Lacan's Linguistic Unconscious and the Language of Desire

And the enigmas that desire seems to pose of a “natural philosophy” — its frenzy mocking the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with jouissance, these amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails-eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else—of metonymy. — Lacan (1966, pp. 166-167)

Lacan and his followers have developed a theory of desire which revitalizes drive theory as well as elaborating the linguistic construction of the unconscious. In their article on the unconscious, Laplanche and Leclaire (1966) create a forum for a discussion of desire in the context of a dream analysis. The analysis of the dream provides a clinical illustration of Lacanian technique. It also permits an exploration of two theoretical issues of importance. The first is what Leclaire terms the “topographical question of unconscious inscriptions” (p. 136). This is the concept of the vorstellungsreprasentanz, translated “ideational representatives,” which form the meeting ground of drive energy and mental representation in Freudian drive theory. The second issue he labels “the economic problem of the energy proper to the unconscious system” (p. 136). This turns out to be the controversial death drive which Leclaire relates to the castration complex, the sexual drives, and language.

The dream in question is the “unicorn dream” of Philippe, a “thirty-year-old obsessional neurotic” in analysis with Leclaire. The manifest text of the dream as he reported it is as follows: