Ill Said Ill Heard: Psychoanalytic and other Discourses on the Language of Madness in the Early Years of this Century

“The unconscious is structured like a language.” In the tradition of Pascal and La Rochefoucauld, Lacan favored the smooth lapidary surface of the maxim, conveying as it does a truth that is both self-contained and unassailable. Nonetheless, unless one is simply to use this phrase as a mantra, magically opening access to some kind of magisterial position, one must presumably come to grips with what the analogy implies about the unconscious, not just as semantic system but also as formal structure.

As a term of comparison, language is unmalleable. Ferdinand de Saussure himself points this out in the opening pages of Cours de Linguistique Générale (1972). “Taken as a whole, language is many sided and heterogeneous; straddling several fields—physical, physiological and psychological—it belongs both to the individual and to society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts for we cannot discover its unity” (25). This unmalleability is however not necessarily a bad thing. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud repeatedly emphasized the unknownness, even the unknowability of the unconscious, and throughout his life he resisted efforts to fit this discovery into the comfortable contours of any existing episteme, whether that of religion, philosophy or psychiatry. It is perhaps idle to wonder what he would have made of Lacan ‘s bold assimilation of linguistics and psychoanalysis. The declaration that these two disciplines not only have the closest possible relationship with each other, but can even be said to overlap, and indeed that “the unconscious is the condition of linguistics,” creates a dizzying, parabolic sweep above the almost reluctant trajectory of Freud's own thought from the field of neurology to the field of language. As Starobinski and