This nimbly written book contains rigorous and detailed information on the question it illuminates: metaphor and metonymy. It is a question that has been endlessly embroiled, first of all by Lacan—who tried in vain to make a formalist point of view prevail, with scant regard for any relation to semantics—and then by a number of his disciples, who were very uncomfortable in this yoke. The critiques formulated by Alain Costes are relevant and supported by evidence and documentation. The model he proposes is sound and enables us to find our bearings clearly. So, rather than reprise or paraphrase what he develops, in what follows I offer a short text that has been in my files for some time. It does not address the linguistic problem but something altogether different: what Freud calls condensation and displacement.
These chains connect (word- and thing-) representations. A, B, C, D, etc. They thus consist of the links, which is to say the connections, between two consecutive elements: A-B.
The connection of A to B is made according to the major types of association that have been emphasised since at least the 18th century: analogy, contiguity, contrast.
analogy: if A is wine
B is the sun
(Like wine, the sun warms the body and the heart. As the song goes: ‘wine, it is sunshine in a bottle’). Heat constitutes what is called: tertium comparationis; it is the common element which links the two representations.
contiguity: contiguity may comprise quite diverse modalities: container-contained / part-whole / cause-effect / etc.
if A is wine
B is the glass (container)
As to association by contrast, its autonomy is debated, and it is often reduced to the first two or to analogy alone.
All of this is thoroughly classical and constantly taken for granted by Freud.
Freud does not employ the words ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’. He frequently speaks of Gleichniss to mean comparison, fable, allegory. He also employs the words Kontiguität and Kontinutät.
Metaphor and metonymy are tropes of classical rhetoric—which is to say, figures of speech, ‘ways of saying’ that involve the replacement of A by B. It is therefore only by a certain impropriety that these words are sometimes used to refer to the type of connection according to which the substitution is made.
These words appear very early in Freud's work (see Laplanche 1967), but they are most emphatically foregrounded in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)(as characterizing the primary process.
Displacement and condensation are two processes that are supported by the associative chains defined above, and this is so whatever the type of association linking the elements to each other.
In an associative link A-B, the representation B receives the entire investment which was originally assigned to A. Thus B is finally substituted for A.
If the link A-B is one of analogy, the displacement would be analogical (metaphorical according to post-Freudian terminology).
wine → sun
The sun, in my discourse or in my dream, replaces the wine.
If the link A-B is one of contiguity, the displacement would be ‘by contiguity’ (metonymic according to the post-Freudian terminology).
wine → glass
The glass, in my discourse or in my dream, replaces the wine.
Metonymy and metaphor are thus two types of substitution whose only difference consists in the modality of the connection A-B (contiguity or analogy).
It frequently happens that associative chains intersect at a common element; thus, if D is the same representation as M, the chains A-B-C-D and J-K-L-M will cross at the element D = M.
It is a matter of condensation because the element (D = M) condenses in itself the entire investment of the two chains. (D = M), comes to represent simultaneously J and A. The energies that have been displaced along the two associative chains will be added together at the junction of the representations.
N.B. a) Each of the connections of each of the chains can be either ‘metaphorical’ or ‘metonymic’. Condensation is no more closely related to metonymy than to metaphor; it comprises both metonymies and metaphors.
Example of condensation (see over the page):
The dream image (wine) condenses the latent representations: (face) and (passage).
b) A double connection—of contiguity and resemblance simultaneously—may exist between two terms.
Suppose, for instance, that Robert is a carpenter. He becomes known, by contiguity, as The Plank. But it may also be the case that Robert is very thin. He becomes known as Plank by analogy.
There is no reason why Robert might not be both a carpenter and very thin. The determination of his nickname would thus be double.
This entire development is strictly Freudian. The only new contributions are the words metaphor and metonymy. But if they seem to create a problem, one can omit them and only speak of analogy and contiguity, following the associationist tradition.
Preface to Alain Costes, Lacan: Le fourvoiement linguistique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, ).