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This book is intended both as an historical research on Freud's linguistic background and as an attempt to reformulate the foundations of psychoanalysis in terms of historico-conceptual arguments, that is: where once we saw biology, we now see philology, where once we saw symbol decoding, we now see phonetic switching, where we once saw the discharge of fixated energy, we now see the rule like transformations of personal script.
The author states that although what may initially strike the reader is the absence of Lacan's name, he would like his work to be considered as prolegomena to a more direct approach to Lacan and his school.
Forrester has divided the book into five chapters.
The first is dedicated to an analysis of Freud's early work on aphasia and hysteria. Beginning with Anna O's famous definition of psychoanalysis as a ‘talking cure’, Forrester finds his basic model of psychoanalysis in Freud's book on aphasia, which he considers to be the sine qua non of the birth of psychoanalysis, as we can now distinguish it from other contemporary theories of neurosis: a theory of the power of words in the formation of symptoms.
According to Forrester, the theoretical core of the book on aphasia is Freud's discovery of a sort of structure of language, a ‘speech apparatus’, a ‘free space of language’, which organizes all perceptions and all representations as if they were a language. The associationism of this model transcends atomism and it could be defined as a type of formalism or structuralism. If that were indeed the case, Freud would have eliminated any notion of the synthetic unity of the subject, or in neo-Kantian terms, of a transcendental subjectivity, organizing this model, or the ‘speech apparatus’ itself. Even at the level of the psychology of language, the existence of such a system or linguistic code would exclude the possibility of an organizing centre.
The model Forrester extrapolates from Freud's book on aphasia is then used to show that for Freud, hysteri