological model to a logical/symbolic one—reveals that the fundamental object of psychoanalysis is the autonomous symbolic order, not the biological organism; consciousness functions as the irreducible paradox that prevents any closed energetic model.

it is a matter of understanding human behaviour. To this end. he wonders whether there might not be room for employing a category analogous to those used in physics. So he introduces the dimension of entropy in so far as it is found in the analytic situation.
#162

Seminar II · The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106

THE FR EUDIAN SCHEMATA OF TH E P S YCHIC APP ARATUS > Introduction to the Entwurf > (Dr Perrier arrives.)

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosomatic phenomena belong to the register of the Real—not the object relation or narcissism—by distinguishing the narcissistic structure (which frames neurosis through ego-other reciprocity) from the properly autoerotic/intra-organic investments that lie beyond conceptual elaboration, and proposes the Real as the precise term for what psychosomatic relations engage.

The eroticisation of this or that organ is the metaphor which comes up most often, through our sense of what order of phenomena is at stake in psychosomatic phenomena.
#163

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.71

**II** > Love and the signifier > Aristotle and Freud: the other satisfaction

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes that jouissance is structurally 'inappropriate' to the sexual relationship, making repression a secondary effect that generates metaphor; he then aligns Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (exemplified by seeing/smell/hearing) with the analytic function of objet petit a as that which, from the male pole, substitutes for the missing partner and thereby constitutes fantasy, while announcing that the female pole requires a different supplement to the non-existent sexual relationship.

the first effect of repression is that it speaks of something else. That is what constitutes the mainspring of metaphor.
#164

Seminar XX · Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge · Jacques Lacan · p.129

Semina r **5:** Wednesday **16 January 1973**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Bentham's utilitarianism and Stoic logic (material implication) to articulate the modal structure of jouissance—that enjoyment 'does not cease not to be written' (the impossible)—and to show that repression is secondary to a primal non-suitability of jouissance for the sexual relationship, with metaphor as repression's first effect; he then aligns this with Aristotle's energeia-pleasure (sight, smell, hearing) to locate the objet petit a as the male-side substitute for the missing partner, constituting fantasy.

And this is what constitutes the mainspring, as I have heavily indicated, this is what constitutes the mainspring of metaphor.
#165

Seminar XXII · R.S.I. · Jacques Lacan · p.24

**Introduction** > **Seminar 2: Tuesday 17 December 1974**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Borromean knot is not a model (which would be grounded in the Imaginary) but rather a writing that directly supports the Real; the three registers (R.S.I.) achieve consistency only by holding together, and jouissance ek-sists to the Real as a hole, with phallic jouissance functioning as the nodal term that analytic experience discovers as primary.

what is the permitted maximum of the substitution of one signifier for another? I apologise, perhaps I have been a little quick here…a reference to the Agency of the letter, in my Ecrits.
#166

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.158

Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that his invention of the Borromean knot as a writing of the Real constitutes a 'forcing'—a traumatic inscription of a new symbolic form—that both responds symptomatically to Freud's energetics and exposes the absence of any Other of the Other, while also identifying the Real as his own sinthome rather than a spontaneous idea.

these three elements, in short, said to be knotted, in reality enchained, constitute a metaphor. It is nothing more, of course, than metaphor of the chain.
#167

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.146

Seminar 9: Wednesday 16 March 1976

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the Real as fundamentally unbound and orientating-without-meaning, distinguishes a more radical foreclosure than that of the Name-of-the-Father, and ties the Death Drive to the Real itself, while the matheme (and the Borromean knot as topological device) are offered as instruments for reaching "bits of Real" that resist symbolic embroidery.

The metaphor indicates nothing but that: the sexual relationship. Except for the fact that it proves in fact, from the fact that it exists, that the sexual relationship is to take a bladder for a lantern.
#168

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.36

**Seminar 2: Wednesday 9 December 1975** > QUESTIONS

Theoretical move: Lacan uses a seminar Q&A to clarify the topological function of the Borromean knot as the fourth term (symptom) that holds RSI together, argues that the Real operates as a third pole mediating between body and language rather than being reducible to either, and distinguishes the knot from a 'model' on the grounds that it resists imagination while topology itself remains insufficient to prove its four-fold Borromean realisation.

one uses language in a way that goes further than what is effectively said. One always reduces the import of the metaphor as such, is that not so. Namely, one reduces it to a metonymy.
#169

Seminar XXIII · The Sinthome · Jacques Lacan · p.168

Seminar 10: Wednesday 13 April 1976 > QUESTIONS

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the sinthome from psychoanalysis proper, arguing that it is the *psychoanalyst* (not psychoanalysis) who functions as a sinthome — a "help against" in the biblical sense — and that the Real, as lawless and devoid of meaning, may itself be illuminated as sinthome; simultaneously, the Borromean knot is defended as a topology that can hold Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real together as separable rings without a common point.

What limit do you assign to the field of metaphor? ... the straight line is enough to metaphorise the infinite.
#170

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.93

**Seminar 8: Wednesday 8 March 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Real cannot constitute a universe on its own but only through its knotting with the Imaginary and Symbolic via the Borromean structure, and that the torus — not the simple ring — is the proper topological unit for this knotting; he further exploits the distinction between metaphor and structure to insist that topology here is structural (not merely analogical), while his anecdote about his grandson reframes the Unconscious as the intrusion of words one does not understand — language as parasitic.

not a metaphor but a structure; for the difference there is between the metaphor and the structure, is that the metaphor is justified by the structure
#171

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.103

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes sense (double-sens, meaning-effect rooted in the duplicity of the signifier) from meaning (a purely empty knotting of word to word), and uses torus topology to articulate the relations between Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary—arguing that anxiety is the symbolically real, the symptom is the only real thing that preserves sense, and that there is no sexual relationship except incestuous, with castration as the only truth.

poetry appears to me all the same to depend on the relation of the signifier to the signified… poetry depends on a violence done to this usage.
#172

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.116

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that analytic interpretation must abandon the register of beautiful, logical sense in favour of a poetic-equivocal resonance grounded in the witticism: it is the capacity to extinguish a symptom—not logical articulation or aesthetic beauty—that validates an interpretation as true, pointing toward a practice founded on economy rather than value.

Metaphor, and metonymy, have an import for interpretation only insofar as they are capable of functioning as something else.
#173

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.124

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 10 May 1977** > **Seminar 12: 17 May 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the Unconscious is not amenable to awakening or metalanguage, that psychoanalysis functions through a poetic/hole-effect rather than suggestion, and proposes the invention of a new, sense-free signifier as the possible opening onto the Real — while translating 'Unbewusst' as 'une-bévue' as a performative demonstration of this metatongue operation.

Everything depends on a metaphor, namely, that people imagine that memory, is something which is imprinted; but there is nothing to say that this metaphor is valid.
#174

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.111

**Seminar 9: Wednesday 15 March 1977** > **Seminar 10: Wednesday 19 April 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that lalangue—the mother tongue as obscene, pre-structural substrate—is what the analytic session truly circulates around (via the analysand's kinship discourse), and that the symptom (sinthome), not truth, is what the analyst actually reads; "varité" (a portmanteau of truth and variety) names the only accessible approximation of truth, rendering psychoanalysis structurally an "autism à deux" redeemed only by lalangue's communal character.

culture is here stifled, deadened, and that on this particular occasion, one would do perhaps better to evoke the metaphor, since culture is also a metaphor, the metaphor of the agri of the same name.
#175

Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.78

So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Passe cannot be transmitted by a speaking subject alone (the *passant*) because the locus of enunciating from which S(Ø) is emitted cannot itself be said; only a topological writing—a graphical arrangement that articulates the subject of the enunciated and the subject of enunciating in a transmissible way—can function as the true Passer, which is why Lacan's seminars and graphs perpetually recreate the conditions of division.

what is proper to this response, the 'It's you', as I define it at that moment, that the proper of this response is that it is a metaphor in a pure state.
#176

Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.85

**X**: What does systematising mean? [*Laughter]* > **Annexe to Session VIII** > **Seminar 10: Tuesday 11 April 1978**

Theoretical move: Lacan reconfigures the topological grounding of psychoanalysis by moving from a simple Möbius strip to a doubled/tripled one that flattens into a threefold knot, arguing that the absence of the sexual relationship—screened by the incest prohibition and crystallised around the Oedipus myth—requires a material geometry of thread and fabric rather than a metaphorics of thought, because the passage from signifier to signified always involves a loss that mere 'free association' cannot overcome.

the art by which one weaves, the art is also a metaphor. That is why I strive to make a geometry of fabric, of thread, of stitching.
#177

Seminar XXV · The Moment to Conclude · Jacques Lacan · p.16

**Seminar 3: Wednesday 20 December 1977**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that both analytic speech and analytic intervention are fundamentally acts of writing/equivocation rather than saying, and develops a topological identification of fantasy with the torus within the Borromean knot structure, mapping three coupled pairs (drive–inhibition, pleasure principle–unconscious, Real–fantasy) onto a 'six-fold torus'; simultaneously, he reframes the end of analysis as recognising what one is captive of (the sinthome), and characterises science, history, and psychoanalysis itself as forms of poetry rooted in fantasy.

This is what led me to things that constitute metaphor, natural metaphor, namely, that that it is close to linguistics, insofar as there is one. But metaphor has to be thought of metaphorically. The stuff of metaphor is that which in thought constitutes matter.
#178

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.238

**XVIII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the efficacy of metaphor — and of signification generally — rests not on the transference of meaning but on the positional structure of the signifier itself; metonymy, as the primitive positional function, is what makes metaphor possible, not the other way around.

The mainspring of the metaphor isn't the meaning, which is supposed to be transposed from Booz onto the sheaf... It's a phenomenon of signifiers that is involved.
#179

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.251

**XVIII** > **An address: Freud in the century** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's fundamental discovery is the primacy of the signifier — the structure of language — as the organizing principle of the unconscious, dreams, symptoms, and the ego, and that the compulsion to repeat is grounded in the insistence of speech; this is what post-Freudian ego psychology has systematically obscured.

It's insofar as Signorelli and the series of names are equivalent words, translations of one another, metaphrases if you like, that the word is linked to repressed death, refused by Freud.
#180

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan

**XVIII** > **Metaphor and metonymy (II): Signifying articulation and transference of the signified**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the aphasia distinction (similarity vs. contiguity disorders) to positively ground the metaphor/metonymy opposition, while insisting that the signifier/signified split cannot be collapsed into the traditional "words for thought" dualism.

