dialectic of a desire conveyed by the function of full speech. To cut a long story
short, full speech is able to offer the subject a different, non-narcissistic satisfaction
of his desire. Beyond the emptiness of speech that accompanies ego-logical imag-
inary objectifications, the subject is constantly speaking with his unconscious,
even if he is unaware of it. One should then ask the following naïve question: what
does the unconscious subject say, and what does he want? He (unconsciously) ad-
dresses the Other (subject) so that the truth about his speech—the specificity of
his unconscious, repressed desire—may be recognized by the Other. This is what
full speech fundamentally is: more precisely, it corresponds to the subject’s full
assumption of a speech which he normally utters without being aware of it. Con-
sequently, full speech is inextricable from symbolic intersubjectivity,^21 which is in-
deed in turn—as I have already outlined in Chapter 1 —inseparable from mutual
recognition of one’s desire and the related dimension of pact as the instauration of
the Law. To quote Lacan: (a) “[Full] speech is the founding medium of the inter-
subjective relation”; (b) “We must start offwith a radical intersubjectivity, with
the subject’s total acceptance by the other subject”; (c) there exists a common
“function of recognition, of pact, of interhuman symbol.”^22 It is therefore clear
that, in the early 195 0s, Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic is profoundly indebted to
the Hegelian-Kojèvian principle for which human desire corresponds to the desire
to be recognized by the Other.
It should equally be clear by now why, according to Lacan, an actual return to
Freud’s original discoveries entails a resumption of the often underestimated
practicalimportance of speech in psychoanalytic treatment, in contrast to the im-
portance bestowed on the subject’s physical reactions during the course of treat-
ment by many psychoanalytic schools. Psychoanalysis aims to symbolize through
full speech the imaginary identifications that objectify the subject in his ego.^23
More precisely, in the specificity of the analytic setting, the general, apparently
unspecified symbolic desire for recognition—which implicitly underlies all
everyday intersubjective interactions insofar as they presuppose the symbolic
dimension—is transformed by the analyst into a recognition of the analysand’s
particular imaginary alienating identifications that ensnare his individual un-
conscious desire. Psychoanalysis should therefore dis-identify the subject from
his imaginary identifications. Dis-alienation can be attained only through dis-
identification. Dis-alienation—from imaginary identifications and, therefore,
also from the imaginary “wall of language”—will ultimately coincide with an in-
tegration of the individual’s desire (for symbolic recognition of his unconscious
desire) into the universal Symbolic. At this stage, Lacan appears to believe that un-
conscious desire can be fully realized: it is enough for it to be recognized by thethe subject of the symbolic (other)