My stress on the dependence of new (neologistic) signification on repression
and the return of the repressed makes it necessary to specify how my claim dif-
fers from Laplanche’s anti-Lacanian argument according to which unconscious
metaphoric substitutions are alwaysresponsible for the connection existing in con-
sciousness between the signifier and the signified. This view distorts the notion of
double inscription by rendering it inextricable from repression stricto sensu.The fact
that newsignification necessarily emerges through metaphoric substitution (re-
pression stricto sensu) does not entail that, at the conscious level, already existing sig-
nification cannot function autonomously of the unconscious—cannot, that is,
function according to the laws of grammar alone. Furthermore, for Laplanche, at
the individuallevel of the child’s pre-Oedipal psychogenesis, it is the always-already
metaphorical structure of the unconscious that allows the acquisition of language;
while for Lacan, language precedes the unconscious. More specifically, language
can be said to precede the complete structuring of the unconscious inasmuch as
primal repression—the metonymic uttering of the first cries, phonemes, or
words—occurs in the individual without any metaphoric substitution. Unlike
Laplanche, Lacan thinks of elementary signifiers as mere oppositional couples—
such as the Fort–Dadescribed by Freud that attempts a primal symbolization of
the trauma provoked by the mother’s absence. Metaphoric substitution—and the
parallel possibility of repression stricto sensu,together with a fully articulated lan-
guage—will successively be effected only by the resolution of the Oedipus com-
plex. Having said this, I also more generally argue, in agreement with Lacan, that
language (and grammar) is historicallyproduced only in concomitance with re-
pression: all the words that we use in conscious language—and initially acquire
as children independently of metaphoric substitutions—were once neologisms.^72
These remarks should also throw some light on the reason why Lacan be-
lieves that metonymy logically precedes metaphor. The child starts to speak (in
a nonarticulated way) precisely by naming what he demands. Demand is at this
stage simply accompanied by a nonarticulated metonymic slide of phonemes or
words.^73 Hence it is not metonymy in the sense of the syntagmatic rules of con-
scious speech that precedes metaphor. Grammar is coextensive with signification,
which is made possible by metaphor. In other words, signification ultimately re-
lies on a primal metaphor—the paternal metaphor that resolves the Oedipus com-
plex—thanks to which metonymy as syntagmatic speech may arise. The primal
metaphor is also a precondition for any clear distinction between the unconscious
and self-consciousness. Before the advent of the paternal metaphor, language (as
nonsyntagmatic metonymy) already alienates the child’s demand—which is there-
fore also somehow repressed—but both the unconscious and self-consciousnessthe subject of the symbolic (other)