The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis

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Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse
French titleFonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse
English titleThe Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis
Year1953
Text typeConference paper / report
Mode of deliveryOral
First presentationCongrès des psychanalystes de langue romane, Rome, September 1953
First publicationLa Psychanalyse (1956)
Collected inÉcrits (1966)
Text statusAuthorial text
Original languageFrench
Psychoanalytic content
Key conceptsSpeech • Language • Symbolic • Full speech • Empty speech • Subject of the unconscious
ThemesAnalytic technique; speech and subjectivity; psychoanalytic training; transference; structural linguistics
Freud referencesThe Interpretation of Dreams • Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious • Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Related seminarsSeminar I • Seminar II • Seminar III
Theoretical context
PeriodStructuralist / linguistic period
RegisterSymbolic


The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (French: Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse), widely known as the "Rome Report" or the "Rome Discourse," is a seminal essay by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Delivered in September 1953 at the Congress of Romance-Language Psychoanalysts in Rome, the text is widely considered the manifesto of Lacan’s "Return to Freud." It marks a decisive pivot in Lacan's teaching from his earlier focus on the Imaginary (the mirror stage) to the primacy of the Symbolic order, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language and that psychoanalysis is fundamentally a practice of speech.

The essay critiques the trends of post-Freudian ego psychology, which Lacan viewed as a betrayal of Freudian discovery, and proposes a structuralist reworking of analytic technique, training, and theory. It was later collected in Lacan's Écrits (1966).


Historical and Institutional Context

The presentation of the "Rome Report" coincided with a period of intense institutional turbulence within the French psychoanalytic community. In June 1953, disagreements regarding the training of analysts and the standardization of technique—specifically Lacan's controversial use of "variable-length sessions" (or short sessions)—led to a schism in the Société Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP).[1]

Lacan, along with Daniel Lagache and Françoise Dolto, seceded to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP). The "Rome Report" was originally commissioned as a theoretical report for the SPP congress, but due to the split, Lacan was effectively barred from speaking in his official capacity. He delivered the address instead to the newly formed SFP, utilizing the venue of Rome to symbolize a re-foundation of psychoanalysis, invoking a "renovation" of the discipline's foundations.[2]

The text reflects the intellectual climate of 1950s France, incorporating influences from structural anthropology (Claude Lévi-Strauss), linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roman Jakobson), and Hegelian philosophy (via Alexandre Kojève). Lacan uses these tools to attack the "behaviorist" and "objectifying" trends in American psychoanalysis, which he argued had reduced the subject to a biological organism and the analytic cure to social adaptation.[3]

Overview of Core Concepts

The central thesis of the essay is that psychoanalysis has only one medium: the patient’s speech.[4] Consequently, Lacan argues that any attempt to ground psychoanalysis in biology, anatomy, or instinctual maturation without reference to the linguistic register is a theoretical error.

Full Speech vs. Empty Speech

A pivotal distinction in the essay is the dichotomy between "Empty Speech" (parole vide) and "Full Speech" (parole pleine).

  • Empty Speech: This is the discourse of the ego. It is characterized by "chatter," objectification, and the "mirage of the monologue."[5] In empty speech, the subject speaks about themselves as an object, alienated in the Imaginary register. This speech is a barrier to truth, often manifesting as resistance where the subject attempts to seduce or placate the analyst with a polished narrative that conceals their subjective history. Lacan compares this to a "millstone" characterizing modern communication, where language serves to obscure the subject's truth.
  • Full Speech: This is the speech that performs a truth. Lacan defines it as speech that "reorders past contingences by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come."[6] Full speech is performative; like a vow or a pledge, it alters the reality of the subject. It restores the continuity of the subject's history by integrating the censored chapters of the unconscious. The goal of analysis is to help the subject move from the frustration of empty speech to the realization of full speech.

Subjectivity and the Unconscious

Lacan famously reformulates the concept of the unconscious not as a reservoir of biological instincts, but as the "discourse of the Other."[7]

Lacan argues against the notion that the unconscious is purely individual or internal. Instead, he posits it as "transindividual." The truth of the subject is always located outside, in the intersubjective field of language. He uses the metaphor of a censored text to describe the unconscious:

"The unconscious is that chapter of my history that is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere."[8]

Lacan lists the locations of this "written" truth: bodily symptoms (hysterical nuclei), childhood memories (archival documents), the vocabulary of the subject, and the family traditions or legends that shape the subject's destiny.

History vs. Maturation

The essay sharply critiques the developmental models of ego psychology, which view neurosis as a fixation at a specific biological stage (oral, anal, phallic) of maturation. Lacan insists that these "instinctual stages" are already organized by subjectivity and history. For Lacan, the anal stage is not merely a biological event regarding sphincters, but a historical dialectic of gift and refusal, demand and compliance.[9]

Lacan asserts that psychoanalysis operates in the realm of history, not biology. The analytic process is a "primary historization" where the subject reconstructs their past. This reconstruction is not about factual accuracy (reality) but about "truth"—a subjective integration of the past that transforms the future.

Speech, Language, and the Symbolic

Lacan draws a distinction between speech (the act of speaking, the "parole") and language (the structure of signs, the "langue"). He argues that the human subject is constituted by the Symbolic order—the pre-existing structure of language, law, and culture into which a child is born.

