attempt a systematic confrontation with Lacan’s early text “Les complexes famili-
aux” (193 8) which, ingeniously combining Hegelian dialectics with evidence
drawn from ethological and psychological experiments, offers both a plausible
psychological explanation of the child’s chronological “stages” of psychosexual
development and an initial, albeit fragmentary, thematization of the unconscious
as an essentially symbolic structure.
Part II contains a systematic analysis of the subject of the Symbolic. In one and
the same gesture, Lacan relates subjectivity to language understood as a structure,
the symbolic order as the legal fabric of human culture, and the Freudian uncon-
scious. The first chapter is concerned above all with the exploration of the famous
Lacanian motto according to which “The unconscious is structured like a lan-
guage.” Here, I endeavor to illustrate the precise reason why, despite being articu-
lated likelanguage, the unconscious is notthe same as ordinary conscious discourse.
After this confrontation, the second chapter investigates in detail the way in which
Lacan explains the individual subject’s active entry into the Symbolic as the funda-
mental Law of society and how, before such an entry, the child is completely sub-
jected to the Other. This will also be the place to assess Lacan’s thorough linguistic
rethinking of the Oedipus complex, engaging in a close reading of Seminars IV and
V; despite all successive theoretical innovations—most noticeably the preemi-
nence given to the Real—Lacan’s exhaustive discussion of the three forms of lack
(frustration, privation, castration) as necessary preconditions for correctly under-
standing the subject-object relationship accomplished by these seminars repre-
sents one of the most important milestones of his theory.^15
Although it is certainly the case that a—more or less convincing—description
of the influence of structural linguistics on Lacanian psychoanalysis and of in-
tricate notions such as the “quilting point,” the “Name-of-the-Father,” and the
“phallus” is already available in countless introductory books, the originality of
Part II of this book lies in its attempt to elucidate further the way in which these
concepts systematically coalesce around a number of problematic questions. What
is the difference between conscious-diachronic and unconscious-synchronic me-
tonymy? Why is metaphor also said to represent a vertical quilting point? Is there
a way to pinpoint appropriately the distinction between the Name-of-the-Father
and the phallus?
Part III is the most extensive part of the book, and deals with the subject of the
Real; more specifically, it attempts to demonstrate the way in which, after realiz-
ing that the symbolic Other is structurally incomplete, Lacan gradually—and not
without hesitations—reorganizes his theory of the subject of the unconscious on
the basis of the notion of the fundamental fantasy as inextricable from the objectintroduction