paper introduces Lacan to the psychotherapist without using his jargon. He is shown as deeply influenced by the Russian Marxist Alexander Kojeve whose charismatic seminars on Hegel Lacan attended. This helps account for his ‘global’ perspective in which we are all determined by deep social structures or that ‘language speaks us’. Lacan also noticed Freud's writings are shot through with almost hidden uses of Figures of Speech, and this becomes the central plank in his theory that our unconscious processes coincide with the rhetorical workings of language.