In their methodological development the French structuralists lay claim to Freud as their sponsor. Such a postulate is a paradox, in that the structuralist "super-rationalism" seeks particularly to understand that domain which Freud, using the terms "unconscious" and "id," had characterized as instinctive and irrational. According to Jacques Lacan, this concept is comprised in the following well-known dictum: "The unconscious is structured like a language." In interpreting the works of Freud, Lang seeks to find concepts which could legitimate this pronouncement and which could also offer more possibilities for convergence—for example in the idea of the "devaluation of the conscious Ego."