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Noting that the unconscious is a symbol-forming organ, Lacan points out that meaning is created at every level of the mind. A signifier is a symbol, standing as it does for something else. Lacan assumes that chains of signifiers connect through associations rather than the laws of syntax. And he tells us that there is no meaning except that which we structure within the chain of signifiers (Van Buren, 1993).
The Lacanian attention to words as signifiers and their place in the association process that leads to the formation of meaning, reminds us of the value of free association in the analytic method. Makari and Shapiro (1993) take note of what they call the linguistic turn in psychoanalysis. They write:
In so privileging language, Lacan concluded that the analyst must attend to the details and nuances of words themselves. Lacan [called] this process the play of signifiers, for it was in this assortment of signifiers … that one found unconsciously encoded messages. Lacan understood repression to be the block between a signifier and what it truly signified. (1993, p. 997)
The build-up of internal object relations, of self and object representations in affectively charged and dynamic relation to one another, is mediated by the meanings the child comes to attribute to its experiences of self in the world. We are meaning-making animals and, willy nilly, the child will create meaning from the earliest times of mental organization.
If we think of the self and object representations as signifiers, we do not stop at the level of the developmental and structural diagnosis, but seek to discover with the patient the historically