The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis

French: Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychana­lyse

Background

At the Rome Congress of Romance Language Psychoanalysts, on the 26th of September, 1953, Lacan delivered a paper entitled "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychana­lyse" ("The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis") -- today referred to as "Discours de Rome" ("Rome Discourse").

Also in 1953, Lacan and a group of colleagues left the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP) to form the Société Française de Psychanalyse (SFP).

The Rome Discourse came to be seen as the founding document of the SFP, and of a new direction in psychoanalysis.

This paper, often called the "Rome Report" or the "Reome Discourse," marked Lacan's break with the analytic establishment and the formation of his own school of psychoanalytic thought.

The paper, the founding statement of Lacanian theory, defines psychoanalysis as a practice of speech and a theory of the speaking subject.

Summary

This paper sets out Lacan's major concerns for the following decade:

• the distinction between speech and language,
• an understanding of the subject as distinct from the I, and, above all,
• the elaboration of the central concepts of the signifier and the symbolic order.