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“The Freudian unconscious,” writes Jacques Lacan, “is the discourse of the Other.” This formula has seemed to many a curious way of expressing the nucleus of the return to Freud which Lacan has succeeded in producing in France, through 15 years of a searching commentary on Freud.
It would have in fact remained a mere curiosity, were it not that, with recent advances in the study of linguistics and language, the relation of the subject and the Other is indeed seen as a symbolic relationship, in the sense that language is symbolic where conventional codes like mathematics are not. Moreover, to complete the formula by Lacan's “The unconscious is structured like a language” expresses in lapidary form the central concept which guided Freud throughout his discoveries.
The first seven pages of the Psychopathology of Everyday Life give us one of the most significant analyses Freud ever made, one with implications for the theory of the unconscious and repression, for the interpretation of dreams and for a comprehension of the psychoanalytic symptom. Moreover, once this analysis is reintegrated into the discourse of Freud himself, what it reveals has far-reaching consequences for les sciences de l'homme, including linguistics, literature, and philosophy.
I am referring to the forgetting of the proper name “Signorelli,” or rather to the repression of the signifier “Signorelli,” which was the first parapraxis fully commented on by under the title of the “Psychical Mechanism of Forgetting” (Standard Edition, III, 289-297).
What is important about this incident is not merely the fact that psychoanalysis has always been the “talking cure” (as one of Breuer and Freud's early patients called it), nor simply that the Signorelli incident puts in question the whole problem of the dialectical relation of the various subjects in the