Talk:Metaphor

In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, metaphor (métaphore) is not primarily a poetic ornament or a figure of style added to an already complete meaning. It is a structural operation of the signifier: a mechanism by which meaning (signification) is produced in and through language by the substitution of one signifier for another. Lacan’s account recasts Freud’s theory of dream-work and the formations of the unconscious in linguistic terms, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language and that its effects—symptoms, dreams, slips, jokes—depend on operations characteristic of signifying chains. Metaphor, in this framework, is the paradigmatic operation of condensation (Freud’s Verdichtung), while metonymy corresponds to displacement (Freud’s Verschiebung).

Lacan’s theory of metaphor has several interlocking dimensions:

• a linguistic dimension, drawn from structural linguistics and Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor (selection/substitution) and metonymy (combination/contiguity);
• a psychoanalytic dimension, which translates Freud’s mechanisms of the unconscious into operations of the signifier;
• a formal dimension, in which Lacan proposes a notation (“the formula of metaphor”) to describe how signification “emerges” from signifier substitution;
• and a clinical dimension, where metaphor becomes central to the theory of symptom formation, interpretation, and especially the “paternal metaphor” (the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father) used to theorize the Oedipus complex, castration, and psychosis.

While the term “metaphor” retains echoes of rhetoric and poetics, Lacan’s use is technical: it refers to a specific way signifiers relate, producing meaning effects that are never purely “inside” the subject but arise from the subject’s insertion into the symbolic order (language, law, kinship, and social norms).

Background and sources

Freud: condensation and the logic of formations of the unconscious

Freud’s early metapsychology of dreams and parapraxes stresses that unconscious thoughts are not simply expressed but transformed. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud isolates two principal mechanisms of dream-work: condensation and displacement. Condensation compresses multiple latent thoughts into a single manifest element; displacement shifts psychical intensity from an important representation to a seemingly minor one. These mechanisms are not limited to dreams: Freud also analyzes jokes and slips as structured productions in which wordplay, substitution, and associative pathways yield meaning beyond conscious intent.

Lacan’s return to Freud does not deny this metapsychology; rather, it re-reads it through linguistic structure. Condensation becomes intelligible as a “metaphoric” effect—multiple meanings gathered into one signifying node—while displacement becomes “metonymic”—a sliding along associations, contiguities, and chains. Lacan’s claim is not that Freud “meant linguistics,” but that Freud discovered a lawful organization of unconscious formations that can be formally clarified by linguistics.

Saussure and structural linguistics: signifier and signified

Lacan’s linguistic reworking depends on a structural model of the sign: the distinction between signifier (sound-image, mark, word-form) and signified (concept). Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics provides a basic template for this distinction, as well as the thesis that language is a system of differences without positive terms, in which values arise from relations rather than intrinsic essences.

Lacan adopts and transforms this model. He foregrounds the primacy of the signifier (often schematized as S/s) and emphasizes that meaning is an effect produced by signifier relations, not a stable substance contained in a word. Metaphor is one of the key operations by which signification is generated within this differential system.

Jakobson: metaphor and metonymy as axes of language

Roman Jakobson’s work is central to Lacan’s theorization. Jakobson distinguishes two axes of language: the axis of selection (paradigmatic) and the axis of combination (syntagmatic). Disorders of language in aphasia, Jakobson argues, show dissociations between these axes. He correlates the selection axis with metaphor (substitution based on similarity) and the combination axis with metonymy (contiguity and contextual combination).

Lacan’s move is to treat these axes not merely as stylistic resources remembered from school rhetoric but as fundamental operations governing unconscious formations. In this re-reading, metaphor and metonymy become structural principles of the signifier’s work, and their clinical relevance becomes immediate: interpretation, symptom formation, and psychotic phenomena can be reconsidered in terms of failures or peculiarities in these operations.

Lacan’s definition: metaphor as signifier substitution

For Lacan, metaphor is generated when one signifier replaces another signifier in a signifying chain, and this substitution produces a new signification effect. The crucial point is that metaphor concerns the signifier-to-signifier relation (S→S), and signification is what “falls out” of this relation.

In ordinary accounts, metaphor is explained as a comparison: “A is like B,” so one term is used in place of another. Lacan’s account is more radical: metaphor is not an optional comparison but a mechanism of meaning-production rooted in the structure of language itself. The “new meaning” does not preexist in the speaker’s mind; it emerges from the substitution and the differential network in which the signifiers take their value.

Lacan’s emphasis also shifts the status of “literal” meaning. If signification is a produced effect, then “literal” meaning is itself stabilized only by convention and by repeated signifier relations. Metaphor is not a deviation from literal meaning so much as an exemplary case that reveals how meaning always depends on signifying structure.

The formula of metaphor

In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan proposes a formal notation to describe metaphor. While its exact typographic presentation varies across editions and commentaries, the core idea is consistent: metaphor is an operation where a signifier is substituted for another signifier, and a signification effect is produced “under” the bar (in the place of the signified).

A simplified verbal paraphrase of Lacan’s formula is:

• A signifier S1 appears in a chain where S2 was expected (or where S2 is “elided”).
• S1 substitutes for S2 (S1 takes S2’s place).
• This substitution generates a new signification, not reducible to either S1 or S2 alone.