What I retain from the two levels of disorder that have been distinguished in aphasia is that there is the same opposition between them as the one that appears, no longer in a negative but in a positive way, in metaphor and metonymy.
#181

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.241

**XVIII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy (contiguous, signifier-to-signifier coordination) is the foundational operation of language acquisition and psychic organization, upon which metaphor (transference of the signified) can only subsequently operate—and that psychotic phenomena like Schreber's delusional assonances expose this hidden signifying substructure by promoting the signifier as such.

it's on this foundation that metaphor is able to intervene... they're not yet up to metaphor, but only metonymy.
#182

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.233

**XVII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the Freudian mechanisms of condensation and displacement in the rhetorical distinction between metaphor and metonymy, arguing that the signifier's structural priority over the signified is the very starting-point of the Freudian discovery, and that psychosis results from a specific pathological relationship between the subject and the signifier/Other rather than from a merely aphasic mechanism.

what Freud originally drew attention to in the mechanisms of neurosis… In general what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls metaphor
#183

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.131

**VIII** > **IX**

Theoretical move: By insisting that the unconscious is fundamentally structured by language and that the signifier plays the primary role, Lacan argues that Schreber's delusion is fully legible through psychoanalytic method—the terminal state of the delusion preserves the same signifying elements as the originary experience of psychosis, making the symbolic relationship analyzable throughout.

They all presuppose a lengthy elaboration, the implications, the reductions, of the real, what we might call metaphysical progress.
#184

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.347

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This is the index section of Seminar III, a non-substantive reference apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references for the seminar's theoretical content on psychosis, language, and related Lacanian concepts.

metaphor, 218-21, 222-230
#185

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.352

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This is an index from Seminar III, non-substantive in itself, but it maps the conceptual architecture of the seminar by clustering key Lacanian terms (Verwerfung/foreclosure, signifier, unconscious, symbolic, subject, Verneinung, etc.) with their page references, making visible the theoretical relations Lacan constructs across the seminar.

similarity … in delusions, 220 … and metaphor, 219
#186

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.231

**XVII** > **1**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in psychosis (particularly Schreber's hallucinations), the signifier's dimension of contiguity dominates over the dimension of similarity/metaphor, and that misrecognising the primordial mediating role of the signifier — reducing analysis to the signified — renders psychosis unintelligible; the hallucinatory phenomenon is precisely the grammatical-syntactic part of language imposed as an external reality, marking a failure of the metaphoric function.

Even when the sentences may have a meaning, one never encounters anything that resembles a metaphor... Metaphor presupposes that a meaning is the dominant datum and that it deflects, commands, the use of the signifier to such an extent that the entire species of preestablished, I should say lexical, connections comes undone.
#187

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.227

**XVII**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the dimension of truth enters human life through the paternal symbol, and that this symbol—understood as pure signifier—coincides with the death drive at the origin of the human symbolic order; this convergence grounds the return to the study of psychosis.

Metaphor and metonymy (I): 'His sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful'
#188

Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.346

**XXV** > **INDE X**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index for Seminar III (The Psychoses), listing key terms, proper names, and their page references across the seminar volume.

and metaphor, 218
#189

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.392

XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

Theoretical move: The phobic object (the horse in little Hans's case) functions as a metaphorical substitute signifier for the missing paternal function, transforming free-floating anxiety into a localized, manageable fear that anchors the subject's symbolic order; Lacan traces the dialectical transformation of the phobia through a series of algebraic formulas, showing how the analysis works by allowing the signifier to evolve through its own structural laws rather than by direct suasive intervention.

The phobic object comes to play the role that on account of some shortcoming on account of a real shortcoming in the case of little Hans has not been played... the object of the phobia appearing, which plays the same metaphorical role
#190

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.142

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes the structures of neurosis and perversion by mapping Dora's hysteria as a perpetual metaphorical self-positioning under shifting signifiers (Frau K. as her metaphor), while the young homosexual woman's perversion operates metonymically—pointing along the signifying chain to what lies beyond, namely the refused paternal phallus—and uses Lévi-Strauss's exchange theory to ground why woman is structurally reduced to object within the Law of symbolic exchange.

Literally, Frau K. is her metaphor, because Dora can say nothing of what she is.
#191

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.391

XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates his trajectory from intersubjective schema (subject/Other/little other) toward discourse and object-as-signifier, then formalises the Oedipus complex and castration complex as interlocking symbolic structures, arguing that the Name-of-the-Father introduces a radical symbolic dimension into the child-mother relation, and that the phobic object functions as a metaphor standing in for this symbolic gap.

This formalisation is what last time I called the metaphorical function of the phobic object.
#192

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.364

XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

Theoretical move: By using the anecdote of a woman artificially inseminated by her dead husband's preserved semen, Lacan sharpens the distinction between the real father and the symbolic father, arguing that paternity is fundamentally a function of speech and the Symbolic Order rather than of biological fecundity — a theoretical move that both grounds the Oedipus complex in the paternal metaphor and exposes the irreducible gap in sexual relations.

The paternal metaphor
#193

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.404

FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.

you will see what is perhaps a tighter justification for the ordering of some of these formulae, notably those for metaphor and metonymy.
#194

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.168

THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS

Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Freudian impasse between identification and object-choice by grounding both in the symbolic structure of the love relation and the oral drive, arguing against the Kleinian symmetry of introjection/projection and proposing instead that the drive always targets the real object as a part-object of the symbolic object—a dialectic of frustration and need that structures the constitution of the object from the outset.

the metaphor that underlies introjection is an oral metaphor. People speak indiscriminately about introjection and incorporation, allowing themselves to slide in the most common way into all the articulations that were produced in the Kleinian era.
#195

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.281

HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a "golden rule" for analytic reading: signifier-elements must first be defined by their articulation with other signifiers, never reduced to a univocal signified. This principle, illustrated through the polysemic horse in the Little Hans case, is grounded in the structural study of myth (Lévi-Strauss) and simultaneously critiques object-relations theory as trapped in the contradictions of the Imaginary.

Before it came to fulfil this metaphorical function in a terminal fashion, so to speak, the horse played a good many other roles.
#196

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.375

XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

Theoretical move: Lacan reads the conclusion of the Little Hans case as an atypical resolution of the Oedipus complex: the phobic object functions as an "almost arbitrary" signal that delimits the symbolic/real interface, while Hans's final fantasy reveals that the paternal function has not been properly integrated but only displaced along a lineage — a solution that is liveable but not paradigmatic.

others rock the mythical transformation into motion … its implicit metaphorical richness are made manifest right away
#197

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.152

THE FETISH OBJECT > THE FUNCTION OF THE VEIL

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fetish is constituted not through metaphor but through metonymy: it is the point in the symbolic-historical chain where the subject's history is arrested, functioning as a screen-memory that marks the onset of repression and veils the beyond-zone where the phallus-as-presence-absence should appear, while the subject's erotic life oscillates between imaginary identifications due to insufficient symbolization of the ternary (Oedipal) relationship.

love transfers via metaphor to desire, which latches onto the object as something illusory, while on the other hand the constitution of the object is not metaphoric but metonymic.
#198

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.323

XVIII CIRCUITS > PERMUTATIONS

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hans's series of fantasies as a structured permutation of signifying elements—hole, bathtub, behind, pincers—demonstrating that the signifier does not represent signification but rather fills the gap left by lost signification, while the castration complex is recast as a symbolic operation (removal and impossible return of the penis) whose incomplete execution in Hans's case may nonetheless suffice as a rite of passage.

little Hans is not a mere nature lover, but a metaphysician, that he conveys the question to its proper place, that is to say, right where there is something that lacks
#199

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.275

HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED

Theoretical move: Through the case of Little Hans, Lacan demonstrates that therapeutic interventions aimed at directly addressing guilt or abolishing prohibition inevitably backfire, transforming the forbidden into the compulsory, and that the child's symptomatic productions are better understood as permutative signifier-operations that progressively integrate a disturbing new real element (the real penis) into the subject's mythic system—making progress in analysis a function of the signifier's displacement across personages, not of regression or direct authoritarian clarification.

the horse is also the mother, at the end the father, and also on occasion little Hans himself
#200

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.287

HOW MYTH IS ANALYSED > THE SIGNIFIER AND DER WITZ

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject is seized by the autonomous play of the signifier — not by drives or affects — and uses the case of Little Hans to show that phobia/myth functions as a structural solution to an impossible symbolic impasse; he then anchors this in Freud's Witz to demonstrate that condensation at the level of the signifier is the constitutive mechanism of both wit and symptomatic production.

the father makes a fresh intervention, telling the mother. Good-bye, big giraffe! Having so far accepted a different interpretative register, the child doesn't reply Oh yes! … but rather Nicht wahr, that can't be true!
#201

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.249

WHAT MYTH IS FOR

Theoretical move: By aligning Lévi-Straussian structural mythology (mythemes, formal decomposition) with Little Hans's "playful mythical production," Lacan argues that the child's fantasy constructions are governed by the same structural necessity as collective myths, and that both are ultimately organised around the signifier's power—particularly as it bears on the castration complex and the Oedipus complex as the central "peg" through which that power operates.

saying that an act of incest and a murder are two equivalent things is not something that would come to mind on first approach, but the comparison of two myths, or two stages of a single myth, can bring such a thing to light.
#202

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.128

Jacques Lacan The Object Relation > DORA AND THE YOUNG HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN

Theoretical move: By distinguishing symbolic insistence (Wiederholungszwang) from imaginary deception in the transference, Lacan argues that the young homosexual woman's "ruse dreams" are in fact the return of an unconscious symbolic message ("You will bear my child") from the Oedipus complex—and that Freud's error was failing to locate transference at the level of symbolic articulation rather than preconscious intentionality; this is then set against the Dora case as its structural mirror (perversion as negative of neurosis).

Perverse metonymy, neurotic metaphor
#203

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.382

XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the Little Hans case by arguing that neurosis is a closed question articulated at the level of the subject's existence through the symbolic dimension, and that transference is the structural mechanism by which the analyst—as the locus of the big Other—progressively decrypts the organised discourse of neurosis through dialogue, with the paternal function necessarily doubled into a real father and a higher symbolic/witnessing father (Freud).

