Benveniste, Lacan and structuralism: about the opposite meanings of primitive words

Abstract

This article intends to make clear some given aspects of Benveniste’s structuralist interpretation about Freudian linguistic reasoning, mainly in his text ‘Opposite meanings of primitive words’. Benveniste’s text ‘Observations about the language function in Freudian discovery’ is placed in dialogue with linguistic hypotheses developed by Freud in his aforementioned text. Thus, a link between linguistic and psychoanalytic fields is pursued, searching Freud’s notion of primitive language and comparing it with Structural Linguistic assumptions supported by Benveniste. The approach is strictly theoretical, in order to enlighten the divergences between language reasoning in Freud and Benveniste. In order to achieve this aim, Freud’s examination about the negation was searched, and it was put in touch with Benveniste’s examinations about linguist Carl Abel, a strong linguistic influence on Freud’s work, mainly in his text ‘Opposite meanings of primitive words’. As a conclusion, it becomes possible to assert that, as being a system and a structure, language has an universal and non-historical quality, which refutes the Freudian thesis concerning the existence of primitive languages.