Letter
In **psychoanalysis**, the **letter** (*lettre*) designates a **technical concept** referring to the **material inscription of the unconscious**, rather than to alphabetic characters, written correspondence, or communicative messages in the ordinary sense. The concept is most fully elaborated in the work of **Jacques Lacan**, where the letter is defined as the **material support of the signifier**—that is, the minimal, iterable mark through which unconscious structure, repetition, and jouissance are inscribed and transmitted.
The psychoanalytic letter must be carefully distinguished from several adjacent notions. It is not equivalent to **meaning** (*sens* or *signification*), which emerges only through relations among signifiers and is inherently unstable. Nor is it identical with **speech** (*parole*), which presupposes a speaking subject and an addressee within the symbolic order. The letter refers instead to what persists **prior to, beneath, or beyond meaning**: a material trace that insists regardless of intention, understanding, or interpretation.
While the concept is classically Lacanian, its foundations lie in **Sigmund Freud**’s metapsychology of inscription, trace, and repetition. Lacan’s theory of the letter may thus be read as a formalization and radicalization of Freud’s insight that the unconscious is structured not primarily as a system of meanings, but as a system of **enduring marks**.
Jacques Lacan
Ferdinand de Saussure
Lacan’s frequent references to the **letter** must be situated within his critical engagement with the linguistics of **Ferdinand de Saussure**. In Saussure’s *Course in General Linguistics*, spoken language is privileged over writing on both historical and developmental grounds: speech is assumed to precede writing in the history of humanity and in the life of the individual. Writing is thus conceived as a secondary system, a representation of speech rather than a constitutive element of language itself. Correspondingly, the **signifier** is defined as an *acoustic image*, not a graphic mark.[1]
Lacan adopts Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, but decisively **breaks with the phonocentrism** implicit in Saussure’s privileging of speech. For Lacan, the signifier cannot be reduced to sound; it requires a **material support** that allows for inscription, repetition, and displacement. This material support is what Lacan designates as the **letter**.
Materiality
When Lacan takes up Saussure’s work in the 1950s, he adapts it freely to his own theoretical purposes. He thus conceives of the **letter** not as a mere graphic representation of sound, but as the **material basis of language itself**:
"By *letter* I designate that material support that concrete discourse borrows from language."[2]
The letter is therefore inseparable from **materiality**. For Lacan, materiality implies both **indivisibility** and **locality**: the letter is a discrete, countable mark that occupies a determinate place. It is in this sense that Lacan describes the letter as “the essentially localized structure of the signifier.”[3]
Through this emphasis, Lacan situates the letter at the interface of the **symbolic order** and the **Real**. While the symbolic order organizes signifiers into systems of difference, the letter names the **irreducible material remainder** that underpins this order and resists complete integration into meaning.
Meaning
As an element of the Real, the letter is **meaningless in itself**. Lacan illustrates this point by referring to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which remained undeciphered in Europe for centuries. Prior to Champollion’s work on the Rosetta Stone, the inscriptions were clearly recognized as belonging to a structured system, yet their meaning was inaccessible. The existence of a signifying order was evident even in the absence of interpretation.[4]
In an analogous way, the signifier persists as a **letter without meaning**, shaping the destiny of the subject independently of conscious understanding. The subject is compelled to decipher this letter, yet its effects precede and exceed any act of interpretation.
A paradigmatic illustration appears in Freud’s case history of the **Wolf Man**, where Freud notes the recurrent appearance of the meaningless letter **V** in multiple guises throughout the patient’s life.[5] Lacan reads this recurrence not as symbolic meaning, but as the insistence of a **letter**—a mark that returns and structures repetition.
Repetition
The essential property of the letter is that it **returns and repeats**. Lacan famously illustrates this repetition through his reading of **Edgar Allan Poe**’s short story *The Purloined Letter*.[6]
Playing on the double meaning of the term “letter,” Lacan interprets Poe’s narrative of a written document circulating among various characters as a structural allegory of the **signifier in motion**. The letter passes from hand to hand, and each subject’s position within the symbolic order is determined by their relation to it.[7]
It is in this context that Lacan formulates the aphorism: **“a letter always arrives at its destination.”**[8] This statement is not a moral or teleological claim about communication, but a structural thesis: the letter inevitably occupies its place within the symbolic network, regardless of intention or awareness. Its “destination” is not a conscious addressee, but a **structural position**.
To the Letter
Because of the role of the letter in the unconscious, Lacan argues that the analyst must attend not primarily to the **meaning** of the analysand’s discourse, but to its **formal properties**. Analytic listening involves reading speech *as if it were a text*, focusing on homophonies, repetitions, slips, and literal inscriptions. Lacan summarizes this orientation with the injunction to take the analysand’s discourse **“to the letter”** (*prendre à la lettre*).
Interpretation, in this framework, does not aim at exhaustive explanation or symbolic closure. Instead, it intervenes at the level of the letter, modifying the subject’s relation to the inscriptions that structure repetition and jouissance.
Writing
Lacan develops the relation between **letter** and **writing** most explicitly in his Seminar of 1972–1973 (*Encore*).[9] Although both letter and writing belong to the order of the Real and thus partake of a meaningless quality, Lacan draws a crucial distinction: **the letter is that which is read**, whereas **writing is not to be read**.[10]
Writing is closely linked to **formalization** and to Lacan’s use of **mathemes**—algebraic symbols designed to transmit analytic knowledge independently of interpretation. Lacan thus refers to his algebraic symbols themselves as **letters**.[11]
Lacan’s concept of the letter became the object of a sustained critique by **Jacques Derrida**, particularly in “Le facteur de la vérité,” included in *The Post Card*.[12] Derrida’s intervention prompted further discussion by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in *Le Titre de la lettre* (1973), a work to which Lacan himself explicitly responds in Seminar XX.[13]
See Also
References
- ↑ Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, Glasgow: Collins Fontana, 1916.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 147.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 153.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. John Forrester, New York: Norton, 1988, pp. 244–245; Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 160.
- ↑ Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1918b [1914]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVII, London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974, p. 3.
- ↑ Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter” (1844), in Great Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: Pocket Library, 1951.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, “Le séminaire sur ‘La lettre volée’,” in Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, pp. 11–61; trans. Jeffrey Mehlman as “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” Yale French Studies, 48 (1972): 38–72.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 41.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, Paris: Seuil, 1975, pp. 29–38.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, p. 29.
- ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, p. 30.
- ↑ Derrida, Jacques. “Le facteur de la vérité,” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 413–496.
- ↑ Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Nancy, Jean-Luc. Le Titre de la lettre, Paris: Galilée, 1973; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, pp. 62–66.