Jacques Lacan: Structural Psychoanalysis
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Unconscious Is Structured Like a Language
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) transferred the structuralist method to psychoanalysis – transforming both Freud and Saussure in the process.[1] We have already treated Lacan in Chapter 6.4 as a psychoanalytic transformer of recognition – his reception of Hegel via Kojève, the reshaping of the master-slave dialectic into the mirror-stage theory. Here we address a different aspect: his specifically structuralist contribution to the theory of language.
Lacan’s most famous thesis states: “The unconscious is structured like a language.”[2] This is not a metaphor – it is meant literally. The mechanisms Freud discovered in the unconscious – displacement and condensation – are the same ones Jakobson found in language: metonymy and metaphor.
Displacement: one dream element stands for another with which it is associated (not by similarity, but by contiguity). This is metonymy – “crown” for “king,” the part for the whole.
Condensation: several dream-thoughts merge into a single image. This is metaphor – similarity, substitution, transfer.
The Signifier Dominates the Signified
Lacan radicalized Saussure in one decisive respect: in Saussure, the signifier and the signified are two sides of the same sign – like the front and back of a sheet of paper. In Lacan, the signifier dominates the signified. The unconscious is a chain of signifiers that slide, shift, and form new connections – and the signified (meaning) always comes after the fact, is always precarious, always incomplete.[3]
This has consequences for therapy: the analyst does not listen to the “meaning” of what the patient says – he listens to the signifiers: slips of the tongue, repetitions, omissions, assonances. The unconscious does not speak in meanings, but in sounds, rhythms, letters.
The Big Other
Lacan’s concept of the “big Other” (grand Autre) is central to his understanding of language. The big Other is not a particular person (father, mother, analyst), but the symbolic order itself – the language, the law, the culture into which we are born and which constitutes us as subjects.[4]
We do not simply speak language – we are spoken by language. The big Other is “the place from which truth speaks.” But – and this is Lacan’s anti-Hegelian point – this place is itself incomplete. “Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre” – there is no Other of the Other, no meta-guarantee, no God who vouches for truth. The symbolic order has a hole – and this hole is constitutive.[5]
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On Lacan’s structuralism, see Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (Paris, 1993). ↩︎
Jacques Lacan, “L’instance de la lettre dans l’inconscient,” Écrits (Paris, 1966), pp. 493-528. ↩︎
Lacan’s formula S/s (signifier over signified, separated by a bar) in: Écrits, p. 497. ↩︎
Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris, 1973), chs. 18-19. ↩︎
“Il n’y a pas d’Autre de l’Autre” – Lacan’s formula against the theological guarantee of truth. ↩︎