are not yet completely structured.^74 Primal repression is effectively repressed only
retroactively through the resolution of the Oedipus complex.
One final point needs to be discussed before moving on to the analysis of the
Other, and of the unconscious, from the standpoint of the individual subject’s ac-
tive entry into the Symbolic as Law (the Oedipus complex). The linguistic struc-
ture of the unconscious is often defined by Lacan in terms of the “letter.” His most
important article on the distinction between the signifier and the signified is in-
deed entitled “The Agency of the Letterin the Unconscious.” What is a letter, and
how does it differentiate itself from a signifier? As Lacan states, a letter must al-
ways be taken literally,^75 and if one takes it so, one immediately realizes that a let-
ter is material, it is the “material support that concrete discourse borrows from
language.”^76 On an initial level, a letter thus corresponds to the written material-
ization of a phoneme (e.g. the ink that occupies a certain space and is taken to rep-
resent a sound). More importantly, on a second, broader level, a letter is nothing but
a signifier as it materially exists per se in the unconscious, independently of its effects of (conscious)
signification.As Miller clearly states, a letter is “a sign, defined not in its effect as sig-
nified, but in its nature as an object.”^77 In other words, a letter is a meaningless
signifier, the realstructure of language. This is why it is fundamentally imprecise,
if not incorrect, to fully equate the—oppositional, differential—order of the
Symbolic with that of language. In a sense, the triad Imaginary, Symbolic, Real is
reflected withinlanguage in the triad signified, signifier, letter.
Moving from these premises, one has to emphasize how Lacan understands the
unconscious in terms both of the signifiers as symbols,as responsible for creating
effects of signification, and of the signifiers as letters,the puresignifiers, the dimension
of the Real-of-language. From this it also follows that the unconsciousqua
letter/Real-of-language can present itself to the subject independently of the in-
dividual subject’s own active participation in the Symbolic. In other words, the
subject can passively “be spoken” by language to be understood as the trans-
individual unconscious. According to Lacan, this is what happens in psychosis
and explains why, as he states repeatedly, in psychosis what is not symbolized
returns in the Real. It returns in the Real-of-language,for instance as auditory
hallucinations.
Given that every individual human being is surrounded by language long
before he can actively manipulate it, one must assume that, logically, the literal,
real character of the signifier precedes its symbolic value. In other words, the let-
ter precedes the unconscious, or rather, precedes the symbolic shaping of the
unconscious in the individual subject—which is parallel to the emergence of