On the Role of Speech In Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Lacan’s “Function and Field”

Abstract

A number of underutilized concepts in Lacan’s “Function and Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis” are examined with an eye to rendering them accessible and practicable to analysts from outside the Lacanian tradition. The concepts of empty and full speech are discussed, along with the notions of the subject of the unconscious, and speaking as itself a mode of intersubjectivity. Attention is afforded the future-oriented mode of psychic temporality that Lacan argues pertains to psychoanalytic practice (that of the future anterior tense, the standpoint from which analysands situate themselves in respect of what they “will have been”). These concepts are then linked to technical initiatives—such as punctuation (the “editorial” role the analyst plays in reference to the analysand’s speech) and scansion (the use of suspension, interruption, or cutting to highlight facets of that speech). These techniques can be read as extensions of Freud’s fundamental rule of free association insofar as they aim to disrupt defensive ego narratives, engage unconscious processes, and draw analysands’ attention, in a potentially transformative manner, to their speech and what it does.