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This book gives the reader the opportunity to reflect on the vast subject of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature and offers a comprehensive survey of works already dealing with the topic; it prompts the reader to consider possible links between creative, poetic and psychoanalytic thought; finally it offers an investigation of certain archaic, or as the author would say, “paleological” functions
of the psyche, which can be found both in poetry and in the psychotic mind.
Among the various authors who have dealt with the links between the psyche and words, Cacciavillani clearly prefers J. Lacan, F. Fornari and A. Green, with the emphasis on those concepts which have contributed to linguistic research or to the philosophy of language.
Lacan's signifier. Lacan (Ecrits, 1966) reverses F. de Sausurre's algorithm signified/signifier (s/S), according to which thought content is expressed in linguistic form, and instead proposes the couple signifier/signified (S/s) as the foundation of the linguistic structure of the unconscious.
The unconscious is on the surface of language, even in its signifying form, and not below it. The products of the unconscious are comparable to linguistic rhetoric.
When the unconscious speaks it is potentially poetic, since the process of signification suggests infinite references to other signifiers.
No signified can be turned into other signifiers; it can only be transformed into another chain of discourse. Thus no text can be translated into another — it can only be transformed. The meaning of an argument derives from the signifying order as a whole, from the chain of a signifier which combines with or replaces another. Meaning is thus created through the interaction of signifiers, it does not come before such interaction, nor does it use it to convey a message that has already been constructed. It is the process of combinations and substitutions that produces an effect of signification.
The practice of language in itself produces