Phobic metaphor
#204

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.233

ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Symbolic order — demonstrated through the internal lawfulness of a combinatorial letter-sequence and the lion/counting anecdote — introduces an originary dimension into the Real that is irreducible to experience, and then deploys this argument to read the pre-phobic structure of little Hans's imaginary phallus as the condition of possibility for the eruption of castration anxiety.

the horse whose presence was already heralded in the text, metaphorically, when the child said to his mother, I thought you were so big you'd have a widdler like a horse.
#205

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.369

XVIII CIRCUITS > AN ESSAY IN RUBBER¬ SHEET LOGIC

Theoretical move: Lacan formalises the paternal metaphor through the Hugo poem on Boaz and Ruth, showing that the father's function is constitutively metaphorical (substitution + castration complex), and applies this formula to the case of Little Hans to explain how the horse-phobia acts as a substitute metaphorical mediator when the paternal metaphor is absent, while also distinguishing phobic and fetishistic objects as "milestones" of desire in the real that are nonetheless only accessible through signifying formalisation.

any kind of introduction to the paternal function belongs to the realm of metaphorical experience.
#206

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.349

XVIII CIRCUITS > THE MOTHER'S DRAWERS AND THE FATHER'S SHORTCOMING

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that in the Little Hans case, the lumf (excrement) functions not primarily as evidence of an "anal stage" but as a signifier homologous with the veil/garment (drawers), both being things that can "fall," and that the succession of Hans's fantasies must be read as a developing myth whose transformations resolve Hans's structural problem of situating himself in relation to the phallic mother — not through instinctual regression or frustration, but through a signifying process moving between symbolic, imaginary, and real registers.

The lumf carries an extra meaning within this system on account of its strict homology with the function of the drawers, that is to say, the function of the veil. Both the lumf and the drawers are a thing that can fall.
#207

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.398

XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'

Theoretical move: By tracing Little Hans's movement through signifying permutations toward an imaginary resolution, Lacan argues that Hans's phobia dissolves not through genuine traversal of the castration complex but through a narcissistic-imaginary fixation, leaving the subject alienated from himself—he has not "forgotten" but "forgotten himself."

the transformation of the biting into the unscrewing of the bathtub... is something utterly different, in particular for the relationship between the protagonists
#208

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.236

ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX > THE SIGNIFIER IN THE REAL

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the child's position in relation to the mother is structurally determined by the mother's lack (the phallus), such that the child functions not as the metaphor of her love but as the metonymy of her desire—a distinction that explains the genesis of anxiety and its transformation into phobia in the case of Little Hans.

if the child is the metaphor of her love for the father, this is not quite the same thing as being the metonymy of her desire for the phallus
#209

Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.311

XVIII CIRCUITS

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Little Hans's phobia originates in a paradigmatic metonymic operation: the grammatical weight of 'wegen' (because of) slides onto 'Pferd' (horse), making the horse signifier the nodal term around which Hans's entire symptomatic system is reorganized; this grounds the horse not as an imaginary symbol but as a structural, 'amboceptor' signifier whose defining feature is its function of hitching/coordination within the signifying chain.

On the one hand there is metaphorical association, where one word corresponds to another for which it can be substituted. On the other hand there is metonymic association, where one word yields the following word that can come next in a sentence.
#210

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.128

*UNE FEMME DE NON-RECEVOIR,* **OR: A FLAT REFUSAL**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the comic (as distinct from the witticism) is constituted at the level of the Imaginary—specifically through the ego's narcissistic dependency on the image of the semblable—while naïve jokes achieve their effect entirely "at the level of the Other" without requiring the standard dialectical work, and that Desire's fundamental disappointment is what the subject masks through ready-made metonymic satisfactions in language.

Soulie's quip in talking about the Golden Calf in relation to the banker - it's almost a witticism already, it's at least a metaphor.
#211

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.16

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

Theoretical move: Lacan recapitulates the theoretical trajectory of Seminars I–IV to frame the new topic of "formations of the unconscious," establishing that the signifier's primacy grounds both the symbolic determination of meaning and the structural distinction between metonymy (desire's object) and metaphor (emergence of meaning), while introducing the quilting-point schema and the retroactive (*nachträglich*) action of the signifier as the key apparatus for the year's investigation.

the only meaning is metaphorical meaning, meaning emerging only from the substitution of one signifier for another in the symbolic chain.
#212

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.289

**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.

The formation of the ego-ideal thus has a metaphorical character and, just as with a metaphor, what results is the modification of a desire that has nothing to do with the desire involved in constituting the object.
#213

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.85

**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

Theoretical move: By tracing Freud's analysis of wit, Lacan argues that the pleasure of witticisms is not reducible to infantile verbal play but is grounded in the structural homology between the laws of the signifier (metaphor/metonymy) and the unconscious, and that this structural primacy of the signifier fundamentally perverts the relationship between need, demand, and desire.

which we've tried to formulate more precisely by using the terms 'metaphor' and 'metonymy'. These forms are the same for all language use and also for the structuring by language we encounter in the unconscious.
#214

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.350

**THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:

Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.

This is what constitutes the paternal metaphor.
#215

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.45

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism 'famillionaire' operates on two irreducible axes—metaphorical signifying creation and metonymic proliferation of meaning—but that the true centre of the phenomenon is the conjunction of signifiers confirmed by the Other, which is precisely what distinguishes a witticism from a symptom and grounds its status as a formation of the unconscious.

You can see, then, the two axes of metaphorical creation in this witticism. There is the axis of meaning, insofar as this word hits home, moves us, is rich in psychological significations
#216

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.203

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

Theoretical move: Lacan recasts male homosexuality not as an inverted Oedipus but as a triangulated identificatory solution: the child identifies with the mother's position (the one who holds the key to the law/phallus) precisely because the father's excessive love reveals his suspected castration, producing a structure in which the mother holds the fantasmatic paternal phallus—making the homosexual's structure triadic, not dual.

the complex bonds of the construction of the Oedipus complex... allow you to understand how the relationship to the power of the law metaphorically reverberates through the relationship to the phallus as fantasmatic object
#217

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.431

**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the resolution of the castration complex does not hinge on having or not having the phallus as an organ, but on the subject's recognition that she/he *is not* the phallus; the Phallus functions as the signifier of desire itself, and the case of the obsessional woman illustrates how misrecognizing this—treating the phallus as an object to be possessed rather than a signifier of desire—leads to analytic impasse.

what is produced, then, in this symptom is the substitution, for the subject's relationship to the Word made flesh or even for the totality of the Word, of a privileged signifier
#218

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.260

**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as the master signifier of desire for both sexes — not as a biological organ but as the structural marker of the gap between need and desire introduced by the signifying order — and that the Kleinian error lies in reducing the primordial dialectic to a specular, dyadic mother-child relation, thereby foreclosing the constitutive third term (the father) and the Other's desire.

the structures of metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement
#219

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.175

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**

Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.

A metaphor, as I have already explained to you, is a signifier that comes to take the place of another signifier. I am saying that this is the father in the Oedipus complex.
#220

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.98

**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the witticism (Witz) operates by traversing the tension between two structural poles: the 'bit-of-sense' (peu-de-sens), the levelling effect of metonymic displacement, and the 'step-of-sense' (pas-de-sens), the surplus introduced by metaphoric substitution. The joke's completion requires the big Other to authenticate the step-of-sense, revealing that desire is structurally conditioned by the signifier's ambiguity and that subjectivity is only constituted through this triangular social process.

This step-of-sense is, strictly speaking, what is actualized in metaphor. It's the subject's intention, his need, which introduces the 'step-of-sense' into metaphors beyond metonymic use
#221

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.521

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section of Seminar V, listing concepts, proper names, and page references in alphabetical order (L–N). No original theoretical argument is advanced here.

paternal metaphor 141-2, 145-62, 175-6, 181, 337, 345-6, 457 ... Name-of-the-Father and 141, 4545
#222

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.59

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's Signorelli forgetting to articulate the structural distinction between metaphor and metonymy as the two axes of signifying creation, arguing that the forgotten name marks not mere absence but a positively constituted lack (an X) where new metaphorical meaning should have been produced, and extends this to a distinction between the 'speaking present' (the enunciating subject) and the 'present speaking' (discourse itself), grounding wit in the play of signifiers at both metaphoric and metonymic levels.

We rediscover here the formula for metaphor insofar as it operates by means of a mechanism of substituting one signifier S for another signifier Sf. What is the consequence of this substitution? A change in meaning is produced at the level of Sf
#223

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.41

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian forgetting of "Signorelli" and the Witz "famillionaire" share the same signifying topology — both operate through the intersection of metonymic decomposition (the combinatory axis) and metaphorical substitution (the substitutive axis) — and uses this structural homology to distinguish carefully between substitution and metaphor, and between *Unterdrückung* and *Verdrängung* as two different modes of repression.

Substitution is the articulation, the signifying means whereby metaphorical action is instituted. This doesn't mean that substitution is metaphor.
#224

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.74

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of witticisms to establish metonymy as the foundational structure of the signifying chain — the "transfer of signification along the chain" — on which metaphor (substitution) depends, while also linking the metonymic function to the sliding of meaning, fetishistic displacement of desire, and the irreducibility of linguistic ambiguity (the impossibility of metalanguage).

Metaphor is the result of the function that is brought to a signifier S insofar as this signifier is substituted for another in a signifying chain.
#225

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.70

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that metonymy is irreducible to metaphor by using Heine's "Golden Calf" witticism to show that the wit resides not in metaphorical substitution but in a metonymic displacement that subverts the metaphor; this is grounded in a structural distinction between desire and need, where need is always refracted through the laws of the signifier before it can appear as demand.

he detects something metaphorical in the Golden Calf and, to be sure, the expression does have a double value - on the one hand, as a symbol of intrigue and, on the other, as a symbol of the power of money.
#226

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.53

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's examples of 'famillionaire' and the forgetting of 'Signorelli' to argue that metaphorical creation necessarily produces a repressed residue (a 'signifying scrap') — the word that is displaced but not forgotten — demonstrating that the unconscious is structured as a combination of signifiers, not as a repository of meanings or objects.

There must be something that in some way marks the residue or scraps of the metaphorical creation.
#227

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.149

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychosis (specifically Schreber's) results from the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: because the Other lacks the signifier that would ground its own authority, messages cannot be authenticated through the 'you' circuit and arrive as broken, enigmatic utterances—a failure that is structural (the paternal metaphor) rather than empirical (whether the real father is present or adequate).

the essence of the paternal metaphor... consists of the following triangle
#228

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.51

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the unconscious structure revealed by Freud in dreams, symptoms, and witticisms coincides entirely with the laws of signifying combination (metaphor/metonymy) identified by linguistics, and uses the 'famillionaire' witticism and Gide's 'Miglionaire' to demonstrate how signifying neo-formations produce meaning through condensation and displacement, while insisting that the subject of the unconscious cannot be equated with the synthesizing ego.

