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The following essay has three chief purposes. The first is to explicate Lacan's widely misunderstood views on the analysis of the “signifier” in the analytic cure. The second is to further develop the notion of clinically oriented linguistic analysis, beyond Lacan's indications, in a precise, systematic, and practical manner, through the reinterpretation of a well-known case history. The third is to achieve in this reinterpretation a new and, hopefully, fuller understanding of Freud's most widely discussed patient.
As is well known, Jacques Lacan adjured analysts to attend most particularly to the “signifier” in their interpretations, undertaking to isolate, in the conscious speech of the analysand, puns, idiomatic ellipses, antonymies, homophonies, and other figures of speech, in order to gain a degree of access to that analysand's unconscious discourse. For Lacan, the sole medium of analysis is the speech of the analysand (almost a necessary truth, given the concrete details of the analytic situation). The analytic problem is then: How is it that the unconscious desires and beliefs of the analysand manifest themselves in his/her speech, when this speech is by definition conscious and thus expressive of precisely the beliefs and aims that exclude the unconscious? Lacan's answer is that this speech directly expresses unconscious beliefs and desires through its “constitutive ambiguity” (“Au-delà du ‘Principe de réalité,’” Lacan, 1966, p. 83). In other words, as Lacan puts it in Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse, “The subject does not know what he[/she] is saying” (Lacan, 1978, p. 286; unless otherwise noted, all translations here and below are my own).
Specifically, the phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and even orthographic ambiguities of the analysand's speech escape his/her conscious awareness, even self-scrutiny, and thus allow the expression of his/her unconscious. As Lacan argues in Les Écrits Techniques de Fre