Langage Et Psychanalyse, Linguistique Et Inconscient; Freud, Saussure, Pichon, Lacan [Language And Psychoanalysis, Linguistics And The Unconscious; Freud, Saussure, Pichon and Lacan]. : By Michel Arrivé. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. 1994. Pp. 276.

This book is now surely required reading for anyone wishing to clarify his ideas on the equivocal but essential relationships between psychoanalysis and linguistics.

The very title of the book draws the wouldbe reader's attention to its ambiguity: from the moment when ‘play’ begins—for the whole project in fact seems to betray a game-related intention—it suggests a kind of square dance between the questions constantly raised about language and the unconscious by the established disciplines of psychoanalysis and linguistics. In the centre of the field is Lacan, whom the author places at the intersection of two epistemological lines. One of these is signposted by the fundamental concepts of the theoretical apparatuses developed in their respective spheres by Saussure and by Freud, between whom Lacan, according to the author, intercedes. The second of these lines, again with Lacan playing a vital role, links Freud and Pichon by a connection generated and necessitated both by the former's predilection for matters linguistic and by the latter's psychoanalytic vocation—after all, Edgard Pichon was President of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society in 1938, whereas his main work, written together with his uncle Jacques Damourette, is the monumental Essai de grammaire de la langue française.

Each ‘line’ is thus given its due in Michel Arrivé's book. The part devoted to the first offers a masterly recapitulation of the foundations of Saussure's thought, with its obscurities, ambiguities and contradictions, at least to the extent that their consideration casts light on the various points that were subsequently to be ‘imported’ by Lacan. The author then proceeds to give a brilliant demonstration of how the Lacanian signifier was born, after casting aside its ‘sign’, from the thought of Saussure.

The second part begins with a consideration of two aspects of the linguistic thought of Pichon and Damourette explicitly taken up by Lacan, namely their theory of grammatical person and thei