We must take this up again, underneath and across this critique, on the basis of the action of speech in this creative chain where it is always liable to engender new meaning - by way of metaphor, in the most obvious manner, or by way of metonymy, in a manner that has stayed profoundly masked till quite recently.
#229

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.518

**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

metaphor 7-8
#230

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.113

**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the joke's mechanism reveals the Other as a dual structure: both a real, living subject (whose needs give meaning direction) and a purely symbolic locus — an anonymous, abstract "treasure trove" of signifiers — and that it is precisely this function of the Other, as the empty Grail or form, that the joke invokes and must awaken, thereby showing that the unconscious is the plane on which the joke's surprise arrives.

What makes the joke a joke is the reference to the red thread, 'roter Faden', a metaphor which is itself poetical... All metaphorical implications are already piled up and compressed in language.
#231

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.116

**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE** > **WHOAH, NEDDY!**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that jokes operate through a shared symbolic field (the "parish"/paroisse) constituted by metonymic stock common to speaker and Other, and that the joke's mechanism works by using the Other-as-censor as a "reflecting concavity" to make the unconscious resonate — the obstacle to meaning becomes the very vehicle for transmitting what cannot ordinarily be heard.

was, as it were, metaphorized by another term which recorded its signifying element
#232

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.189

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (II)**

Theoretical move: Lacan elaborates the three logical moments of the Oedipus complex as a structural sequence centred on the metonymic circulation of the phallus as the object of the mother's desire, showing how the paternal prohibition interrupts the child's identification as the mother's metonymic object and thereby opens the path to the third, identificatory moment — grounding castration in the paternal metaphor rather than in any social teleology.

I've been talking about the paternal metaphor.
#233

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.64

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *MIGLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that human intelligence is not a brute capacity but is constituted by the prior introduction of signifying formulations; the signifying chain, as the principle of combination and locus of metonymy, is what makes metaphorical substitution possible and what transforms mere discourse into knowledge.

the very possibility of metaphorical play is founded on the existence of having something to substitute.
#234

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.81

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE GOLDEN CALF**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that metonymy, through the perpetual sliding of meaning along the signifying chain, constitutes the primordial dimension of human language not as meaning but as value — a claim grounded in readings of Maupassant, Feneon's micro-fictions, and Marx's theory of general equivalence, all of which demonstrate that discourse can only grasp reality by introducing a decentring, disorganizing movement irreducible to reference.

We have, then, passed through the I and returned with 'Golden Calf at A, the locus of usage and metonymy, for, while the Golden Calf is a metaphor it is a dead one, it has passed into language.
#235

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.18

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE F AMILLIONAIRE**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Graph of Desire's two-line schema to distinguish the signifying chain (permeable to metaphor/metonymy) from the line of rational discourse, showing how their two intersections (code and message) generate meaning; he then opens the inquiry into Witz as the privileged Freudian site where the interplay between code and message—and thereby the structural relation between wit and the unconscious—becomes legible.

the signifying chain insofar as it remains completely permeable to the properly signifying effects of metaphor and metonymy
#236

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.35

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor and condensation operate not through injection of meaning but through signifier-to-signifier relations (homonymy, equivocation), and that this same mechanism — whereby the original signifier gets "repressed" once meaning is established — underlies all formations of the unconscious, unifying wit, slips, and forgetting under a single economy of the signifier.

The metaphorical pathway presides not only over the creation and evolution of a language, but also over the creation and evolution of meaning as such
#237

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.459

**THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE PHALLUS IN** THE TREATMENT > **EXITING VIA THE SYMPTOM**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus achieves its privileged status as master signifier of the unconscious not through anatomical primacy but through its metaphorical passage into the signifying chain via the paternal metaphor; in psychosis, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father prevents this metaphorical effect, leaving the Other's desire unsymbolized and causing the 'it speaks' of the unconscious to erupt in the Real as hallucination, while in obsessional neurosis the Other's desire is actively disavowed (Verneinung) rather than left unsymbolized.

This metaphor is established on the mother's original, opaque and obscure desire... the Name-of-the-Father over the Mother's Desire and the Mother's Desire over its symbolization.
#238

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.32

THE FREUDIAN STRUCTURES OF WIT > **THE** *FAT-MILLIONAIRE*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's analysis of the joke-word 'famillionaire' to argue that the structural mechanisms of the unconscious (condensation, displacement) are irreducibly linguistic phenomena — specifically special cases of the signifier's two fundamental functions, metaphor (substitution) and metonymy (combination/contiguity) — thereby insisting that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded in a rigorous theory of the signifier.

It's in the relationship of substitution that metaphor's creative mainspring, creative force or power to engender - that's the word for it! - lies.
#239

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.186

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.

The paternal metaphor plays a role here, which is precisely the role we would expect from a metaphor - it results in the institution of something which is of the order of signifiers, which is there in reserve and whose signification will develop later.
#240

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.90

**A BIT-OF-SENSE AND THE STEP-OF-SENSE**

Theoretical move: By tracing demand through a three-moment schema, Lacan argues that the introduction of signifiers necessarily transforms raw need into desire, and that this minimal metaphorical transformation—instating the Other and the message simultaneously—is the mythical-structural foundation for all subsequent operations of the unconscious, including wit, surprise, and the metonymic circuit of the subject's desire in the Other.

With the addition of signifiers, it undergoes a minimal transformation - a minimal metaphor, in a word - and this makes it the case that what is signified is something beyond raw need and is remodelled through the use of signifiers.
#241

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.171

**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Oedipus complex must be articulated through the structure of the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the mother in the signifying chain, and this symbolic operation is what installs the phallus as the privileged imaginary object mediating the child's relation to the mother's desire — establishing a metaphorical (not merely sociological or empirical) connection between the symbolic father and the imaginary phallus.

What is the paternal metaphor? Strictly speaking, in what has been constituted out of a primordial symbolization between child and mother, it's the substitution of the father as a symbol or signifier in the place of the mother.
#242

Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.143

**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER**

Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates that Foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father destroys the message/code circuit at point A (the locus of the Other), thereby collapsing the signifying conditions for desire's satisfaction and precipitating psychosis—illustrated through Schreber's voice hallucinations as substitutes for the absent paternal signifier.

Witticisms unfold in the dimension of metaphor, that is, beyond signifiers, insofar as when you try to signify something with a signifier, you will always signify something else.
#243

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.232

THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS

Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes the quadripartite structure of subject-formation by showing that the specular couple [a-a'] is always already regulated by the more primitive dyad of the unconstituted subject and the mother-as-One, and that the birth of metaphor (substitution) is the moment at which the object is symbolized and desire properly emerges — yielding the formula of fantasy ($◇a) inscribed within a four-term schema.

the essential moment that I have pointed to: the moment in child development that involves the birth of metaphor... the activity of substitution wherein lies the entire mainspring of symbolic progress
#244

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.53

FURTHER EXPLANATION

Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire in dreams (and in analytic experience) cannot be reduced to sexual desire or simple wish-fulfilment; rather, desire is essentially structured by fantasy — "to desire someone" means "to include them in one's fundamental fantasy" — and this fantasy structure is located on the Graph of Desire at the locus of the unconscious, where only signifying elements (signifiers) circulate and can be repressed.

He left us something to discover and articulate, which completes his second topography and which allows us to resituate it in and restore it to the whole of his discovery. It is the fundamentally metaphorical function of language.
#245

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.139

DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION > But Freud adds the following:

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three-phase schema of "A Child Is Being Beaten" and the optics of the inverted bouquet to argue that the subject constitutes itself as barred subject ($) only by passing through a fantasmatic phase of near-abolition (primary masochism), and that the phallus functions as the mediating signifier through which desire is structured in the imaginary-symbolic interplay.

This is but a metaphor, one that represents the specular pathway by which the subject tries in fantasy to return to his place in the symbolic.
#246

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.374

THE FUNDAMENTAL FANTASY

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "Freudian thing" is desire, and that desire is constitutively incompatible with any harmonistic or adaptive account of human development; against ego-psychological attempts (Glover, Hartmann) to reduce desire to a preparatory stage of reality-adaptation, Lacan proposes to re-situate desire within the synchronic structure of the signifier rather than the diachronic unfolding of the unconscious.

they are metaphors that generate no meaning, and displacements that bring no being with them
#247

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.216

SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.

She accentuates metaphor in a way that is in no wise discordant with what I teach you. She always knows how to underscore the kind of substitution in symptoms that is, strictly speaking, linguistic in nature
#248

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.43

FURTHER EXPLANATION

Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs the Graph of Desire step by step to show how its two levels articulate the speaking subject's relation to the signifier, demonstrating that continuity and fragmentation on each trajectory encode the retroactive effect of the signifier's synchronic structure on need, demand, and intentionality, thereby distinguishing the repressed, desire, and the unconscious as three non-identical registers.

In making something disappear and reappear - his own face, for example, by covering and then uncovering the child's face - she reveals the revealing function to him. It is already a function raised to the second power.
#249

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.18

CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

Theoretical move: Lacan opens Seminar VI by re-centering psychoanalytic theory on "desire" against the Object Relations drift toward "object-seeking" libido, arguing that desire—not affect, libido-as-energy, or object-relation—is the fundamental axis of psychoanalytic practice, and anchors this claim in a philosophical genealogy running from Aristotle's ethics of mastery through Spinoza's identification of desire with human essence.

figurative poetry—the kind that I would say virtually paints beauty's 'roses and lilies'—always expresses desire with a singular coldness. Curiously enough, the opposite is true in the type of poetry that is dubbed metaphysical.
#250

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.34

CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

Theoretical move: The passage argues that metaphor produces a new signified by substituting an unexpected signifier, and that this metaphorical operation always veils/unveils death — the constitutive absence at the heart of language — through the structural function of the phallus as the missing signifier subtracted from the chain of speech, making desire the metonymy of being and castration the inevitable consequence of the subject's capture in speech.

It is inasmuch as it was not expected, but was rather put in the place of another signifier, that a new signified was produced.
#251

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.472

THE FUNCTION OF SPLITTING\* IN PERVERSION

Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between neurotic and perverse desire by deploying the fantasy matheme ($◇a) to show that fantasy constitutes the subject at the point where unconscious discourse escapes him; masochistic jouissance is reread as the subject's relation to the Other's discourse rather than the death drive, schizophrenic foreclosure is located at the identification with the cut, and neurotic desire is defined as structurally dependent on the paternal metaphor that masks a metonymy of castration.

the paternal metaphor actually masks a metonymy. Behind the metaphor of the father as a subject of the law, as a peaceful possessor of jouissance, the metonymy of castration is hidden.
#252

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.176

THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

Theoretical move: Through the anecdote of a child who replaces the adult signifier "dog" with the onomatopoeia "bowwow" and then inverts animal-sound pairings, Lacan argues that metaphor—understood as the substitution of one signifier for another—is the structural origin of predication and the signified, not a primitive or developmental curiosity but a logical necessity of language itself.

To replace 'dog' by 'bowwow' is to create a first metaphor, and it is here that predication first begins to operate. Nothing is closer to the true genesis of language.
#253

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.178

THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG > Crossing and exchange

Theoretical move: Lacan demonstrates how the fantasy formula ($◇a) operates clinically by tracking a patient's chain of associations through the Graph of Desire, showing that the subject's fantasy structure requires the absence of the big Other as witness, and that the oscillation between the imaginary other (little a) and the symbolic Other is the pivotal hinge around which the subject's desire and shame are organized.

From the moment the game begins, from the moment 'dogs go bowwow' and 'bowwow,' which is elided, sinks into the what lies below the enunciation concerning the dog, the latter becomes a true signifying enunciation.
#254

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.313

THERE IS NO OTHER OF THE OTHER

Theoretical move: The passage delivers the core formulation S(Ⱥ) — the signifier of the barred Other — as the "big secret of psychoanalysis": there is no Other of the Other, no metalanguage or guarantor that can give the subject back what it has sacrificed to the signifying order, and the phallus names precisely that missing, symbolically-sacrificed signifier; Hamlet is read as the dramatic figure who receives this radical revelation and whose desire is consequently structured around this absence.

interpretations are designed to have an effect, which can only be conceptualized as metaphorical, and inasmuch as our interpretations always play and resonate between the two lines of the graph
#255

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.465

THE EITHER/OR CONCERNING THE OBJECT

Theoretical move: The passage articulates the structural logic of the phallus as signifier through the "either/or" formulation — one either *is* the phallus or *has* it — and deploys this to distinguish feminine desire from neurotic desire, where the neurotic regresses to a metonymic substitution in which "not having" disguises an unconscious identification with being the phallus, while the ego usurps the place of the barred subject in the dialectic of desire.

in the guise of the phallus, the paternal metaphor, as I have called it, institutes a split in the object
#256

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.60

THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the structure of associationism (contiguity and similarity) maps directly onto metonymy and metaphor in the signifying chain, thereby subordinating psychological atomism and its Gestalt critique to a single linguistically-grounded theory; the dream's wish-satisfaction operates at the level of "being" as verbal appearance rather than substance, and desire—irreducible to demand—is located at the enigmatic point opened by the subject's relation to the signifier.

a metaphorical effect always comes down to an effect of substitution [of one term for another] in the signifying chain, as I have shown you.
#257

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.85

LITTLE ANNA'S DREAM

Theoretical move: The passage develops the distinction between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the statement as the structural foundation of the Graph of Desire's two lines, arguing that repression is essentially the effacement of the subject at the level of the enunciation process, and that all speech is primordially the Other's discourse — with Foreclosure (Verwerfung) marking the pathological limit of this structure.

Signifiers follow one another in a certain order, but this order takes the form of a piling up. These signifiers are superimposed on each other, as it were, in the form of a column. They replace each other, like so many metaphors for each other.
#258

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.347

MOURNING AND DESIRE > What is Hamlet missing?

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Hamlet's identification with the "foil" (the mortal phallus) as the structural key to his desire, and then pivots to argue that mourning—illustrated by the cemetery scene—produces a hole in the Real that is the strict converse of Foreclosure: what is lost in reality irrupts as an absolute (impossible) object, and this opens onto a rearticulation of mourning via the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real rather than mere object-relations.

These characters operate primarily by equivocating, speaking metaphorically, punning, concocting concetti, speaking preciously, and replacing one signifier with another
#259

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.33

CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH

Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.

there is no need to posit the principle of metaphorical effects - that is, the substitution of one signifier for another - nor to require Darwin to have had some inkling of it
#260

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.449

THE DIALECTIC OF DESIRE IN NEUROSIS

Theoretical move: By re-reading Freud's "A Child is Being Beaten" through the lens of metaphor and alienation, Lacan argues that the obsessive fantasy stages the neurotic's structural relation to desire: the subject sustains desire precisely by perpetuating its precariousness, finding jouissance not in satisfaction but in the symptomatic metonymy of 'être pour' (being-for) that defers 'pour être' (being as such).

the process involves an intermediary stage which is, I will say, strictly speaking metaphorical... The subject puts himself in his rival's shoes: it is the subject himself who is punished. What is the subject seeking in this metaphor or transference?
#261

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.435

THE FUNCTION OF THE SUBJECTIVE SLIT IN PER VERSE FANTASIES

Theoretical move: The passage advances the structural argument that in perverse fantasy (exhibitionism/voyeurism), the subject is not identified with the visible object but with the 'slit' itself — the cut or gap that mediates between the glimpsed and the not-glimpsed — and that the barred subject ($) in fantasy is therefore structurally constituted by this cut, while the objet petit a in fantasy turns out to be the Other's desire rather than a simple part-object.

Twice - once in our re-examination of the Oedipus complex last year, and once in my article on the psychoses - I showed you that the phallus is linked to the paternal metaphor - namely, insofar as it gives the subject a signified.
#262

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.124

DESIRE'S PHALLIC MEDIATION

Theoretical move: Desire cannot be reduced to demand or frustration but must be grasped through the tight knot of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; the dream of the dead father exemplifies how the imaginary interposition of the father's image props up desire as a shield against the anxiety of subjective elision, with the fantasy formula (S◇a) expressing the structural absence of the subject that is constitutive of desire itself.

what constitutes a symptom - namely, let us say, a metaphorical phenomenon, that is, interference by a repressed signifier with a patent signifier
#263

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.69

THE DREAM ABOUT THE DEAD FATHER: "HE DID NOT KNOW HE WAS DEAD"

Theoretical move: The dream about the dead father is analyzed as a metaphor produced by the elision (subtraction) of signifiers, where repression operates at the level of the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz rather than content; this analysis hinges on the distinction between signifying elision and repression, and opens toward the graph of desire, fantasy, and the differential clinical significance of similar structures across neurosis and psychosis.

The dream is a metaphor. In this metaphor, something new emerges that is a meaning or signified.
#264

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.213

SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN

Theoretical move: Lacan uses close reading of a clinical dream-text to argue that the phallus functions as a perpetually absent signifier whose structural elusiveness—not aggressive retaliation or castration anxiety in the ordinary sense—organises the neurotic subject's symptomatology, thereby critiquing hasty analytic interpretations that reduce the material to castration as cause rather than context.

He says, 'We have undone those things we ought to have done and there is no good thing in us' … the 'good thing' that he substituted for it is what is truly at work: the good object is not there.
#265

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.173

THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's case to demonstrate that the patient's question about the purpose of his cough operates at the level of the signifier of the Other (the unconscious question "what does the Other want?"), and that the barking-dog fantasy exemplifies how the subject constitutes itself through a signifier as other-than-what-it-is — establishing the structural function of the signifier in fantasy as distinct from the order of affect and comprehension.

'to put off the scent' is a metaphorical expression, and there is always a reason why one metaphor is used instead of another; yet there is no trace of the word 'scent' in what the patient tells us.
#266

Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.191

THE IMAGE OF THE INSIDE-OUT GLOVE

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that fantasy must not be dissolved into pre-formed imaginary significations (mouth/vagina, womb/envelopment) but must be respected as a precise object with signifying value; using the Graph of Desire, he locates fantasy midway between the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ) and the signified of the Other s(A), insisting that the object in fantasy is simultaneously a visual representation and a signifier.

What was essential was not that these elements were the mother and the phallus, but what little Hans did with them - he could sit on them or crumple them up. I told you at that time that the giraffes were symbols.
#267

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.177

**XI** > **XIII**

Theoretical move: The passage makes two interlocking theoretical moves: (1) it critiques Sperber's sexual-origin theory of language by insisting that the metaphorical spread of sexual signifiers proves not a reduction of meaning to sexual roots but rather that an "emptiness" or gap — the form of the female organ — is the privileged pole around which metaphorical play of the signifier is organised; (2) it pivots to Freud's treatment of the paternal function in religious experience, arguing that religious knowledge (Moses, the Name of the Father) belongs within the analytic field of inquiry precisely because all knowledge emerges against a background of ignorance.

Why in our everyday life do we find that in our metaphors a certain type of meaning is involved, certain signifiers that are marked by their primitive use in connection with the sexual relation?
#268

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.70

**V**

Theoretical move: Lacan reconstructs Freud's *Entwurf* around *das Ding* as the original lost object that structures the entire movement of *Vorstellungen* under the pleasure principle, while establishing that the unconscious is organized according to the laws of condensation/displacement (metaphor/metonymy), and that access to thought processes requires their mediation through word-representations (*Wort-Vorstellungen*) in preconsciousness — thereby grounding the ethics of psychoanalysis in the constitutive distance from *das Ding*.

not necessarily that of contradiction or of grammar, but the laws of condensation and displacement, those that I call the laws of metaphor and metonymy.
#269

Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.82

**VI**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that *das Ding* occupies a paradoxical topological position—excluded yet central—and that the subject's entire relation to the good (Wohl), the pleasure principle, repetition, and the reality principle is organized around this primordial excluded exterior; ethics proper begins only beyond these structural coordinates, at the point where the unconscious lie (proton pseudos) marks the subject's constitutive inability to directly approach das Ding.

the defense or the mutilation that is proper to man does not occur only at the level of substitution, displacement or metaphor
#270

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.322

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > And a bit further on she continues:

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Claudel's blind Pensée as an incarnation of the partial object of desire — specifically as a figure that, through her blindness, escapes the scopic economy (seeing-oneself-seen) and instead operates through the structure of the voice and speech, which cannot be heard hearing itself except in hallucination; this leads to the claim that castration alone separates absolute desire from natural desire, and that the sublime object of desire functions as a substitute for das Ding.

the anamorphic cylinder… I thereby portrayed for you the mechanism for reflecting the fascinating figure, beauty rising up… projected at the extreme limit in order to stop us from going any further toward the heart of the Thing.
#271

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > 467 **Editor's Notes** > **Notes to the Second Edition**

Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index excerpt from the editor's notes to a second edition of Seminar VIII, listing page references for key Lacanian and philosophical concepts without advancing any theoretical argument.

metaphor and 295-6
#272

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.53

**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*

Theoretical move: Lacan establishes love as a Metaphor (signifier substitution) by articulating the structural non-coincidence between what the lover (erastès) lacks and what the beloved (erômenos) unknowingly has, grounding transference in this same gap and positioning the trajectory of analysis as the revelation of the unconscious Other through an analogous structure.

