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In the US, at the time of Lacan’s famous seminar, the accent was more on fantasies making up the contents of the unconscious. This fostered a different style of clinical listening: listening for indications of a fantasy disguised in the free associations. The French approach taught (in a Freudian way) that the analyst’s attention should be on the words themselves and on the unspoken between them. On the other hand, the notion of defenses (other than repression) that are necessary for keeping signifiers in the unconscious and, of course, the analysis of defense, other than the innovative Lacanian development of the notion of “foreclosure”, is less prominent in French thinking. Lacan has been criticized for turning psychoanalysis into structural linguistics. However, Lacanian interest is not language per se . On the contrary, the interesting thing is the limits, where language fails. The unconscious can, according to Lacan, not be identified. It reveals itself in the traces it leaves especially when it is absent. He has qualified his linguistic approach by arguing that it is only when the unconscious passes into words that we are able to grasp it, and further, that the unconscious works in accordance with the linguistic figures of metonymy and metaphor. Finally, Lacan insists on the unconscious as discourse, that is, the discourse of the Other . The unconscious is the effect of the signifier on the subject. The signifier is what is repressed and what returns in the form of symptoms, jokes, parapraxes and dreams. Lacan’s concept of the unconscious took, however, an important step when he reworked the three orders of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real in “Seminar XX” where he knotted them together in the so called Borromean rings (Lacan, 1999). The assumption of intra-psychic conflict – at least for Lacan – was replaced by the idea of articulation among the three orders. An important consequence was a split in the concept of the unconscious, one part being to a certain degree decipherable or accessible to conventional language, another part termed “lalangue”, Lacan´s term for the kind of language which precedes the language of the Symbolic order. Thus, we have two kinds of knowledge; the knowledge of le langage and the knowledge of lalangue . The unconscious-lalangue is fundamentally situated outside the Symbolic but affects us to a degree that exceeds our enunciated knowledge. Evans defines lalangue as “the primary chaotic substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed” (1996, p 97). A group of analysts influenced by Lacan has tried to extend the concept of signifier to encompass signifiers beyond language. Based on her work with psychotics, Piera Aulagnier (2001) has pointed to the inadequacies of the concept of the signifier. She has introduced the concept of pictogram to refer to a level of unconscious non-verbal “representation” of the infant’s bodily encounter with its caretaker (erogenous zones and their part objects) in total ignorance of the duality of which it is composed. Guy Rosolato (1969) has introduced the concept of demarcation signifiers with the same aim of pointing to signifiers outside language and Didier Anzieu (1995) has coined the term formal signifiers supporting his theory of the skin-ego. Even Jean Laplanche – one of those who had systematically opposed the idea of the unconscious being structured like a language – introduced the terms enigmatic signifiers and designified signifiers . Where analysts have adopted Lacan’s concept of signifier, they have transgressed its exclusively linguistic meaning and in this way they remained closer to Freud´s concept of the
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