The unconscious as language: from Freud to Lacan

Abstract

This article shows that Freud, even without the resources of linguistic, already conceived the unconscious in terms of language, and that Lacan, by using theoretical tools taken from Saussure and Jakobson, furthered the Freudian conception. Thus, we can say that the formations of the unconscious (the dream, the joke, the slip) and the neurotic symptoms are articulations involving signifiers: the work analyses particularly how mechanisms of oniric elaboration follow the modus operandi of stylistic figures. Laying on the basis of the unconscious as well as of the social order, the language provides the continuity thread between them.