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"[[linguistics]]" ([[Fr]]. ''[[linguistique]]'')
While [[Lacan]]s interest in [[language]] can be traced back to the early 1930s, when he analyzed the writings of a [[psychotic]] [[woman]] in his doctoral dissertation, it is only in the early 1950s that he begins to articulate his views of [[language]] in terms derived from a specific linguistic theory,a dn not until 1957 that he begins to engage with [[linguistics]] in any detail.
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[[Lacan]]'s "linguistic turn" was inspired by the [[anthropology|anthropological]] work of [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]] who, in the 1940s, had begun to apply the methods of [[structure|structural]] [[linguistics]] to non-linguistic cultural data (myth, kinship relations, etc.), thus giving brith to "structural anthropology."
In so doing, [[Lévi-Strauss]] announced an ambitious programme, in which [[linguistics]] would provide a paradigm of [[science|scientificity]] for all the social sciences:
<blockquote>"Structural linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences."<ref>Levi-Strauss. 1945. p.33</ref></blockquote>
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Following the indications of [[Lévi-Strauss]], [[Lacan]] turns to [[linguistics]] to provide [[psychoanalytic theory]] with a conceptual rigour that it previously lacked.
The reason for this lakc of ocnceptual rigour was simply due, [[Lacan]] argues, to the fact that [[linguistics|structural lingusitics]] appeared too alte for [[Freud]] to make use of it.
however, [[Lacan]] argues that when [[Freud]] is reread in the light of linguistic theory, a coherent logic is revealed which is not otherwise apparent; indeed, [[Freud]] can even be seen to have anticipated certain elements of modenr linguistic theory.<ref>{E}} p.162</ref>
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[[Lacan]]'s engagement with [[linguistics]] revolves almost entirely aorund the work of [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] and [[Roman Jakobson]].
References to the work of other influential linguistics... are almost completely absent from [[Lacan]]'s work.
There is a corresponding focus on the [[sign]], rhetorical tropes, and phoneme analysis, at the espense of an almost complete neglect of other areas of [[lingusitics]] such as syntax, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition.
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