Love as a signifier - for to us it is a signifier and nothing else - is a metaphor, assuming that we have come to understand metaphor as substitution.
#273

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.259

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

Theoretical move: The passage theorises the structural difference between hysterical and obsessional fantasy through their respective relations to the phallic signifier Φ: the hysteric sacrifices her own desire to keep the Other in possession of the key to her mystery, while the obsessive attacks the imaginary phallus in the Other (what Lacan calls "phallophany") to manage the unbearable real presence of desire — revealing that handling the symbolic function of Φ, not working through imaginary castration, is the genuine analytic task.

Here we have a, the substitutional or metaphorical object, over something that is hidden - namely, minus phi
#274

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.252

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

Theoretical move: Lacan introduces capital Φ as the unique symbol that occupies the place of the missing signifier — not because any signifier is literally absent from the battery, but because the dimension of questioning opens a subjective gap where the signifier's own foundation becomes ungraspable, making Φ indispensable for understanding how the castration complex operates on the mainspring of transference.

to ask himself what he is, is to go beyond the stage of doubt concerning whether he is, for merely by formulating his question in this way, he immediately slips into metaphor
#275

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.253

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.

What happens when meaning draws to a close? What happens is something that is always metaphorical in any and every attribution.
#276

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.129

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Plato's *Symposium* — specifically the limit of Socratic *epistémè* and its necessary handing over to myth (Diotima) — to argue that the Freudian unconscious marks precisely what exceeds the law of the signifier: something sustains itself *by excluding* knowledge, thereby constituting the irreducible split of the subject that Socratic dialectic cannot reach.

the rather quick substitution I mentioned earlier between Eros and desire to occur
#277

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.207

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > **A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that what Object Relations analysts call "countertransference" is actually an irreducible structural effect of transference itself: by virtue of the analytic situation, the analyst is necessarily positioned as the container of *agalma* (objet petit a), and this positioning—not the analyst's personal psychology—explains phenomena like projective identification, transference love, and the analyst's affective responses; the categories of desire, fantasy, and topology are required to articulate this adequately.

he fulfills the condition for the metaphor or substitution of erastés for eromenos, which in and of itself constitutes the phenomenon of love.
#278

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.7

**Jacques Lacan** > **Contents**

Theoretical move: This is the table of contents for Lacan's Seminar VIII (Transference), listing chapter headings that signal the seminar's major theoretical concerns: a commentary on Plato's Symposium, the object of desire and castration dialectic, a reading of Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy, and the relation between Capital I (Ideal) and little a (objet petit a).

III. The Metaphor of Love: Phaedrus
#279

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.370

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**

Theoretical move: The passage performs two linked theoretical moves: (1) it distinguishes the *einziger Zug* (single trait) as a sign rather than a signifier, using it to differentiate Ego Ideal (symbolic introjection) from Ideal Ego (imaginary projection); and (2) it articulates love as structured by the unconditional dimension of demand, where love is "giving what you don't have," connecting poverty/lack structurally to desire, and wealth/jouissance structurally to the saint's position — thereby positioning the analyst's own ideal against the horizon of sainthood and jouissance.

In love, the metaphor of the one who desires implies what it replaces in the metaphor - in other words, the one who is desired [eromenos].
#280

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.422

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter IX - Exit from the Ultra-World**

Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes providing philological glosses, source citations, and textual corrections for Chapter IX of Seminar VIII; it contains no independent theoretical argument.

On metaphor, see Seminar III, Chapters 17 and 18.
#281

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.127

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S*

Theoretical move: Lacan reads the Symposium's shift from Agathon to Diotima not as Socrates' tact toward a humiliated interlocutor, but as a structural necessity: once the function of lack is installed as constitutive of desire/love, Socrates cannot continue in his own name because the substitution of *epithumei* (desire) for *era* (love) is a move that exceeds what Socratic dialectical knowledge can formally authorize.

with no concern for elegance, so he tells us, using everyday words - reside in the exchange, dialogue, or consent obtained from the person with whom he is speaking.
#282

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.222

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst must preserve the gap between demand and desire by resisting premature interpretation: the "margin of incomprehension" is precisely the margin of desire, and collapsing it—whether by satisfying the obsessive's demand, offering phallic communion, or nourishing the subject with metaphor—forecloses desire in favour of symptom, while the object of desire is shown to pre-exist the subject who seeks it.

every time you introduce metaphor - and you are probably obliged to do so - you remain on the very path that gives the symptom consistency.
#283

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.241

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the myth of Psyche and Zucchi's painting as an image for the castration complex, arguing that the phallus becomes a signifier precisely by being cut off from the organ, making it the signifier of the point where the signifying chain is lacking — S(Ⱥ) — and thereby rendering the subject unconscious and barred, rather than the castration complex being reducible to a fear of aphanisis.

no longer in a contaminated, displaced, condensed, or metaphorical fashion
#284

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.308

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OEDIPAL MYTH TODAY** > **TU R E L U R E 'S ABJECTION**

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Claudel's trilogy to argue that castration is constitutive of the desiring subject—not as frustration of need but as the structural elevation of the phallus to a signifying function—and locates the composition of desire across three generational stages: the mark of the signifier, the undesired object, and finally the constitution of desire proper, while critiquing ego-psychology's reduction of desire to need and the concurrent eclipse of the father function.

just as it is altogether convincing to see Freud already enunciate the laws of metaphor and metonymy in The Interpretation of Dreams.
#285

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.409

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**

Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.

we purely and simply encounter a metaphorical attempt to attribute a trait in common to all objects; it is purely and simply by decree that we can try to attribute a common feature to their diversity.
#286

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.169

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > **BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.

the structure of substitution or actualized metaphor that constitutes what I call the miracle of the appearance of erastés at the very place where erômenos was
#287

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.143

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **FROM** *E P IS T É M E* **TO** *M Y T H O U S* > **EXIT FROM THE ULTRA-W ORLD**

Theoretical move: The passage argues that love's discourse is structurally conditioned by a founding "he did not know" (the position of the erastés before the erômenon), and that Alcibiades' entrance into the Symposium introduces the objet petit a (the agalma) as the object of unique covetousness that disrupts the harmonious ascent toward beauty and reveals love's fundamentally non-harmonious, scandalous dimension.

The metaphor by which we always recognize that love is operating, even when it is hidden in the shadows, the metaphor whereby ewn or erastés is restored to erômenon, is missing here due to the absence of erômenon at the outset.
#288

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.163

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > **BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Socrates' refusal to enter the erotic exchange with Alcibiades is structurally determined by his knowledge of love: because Socrates knows (the truth of love), he cannot love—he refuses to become the eromenos/beloved, thereby refusing the metaphor of love that would complete the transference dynamic.

the action of metaphor lies precisely herein. The eulogy of another person is substituted, not for the eulogy of Love, but for love itself
#289

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.61

**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *Phaedrus*

Theoretical move: By reading Plato's Symposium through the Alcestis/Achilles contrast, Lacan argues that the "signification of love" culminates in the reversal whereby the beloved (eromenon) acts as lover (erastes) — a structural inversion that anticipates his analytic distinction between activity and strength, and between lack and desire, particularly as these play out in the heterosexual couple.

The substitution or metaphor I was telling you about earlier is literally realized here. Alcestis authentically takes Admetus' place.
#290

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.65

**Jacques Lacan** > **THE M AINSPRING OF LOVE** > *PAUSANIAS*

Theoretical move: By reading the *Symposium*'s *erastës/erômenos* couple as a structure of metaphorical substitution—where the beloved becomes the lover—Lacan founds his account of transference on the asymmetrical, non-reciprocal logic of desire rather than on intersubjective recognition, showing that love is generated by a signifying substitution (erômenos → erastës) that mirrors the structure of metaphor itself.

directing you toward the formula, metaphor, or substitution of erastës for eromenos. This metaphor generates the signification of love.
#291

Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.416

**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter III - The Metaphor of Love: Phaedrus**

Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII Chapter III, providing philological, bibliographical, and contextual glosses on specific terms and references; it contains no substantive theoretical argument.

The French title of this chapter, La métaphore de I amour, could alternatively be translated as "Love as a Metaphor."
#292

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.91

*Seminar 9*: *Wednesday 24 January 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses Russell's paradox—the set of all sets that do not include themselves—as a structural homology for the analytic subject's self-exclusion, arguing that the letter's signifying function (not logical intuition) is what generates the paradox, and then pivots to show how the metonymical object of desire (objet petit a) undergoes metaphorical substitution for the faded subject in demand, yielding the master signifier of the "good object."

when this object comes to metaphorical birth, when we come to substitute it for the subject who, in the demand has a syncope, has fainted
#293

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.230

*Seminar 21*: *Wednesday 23 May 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that classical logic's universality (the Eulerian circle, *dictum de omni et nullo*) is grounded in nullifiability, and that what logic truly circles around is not extensional inclusion but the object of desire — the "whirlwind" or hole at the centre of the concept (*Begriff*). The cut (la coupure), as a closed and nullifiable line, is the structural origin of signification, and the death drive names the condition under which life perpetually twists around a void rather than simply opposing the inanimate.