The Law and the Name-of-the-Father

Lacan connects the laws of language to the laws of kinship described by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Just as kinship structures regulate exchange and prohibit incest through a symbolic system of names, language regulates the subject's desire. Lacan identifies the "Name-of-the-Father" as the support of the symbolic function.[10] This function introduces the Law, separating the child from the mother and instituting the order of desire. The failure of this symbolic identification leads to psychosis, which Lacan describes as a disorder where the subject is "spoken rather than speaking."[11]

The Symbol Made Man

Lacan famously declares: "Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man."[12] Symbols are not merely devices used by humans; they envelop the life of man "in a network so total" that they determine his destiny before he is even born. This creates a "language barrier" or a wall between the subject and the real world, but also between the subject and the analyst.

Clinical Implications and Analytic Technique

The "Rome Report" is as much a technical treatise as a theoretical one. Lacan deduces specific technical requirements from his linguistic theory of the unconscious.

The Analyst as Punctuation

Lacan critiques the view of the analyst as a benevolent listener or a model for the patient’s ego to identify with (as in the "strengthening of the ego"). Instead, the analyst must act as a dialectical partner who returns the subject's speech to them in an inverted form.[13]

The function of the analyst is to "punctuate" the discourse. Just as punctuation in a sentence fixes its meaning, the analyst’s interventions (or silence) determine the meaning of the subject's speech.

"It is a beneficent punctuation, one which confers its meaning on the subject’s discourse."[14]

Variable-Length Sessions

Lacan defends his controversial practice of shortening analytic sessions (scansion). He argues that standardizing sessions to a fixed chronological time (e.g., 50 minutes) serves the "obsessional" resistance of the subject, allowing them to fill the time with empty speech or "forced labor" to please the analyst.[15]

By ending the session at a moment of significance—regardless of the clock—the analyst creates a "dramatic" punctuation that forces the subject to confront their own speech. Lacan compares this to the Zen technique of immediate revelation.[16] He cites a clinical example where shortening a session revealed a patient's anal-pregnancy fantasy, which would otherwise have been lost in "speculations on the art of Dostoievsky."[16]

Transference and Resistance

Lacan reinterprets resistance not as an internal force of the patient blocking the truth, but often as a product of the analyst’s own ego and bad technique. "There is no other resistance to analysis than that of the analyst himself," Lacan would later famously claim, a sentiment rooted in this text's critique of analyzing defenses.

Transference is defined as the "enactment of the reality of the unconscious."[17] However, Lacan warns against the "object relations" view that sees transference as a simple repetition of past habits. Instead, it is an intersubjective dialectic where the subject seeks recognition.

Freud and Lacan: Points of Departure

Lacan presents his work as a rigorous return to the "truth" of Freud, distinguishing between what he views as Freud's correct intuitions and the "scientistic" or biological metaphors Freud sometimes employed.

  • **On the Death Drive:** Lacan reinterprets the death drive (Thanatos) not as biological entropy, but through the lens of Martin Heidegger’s "Being-towards-death." The death instinct expresses the limit of the historical function of the subject. It is the "radical negativity" of the symbol, which kills the thing to create the word.[18]
  • **On the "Fort-Da" Game:** Lacan analyzes Freud’s observation of the child playing with a reel (in *Beyond the Pleasure Principle*). Lacan views this not just as mastery of the mother's absence, but as the moment of entry into language. The phonemic opposition *Fort!* (Gone!) and *Da!* (Here!) constitutes the subject's alienation in the Symbolic, raising desire to a "second power."[19]

Legacy and Commentary

  • The Function and Field of Speech and Language* established the theoretical infrastructure for Lacanian psychoanalysis.

The Linguistic Turn in Psychoanalysis

Secondary commentators emphasize that this text solidifies the "linguistic turn" in psychoanalysis. By asserting that "the unconscious is structured like a language," Lacan imported Saussurean linguistics (signifier/signified) into clinical practice. As Bruce Fink notes, this moves analysis away from the search for "meaning" (in the sense of a hidden signified) toward the logic of the "signifier" and its combinatory effects.[17]

The Dialectic of Recognition

Scholars such as Stijn Vanheule highlight the Hegelian influence in the text, particularly the dialectic of recognition. The subject desires to be recognized by the Other. However, Lacan eventually moves beyond this Hegelian optimism in his later seminars, shifting focus from the Symbolic (recognition) to the Real (that which resists symbolization).[20]

Critique of Object Relations

The text remains the primary source for Lacan’s critique of the Object Relations school. Jacques-Alain Miller notes that Lacan attacks the idea of the "good object" or the "mature ego," arguing that these are imaginary constructs that trap the subject in alienation. Lacan’s alternative is the "subject of the unconscious," which has no "ego" but only a history and a desire articulated through the Other.[21]

See Also

References

  1. ↑ Roudinesco, Elisabeth, *Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985*, University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 243.
  2. ↑ Lacan, Jacques, *Écrits: A Selection*, trans. Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton & Co., 1977, p. 24.
  3. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 29.
  4. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 30.
  5. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 31.
  6. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 36.
  7. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 41.
  8. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 38.
  9. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 39.
  10. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 50.
  11. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 52.
  12. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 49.
  13. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 63.
  14. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 33.
  15. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 73.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 74.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Fink, Bruce, *Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely*, University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 25.
  18. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 77.
  19. ↑ Lacan, *Écrits*, p. 76.
  20. ↑ Vanheule, Stijn, *The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective*, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 55.
  21. ↑ Miller, Jacques-Alain, "An Introduction to Seminars I and II," in *Reading Seminars I and II*, SUNY Press, 1996, p. 12.
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