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"). This paper, often referred to as the Rome Discourse marked Lacan's break with the analytic establishment and the formation of his own school of psychoanalytic thought. 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.

Language

The paper, the founding statement of Lacanian theory, defines psychoanalysis as a practice of speech and a theory of the speaking subject. Psychoanalysis, he asserts, is distinguished from other disciplines in that the analyst works on the subject's speech. He points out that Freud often referred to language, particularly when he was focusing on the unconscious. After all, language is the "talking cure".

Three Orders

The theory of the three interacting orders, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, first appears in detail in this paper. These orders can be conceived as different planes of existence which, though interconnected, are independent realities, each order being concerned with different functions.

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.