I have to say that in this case I believe I began to push forward metaphor and metonymy in our theory sometime around the discourse of Rome which has been published - it was in speaking with Jakobson that he said to me: 'Of course, this business of metaphor and metonymy, we worked that out together'
#294

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.100

*Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962*

Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the structural distinction between love and desire: love is a natural, hydraulic force grounded in narcissistic libido, whereas desire is constituted by lack—specifically the lack of the phallus in the other—and can never coincide with love without collapsing into narcissism. This distinction grounds the clinic of hysteria and obsession and is anchored retrospectively in Plato's Symposium as the founding articulation of the subject of desire.

which I called the metaphor of true love, which is the famous equation: the eron substituting himself, the desirer substituting himself for the desired at this point
#295

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.136

*Seminar 13*: *Wednesday 14 March 1962*

Theoretical move: By mapping desire and demand onto two interlocking tori, Lacan demonstrates that the subject's inside and outside spaces are topologically identical, and that the object of desire emerges precisely from the Other's structural inability to respond to demand — the Other is "not without" power, and this negation grounds the absolute conditionality of desire.

this Other whom we have introduced qua metaphor in short of the unary trait... this 'like' situates well enough for you as being that of metaphor.
#296

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.193

*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962*

Theoretical move: Piera Aulagnier, invited by Lacan, argues that anxiety is not typed by content (oral, castration, death) but is structurally defined as the collapse of all identificatory reference points—the ego's dissolution before the un-symbolisable—and that its resolution or temporary suspension is bound to the coincidence of demand and desire in jouissance, with castration functioning as the transitional passage that converts the penis into the phallic signifier.

I do not here need to emphasize the mediating metaphoric role of the word, nor the gaps which exist between an affective experience and its translation into words.
#297

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.308

*Seminar 26: Wednesday 27 June 1962*

Theoretical move: At the close of Seminar 9, Lacan articulates the objet petit a as a topological-ontological operator: it is the object of castration that, by its enucleation from the cross-cap, transforms the imaginary sphere into a Möbius surface, thereby constituting the subject's world while marking the irreducible hole at the centre of desire and the Other's desire—a 'acosmic point' that underlies every metaphor, every symptom, and the anxiety of confronting what the Other desires of the subject.

Every metaphor, including that of the symptom tries to make this object emerge in its signification, but all the pullulation of meanings that it may engender never manages to staunch what is involved in this hole in terms of a central loss.
#298

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.53

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 6*: *Wednesday 20 December 1961* > Where is the subject in all of that?

Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that the proper name cannot be adequately defined by Russell's nominalist reduction to "word for particular" nor by Gardiner's psychological accent on sonant material, and that a rigorous definition requires grounding the proper name in the subject's relationship to the letter — thereby linking proper-name function to the unary trait and the unconscious structured by the letter.

When I spoke about 'The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious' a few years later, I gave by means of metaphors and metonymies a more precise accent to it.
#299

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.142

*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962*

Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the torus and the Graph of Desire's four nodal points to articulate the structural difference between message and question, grounding desire as precisely that part of demand hidden from the Other—and showing how the neurotic (especially the obsessional) constitutes himself as a real/impossible in face of the Other's impotence to respond.

the metaphor for us is condensation, which means two chains and that the metaphor makes its appearance in an unexpected fashion right in the middle of the message
#300

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.153

*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 15*: *Wednesday 28 March 1962*

Theoretical move: The passage traces how the subject constitutes itself through the unary trait and the non-response of the Other, rewriting Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" as a formula of the One's advent, and then uses Sade to demonstrate that the object of desire is structurally dependent on the Other's silence—culminating in the Sadian drive toward annihilating signifying power as the logical extreme of this dialectic.

we analysts have to deal with this relationship of the subject to the nothing, we slip regularly between two slopes... at once metaphorical and metonymical, of the first signifying game
#301

Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.30

*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 4*: *Wednesday 6 December 1961*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the formula "A is A" is not a logical truth but a historically contingent belief whose apparent self-evidence conceals the real condition of subject-formation: the subject emerges only from the non-self-identity of the signifier, demonstrated through the Fort-Da game and the distinction between sign and signifier, between indexical and nominal uses of language.

Metonymical effect, metaphorical effect, we do not yet know and perhaps there is something already articulatable before these effects
#302

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.33

I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freud's ethics cannot be reduced to utilitarianism or humanism because its core is the structuring function of the Name-of-the-Father as prohibition of jouissance, a mechanism legible in St. Paul's account of the law and sin, and whose truth Freud traces through the Oedipus complex, Totem and Taboo, and Moses and Monotheism to a Judeo-Christian ontological tradition that grounds the subject in discourse rather than in biology.

the gods are innumerable and changing like the figures of desire, that they are living metaphors. But this is not the case for the only God.
#303

The Triumph of Religion · Jacques Lacan · p.20

I. Regarding Ethics, Freud Has What it Takes

Theoretical move: Lacan argues that Freudian desire—properly understood as the "true intention" of an unconscious discourse structured like a signifying chain—poses genuinely new problems for moral philosophy, positioning psychoanalysis as a more adequate ethics than either Ego Psychology's adaptive finalism or traditional philosophy of good intentions.

any new signification is generated only by the substitution of one signifier for another, which is the dimension of metaphor by which reality becomes infused with poetry.
#304

Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > CHAPTER III. The Architectonic of Pure Reason.

Theoretical move: Kant argues that metaphysics requires a principled architectonic division grounded in the kind and origin of pure a priori cognition—not merely in degree of generality—and that this systematic unity constitutes philosophy's highest office: the critical regulation of speculative reason to prevent dialectical excess in morals and religion.

it can never be completely abandoned, that we must always return to it as to a beloved one who has been for a time estranged
#305

Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason. > CHAPTER III. The Architectonic of Pure Reason.

Theoretical move: Kant argues that reason demands systematic unity ('architectonic') as the condition of genuine science, distinguishing technical (empirical) from architectonical (a priori) unity, and within this framework differentiates historical from rational cognition, philosophy from mathematics, and the scholastic from the cosmical conception of philosophy—culminating in the claim that moral philosophy occupies the apex of the legislative system of pure reason.

The whole is thus an organism (articulatio), and not an aggregate (coacervatio); it may grow from within (per intussusceptionem), but it cannot increase by external additions (per appositionem). It is, thus, like an animal body.
#306

A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.184

Silence > The mouse

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Kafkan "strategy of art"—exemplified by Josephine's voice as a minimal, ready-made gap within the law—inevitably defeats itself: the very institutionalization of the exception reinserts it into the symbolic order, closing the gap it opened and confirming that art's transcendence is always domesticated back into a social function.

'Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor' (Deleuze and Guattari 1975, p. 40), and Kafka is perhaps the first utterly non-metaphorical author.
#307

Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for a Contemporary Use of Fatalism · Frank Ruda · p.161

Freud against the Illusion of Psychical Freedom > Anatomy Is Destiny I: The Fate of the Genitals

Theoretical move: Ruda argues that Freud's "Anatomy is destiny" is not biological determinism but a retroactive logic: it is culture and repression that transform the meaningless anatomical placement of the genitals into an inescapable fate, such that repression and the return of the repressed coincide, making cultural progress itself the source of irreducible conflict.

the utter meaninglessness of their location becomes somehow the metaphor of man's excremental nature (born between urine and feces) and the metonymy for human repression.
#308

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.130

5. *The Jouissance of the Signifi er* > *Epiphanies That Transmit the Real*

Theoretical move: Joyce's writing is theorized as a privileged site where the Real irrupts into the Symbolic not to destroy but to radicalize language: by remaining at the level of metonymic residue rather than metaphor, Joyce's epiphanies transmit scraps of the Real and enact an eroticization of language that brushes against the sinthome without collapsing into psychosis.

They sidestep metaphors in order to convey us directly to 'the hiding place of being'... it can only expose a 'split,' if it fails to give rise to a metaphor.
#309

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.126

Chapter 2 Between the Image and the Word > The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles

Theoretical move: Boothby articulates a general theory of metaphor and metonymy by mapping Lacan's structural distinction onto an original framework of "positionality" vs. "dispositional field," arguing that metaphor operates through positional substitution that releases latent dispositional meaning, while metonymy operates through lateral slippage across the dispositional field — and that this dynamic is more fundamental than the image/sign dichotomy itself.

Lacan's definition of the metaphor as 'the substitution of signifier for signifier . . . [by means of which] an effect of signification is produced that is creative or poetic'
#310

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.131

Chapter 2 Between the Image and the Word > The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles

Theoretical move: By mapping Jakobson's two aphasic types (similarity disorder / contiguity disorder) onto the metaphoric and metonymic poles — and correlating these with psychological field dependence/independence — the passage grounds Lacan's expansion of Freud's condensation/displacement distinction in a clinical linguistics of positional and dispositional functioning.

Where the capacity to produce metaphor is almost absent in the similarity disorder, metaphoric equivalences, or something approaching them, are constantly produced by the sufferer of contiguity disorder.
#311

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.227

Chapter 4 The Freudian Thing > Freud avec Jakobson

Theoretical move: By reading Freud's concept of das Ding through Jakobson's linguistics, the passage argues that the phoneme—as a signifier that signifies nothing—provides the structural condition for an open, indeterminate horizon of meaning, thereby grounding the relation between language and the Thing at the level of pure differential structure rather than binary semantic necessity.

the functions of combination and selection that Jakobson associates with the full realization of speech
#312

Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.262

Chapter 5 Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four

Theoretical move: By mapping the *objet a* across Schema L, Schema R, the Gestalt figure/ground distinction, and the Greimasian semiotic square, Boothby argues that the *objet a* is not a positional object but an "objectality" function that emerges from the structural tension between das Ding (maternal) and the paternal Law (symbolic order), a tension whose topology is best captured by Schema R rather than Schema L.

To designate the petit a by the term object is, as you see, a metaphorical usage, since it is borrowed precisely from this subject-object relationship from which the term object is constituted
#313

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.334

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > Towards a Quantum Platonism

Theoretical move: The passage argues for a "Quantum Platonism" in which the Idea (eidos) is not an abstract universal but the virtual field of variations that subtends reality—itself always a partial, collapsed version of an impossible whole—and that this structure, visible in Kieslowski's eidetic film variations, Freud's reconstructed fantasy, Benjamin's translation theory, and Picasso's cubist distortion, is homologous to the Lacanian futur antérieur of the Unconscious and to Hegel's Understanding as the power of separation.

The movement described here by Benjamin is a kind of transposition of metaphor into metonymy: instead of conceiving translation as a metaphoric substitute of the original…
#314

Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.377

**Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The Persistence of Abstraction > [The All-Too-Close In-Itself](#contents.xhtml_ahd25)

Theoretical move: Žižek defends the transcendental subject against object-oriented ontology by arguing that the subject is not an object but an irreducible standpoint, and redeploys the Lacanian Real as virtual-impossible rather than materially present, showing how direct neuronal manipulation produces a "more real than real" experience that dissolves the reality/simulacrum divide — while paralleling this logic to the Unconscious (which must not be substantialized) and to neurotheology's hard-rock encounter with the Real.

we use metaphors which cannot be paraphrased in literal speech without a loss... the withdrawn meaning does not exist in itself, preceding its metaphoric expression
#315

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek traces three periods of Lacan's teaching on the death drive to show how, in the third period, das Ding as the 'extimate' traumatic kernel within the symbolic order redefines the death drive as the possibility of 'second death' — the radical annihilation of the symbolic universe itself — and links this to Benjamin's Theses as the unique point where Marxist historiography touches this non-historical kernel.

the unconscious 'structured like a language', its 'primary process' of metonymic-metaphoric displacement, is governed by the pleasure principle
#316

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that ideology cannot be fully grasped through discourse analysis (interpellation/symbolic identification) alone; its ultimate support is a pre-ideological kernel of enjoyment structured in fantasy, and therefore ideology critique must be supplemented by a logic of enjoyment that 'traverses' social fantasy and identifies with the symptom — demonstrated through the case of anti-Semitism, where 'the Jew' functions as a fetish embodying the structural impossibility of 'Society'.

this logic of metaphoric-metonymic displacement is not sufficient to explain how the figure of the Jew captures our desire
#317

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: The passage argues that ideology functions through a surplus-enjoyment generated by renunciation itself (structurally homologous to Marxian surplus-value), and that this enjoyment must remain concealed to operate—since ideological form is its own end; further, it theorizes how ideological fields achieve unity through the 'quilting' function of the point de capiton (nodal point), which arrests the sliding of floating signifiers and retroactively fixes their identity.

their 'literal' signification depends on their metaphorical surplus-signification
#318

The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek

INTRODUCTION

Theoretical move: Žižek argues that Lacan's insistence on the primacy of metaphor over metonymy and on the phallic signifier as the signifier of castration radically distinguishes him from post-structuralism: where Derrida sees the localization of lack as taming dissemination, for Lacan the phallic signifier sustains the radical gap by embodying its own impossibility, thereby preventing (rather than securing) a metalanguage position.

the Lacanian insistence on the primacy of metaphor over metonymy, his thesis that metonymical sliding must always be supported by a metaphorical cut
#319

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.76

**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Introduction of a Third Term*

Theoretical move: The passage argues that the paternal metaphor/function, by introducing a third term (Name-of-the-Father) that disrupts the mother-child dyad, is structurally equivalent to the operation of Separation, and that the failure of this function is what produces psychosis; language itself is thereby theorized as the protective mechanism that transforms dangerous dyadic jouissance into structured desire.

the name that serves the paternal function bars and transforms the real, undifferentiated, mother-child unity... the substitution of a name for the mother's desire.
#320

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.17

**THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

Theoretical move: This passage is a preface/road map for the book, outlining its scope, methodology, and interpretive stance—it is non-substantive theoretical content, serving primarily as an editorial and navigational frame rather than advancing a theoretical argument.

the subject as metaphor
#321

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.77

**The Lacanian Subject** > Signifier Mother's Desire

Theoretical move: The paternal metaphor's substitution of S2 for the mOther's desire retroactively produces S1, constitutes the desiring subject through separation, and simultaneously precipitates all four algebraic elements (S1, S2, $, and objet petit a) as a single logical event in Lacan's metapsychology.

The substitution implied by the paternal metaphor is only made possible by language, and thus it is only insofar as a 'second' signifier, S2, is instated... that the mother's desire is retroactively symbolized or transformed into a 'first' signifier (S1)
#322

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.89

**The Lacanian Subject** > **Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity**

Theoretical move: Fink argues that the three constitutive moments of subjectivity (alienation, separation, traversal of fantasy) are structurally identical to three substitutional metaphors, and that the subject itself has two faces—as precipitate (sedimented signification) and as breach/precipitation (the creative spark between signifiers)—such that metaphorization and subjectification are strictly co-extensive, with analysis requiring the forging of new metaphors to reconfigure the symptom.

the canceling out of one thing by another in Lacan's substitutional metaphors is at the root of Lacanian metapsychology. The subject here can be understood as resulting from a metaphor (or series of metaphors).
#323

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.92

**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Signified*

Theoretical move: Fink redefines Lacanian castration as the subject's alienation-in and separation-from the Other (not biological threat), and articulates how the barred subject is constituted as a sedimentation of meanings via the retroactive relation between S2 and the master signifier S1 (equated with the Name-of-the-Father), with the traversal of fantasy marking the path beyond neurosis.

That subject can be characterized by the first two metaphors presented at the beginning of this chapter, but not by the third.
#324

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.98

**The Lacanian Subject** > *The Subject as Breach*

Theoretical move: The subject is theorized not as a sedimentation of meanings but as the act of forging links between signifiers (Bahnung/frayage); the analytic aim is to "dialectize" isolated master signifiers, which simultaneously precipitates subjectivity, produces metaphorization, and initiates separation—a process Lacan presents as surpassing Freud's "rock of castration."

the dialectization of master signifiers, the precipitation of subjectivity, the creation of a new metaphor, and the subjectification or 'assumption' of the cause... they are all one and the same
#325

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.24

Language and Otherness > A Slip of the Other's Tongue

Theoretical move: The passage argues that alienation in language is constitutive of the subject: the Other (as the pre-given totality of language) is not merely an external resource but an intrusive force that molds need into desire, installs an unconscious Other-discourse alongside ego-discourse, and thereby fundamentally alienates every speaking being from themselves.

Lacan pointed out the relationship between Freud's concepts of displacement and condensation typical of dream work and the linguistic notions of metonymy and metaphor.
#326

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.34

The Nature of Unconscious Thought, or How the Other Half "Thinks"

Theoretical move: The passage argues that language operates autonomously as an Other that subjects are "used by" rather than merely using, and that unconscious thought processes — structured by condensation/metaphor and displacement/metonymy — constitute a parallel chain of discourse whose autonomous functioning Lacan sought to model through artificial/formal languages and combinatories.

demonstrate the relation between condensation and metaphor on the one hand… metaphor and metonymy being linguistic tropes that have been discussed at great length in works on rhetoric for centuries
#327

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.235

**Index**

Theoretical move: This is an index passage (pages 235-236) from Bruce Fink's "The Lacanian Subject," listing key concepts and page references. It is non-substantive as a theoretical argument but serves as a navigational guide to the book's conceptual architecture.

Metaphor, 5, 15. 58, 69-71, 148, 182n.8
#328

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.90

**The Lacanian Subject** > **The Signified**

Theoretical move: Lacan's theory of metaphor is leveraged to distinguish between ordinary "understanding" (assimilation of signifiers into a pre-existing chain, which is imaginary) and a "true" transformative process at the border of the symbolic and the real, where new meaning is created and the subject is implicated — making "insight" irrelevant to the analytic process.

Metaphor, on the other hand, brings about a new configuration of thoughts, establishing a new combination or permutation, a new order in the signifying chain, a shakedown of the old order. Connections between signifiers are definitively changed.
#329

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink

**THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise

Theoretical move: This passage is a table of contents for "The Lacanian Subject" by Bruce Fink; it is non-substantive and contains no theoretical argument, only chapter and section headings.

Metaphor and the Precipitation of Subjectivity
#330

The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.171

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

This is why the meaning of a metaphor cannot be reduced to its 'true' referent: it is not enough to point out the reality to which a metaphor refers; once the metaphorical substitution is accomplished, this reality itself is forever haunted by the spectral real of the metaphorical content.
#331

Theory Keywords · Various · p.49

**Name of the Father**

Theoretical move: The passage performs two related theoretical moves: first, it defines the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier/metaphor that installs the symbolic order of desire and lack via the Oedipus complex; second, it grounds narcissism in Freud's drive theory, showing how drive vicissitudes (scopophilia, sadism/masochism) are structurally dependent on the narcissistic organization of the ego.

The father is a signifier or a metaphor rather than an actual person.
#332

Theory Keywords · Various · p.89

**Transference** > **Unconscious**

Theoretical move: The passage advances a multi-pronged account of the Lacanian unconscious: it is structured like a language (via the metaphor/metonymy–condensation/displacement homology), it is spatial and relational (between subject and Other), it operates independently of meaning/signification, and its logic can be extended to critique ideological systems like capitalism where surface avowals conceal the real engine (loss/sacrifice) driving the system.

Metaphor is a substitution of one word for another and thus corresponded to the paradigmatic axis, or the axis of selection.
#333

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

Žižek Responds! > [Rethinking Lacan’s Unthinkable “Thing”](#contents.xhtml_ch14)<a href="#14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_en14-1" id="14_harpos_grin_rethinking_lacans_unthinkable_thing.xhtml_nr14-1">1</a>

Theoretical move: The passage argues that *objet a* and *das Ding* form a two-fold ontic-ontological dynamic: the *objet a* functions as the obstinate objective clue (the ontic "odd feature") that opens onto the abyssal void of *das Ding* (the ontological Real), thereby reversing Žižek's own formulation; and that *das Ding*, linked to the mother's inscrutable desire and mediated by the Name of the Father / signifier, is ultimately "extimate" — the Thing in the Other mirrors an unthinkable excess within the subject itself.

Lacan's thesis of das Ding thus intersects with what is arguably his most important addition to psychoanalytic theory, his concept of 'the paternal metaphor.'
#334

Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.) · p.309

Žižek Responds! > [Response to Rousselle](#contents.xhtml_ch13a)

Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Rousselle's (and Miller's) thesis of "generalized foreclosure" characterizing the current political era, contending that the symbolic order remains operative—as evidenced by political censorship that still works through metaphoric substitution (absence standing in for prohibited content)—and that the Iraq WMD and Ukraine "bio-labs" narratives function as Hitchcockian MacGuffins rather than psychotic foreclosures.

the autonomy of the symbolic order (which opens up the space for metaphoric substitutions in which a universal can stand for a particular) is still operative.
#335

Universality and Identity Politics · Todd McGowan · p.22

<a href="#contents.xhtml_toc2_2" id="introduction.xhtml_toc2-2">INTRODUCTION</a> > **PARTICULAR ENTITIES**

Theoretical move: McGowan argues that the twentieth-century turn from universality to particular identity is both a political catastrophe and a philosophical opportunity: by redefining the universal not as a shared possession but as a shared absence, he reclaims universality as the only genuine basis for emancipation and exposes identity politics as an ideological product of capitalism's evacuation of particular content.

Metaphysics—the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West; the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.