Lacan’s formalization is meant to emphasize several non-intuitive consequences:

1. Metaphor is not primarily semantic but structural: it depends on the positions of signifiers and their substitutability within a system. 2. Meaning is an effect: signification emerges from the signifier operation, rather than guiding it from above. 3. The repressed signifier matters: what is substituted out (the “missing” signifier) remains active as an absence, shaping the produced meaning (for instance, through resonance, ambiguity, and symptom formation).

This last point is clinically important. In symptoms and dreams, the substituted-out signifier often corresponds to repressed material. The metaphor’s product is therefore overdetermined: it condenses multiple signifying threads and affects, and it can be interpreted by tracing the signifier relations that made it possible.

Metaphor and metonymy

Lacan’s metaphor is inseparable from its pairing with metonymy. The pair gives Lacan a way to map Freud’s mechanisms of the unconscious onto linguistic operations:

• Metaphor ↔ condensation (Verdichtung)
• Metonymy ↔ displacement (Verschiebung)

This mapping is not merely analogical. Lacan uses it to argue that the unconscious does not operate by “irrational images” but by lawful signifier processes that can be analyzed. Dreams condense, jokes substitute, symptoms compress: these are metaphoric effects. Meanwhile, the sliding of desire along objects, the endless deferral of satisfaction, and the chain of associative substitutions are metonymic effects.

In Jakobson’s terms, metaphor aligns with the axis of selection/substitution; metonymy aligns with the axis of combination/contiguity. Lacan radicalizes this by linking metonymy to desire itself: desire “slides” along signifiers, never reaching a final object. Metaphor, by contrast, produces nodal points of meaning—moments where signification appears to “quilt” the chain, temporarily stabilizing it.

Metaphor, the unconscious, and symptom formation

Lacan’s re-reading of Freud treats symptoms as structured like language: they are not brute facts of the body or mere behavioral habits, but formations that “say” something in an encrypted way. Metaphor is one of the mechanisms by which such formations become possible.

A symptom can be understood as a metaphoric condensation: a signifying substitution that produces a meaningful effect while simultaneously disguising the repressed signifier. Interpretation does not “decode” by translating symptom into an already-known content; rather, it works on the signifiers, tracing substitutions, puns, homophonies, and equivocations through which the unconscious has produced the symptom’s form. Freud’s analyses of dreams and jokes already point to such operations, where wordplay and substitution are not decorative but constitutive.

Metaphor’s relevance is also tied to Lacan’s insistence that the unconscious is not a reservoir of images but an effect of the symbolic. Even when symptoms appear bodily (somatic complaints, inhibitions, compulsions), their organization can be approached as signifying. Metaphor is one of the ways the symbolic “writes” itself into the subject’s lived reality.

The paternal metaphor

One of Lacan’s most influential and controversial uses of metaphor is the paternal metaphor (métaphore paternelle), a theoretical construct used to describe how the Name-of-the-Father functions in the subject’s entry into the symbolic order.

In broad terms, the paternal metaphor articulates how a certain signifier—the Name-of-the-Father—substitutes for (or intervenes in) the signifying relation between the child and the maternal desire. This substitution institutes the law of kinship and prohibition (often framed through the Oedipus complex), introduces the signifier of castration, and enables the stabilization of meaning and desire within the symbolic order.

Lacan’s emphasis is not on the empirical father as a person but on a signifier-function. The paternal metaphor describes how a signifying operation can restructure the subject’s world: it introduces a point that limits and orders desire, allowing signification to be “quilted” rather than endlessly sliding. Where this metaphor fails (or is foreclosed), Lacan connects the result to psychosis: instead of repression (a neurotic mechanism), the Name-of-the-Father is not integrated into the symbolic, and phenomena like hallucination and delusional metaphorization can appear as attempts to patch the symbolic gap.

The paternal metaphor is thus a nexus of Lacan’s linguistics and clinical structures:

• In neurosis, the paternal metaphor is operative; repression and symptom formation rely on symbolic substitution and return of the repressed in metaphoric formations.
• In psychosis, Lacan theorizes a foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father; the paternal metaphor does not take hold in the same way, leading to distinctive disturbances in signification and reality-testing.

Because Lacan’s model is structural, it has been applied beyond the traditional family: the “Name-of-the-Father” can be approached as a function that may be carried by multiple figures, institutions, and signifying supports, though Lacan’s own formulations remain tied to Oedipal coordinates and the question of symbolic law.

Metaphor, meaning, and the “quilting point”

Although the “quilting point” (point de capiton) is often discussed as a separate concept, it intersects with metaphor as a mechanism of stabilizing signification. The signifying chain, in Lacan’s view, is inherently differential and potentially sliding: any signifier evokes others, and meaning can drift. Metaphor produces a punctuating effect: by substituting one signifier for another, it can create a new signification that “stops” the drift, at least momentarily, by providing a nodal point around which meaning organizes.

This does not mean metaphor delivers final truth. Its effect is contingent and revisable; the same signifying material can be re-metaphorized in analysis, producing new meanings and new subjective positions. Metaphor’s power is precisely that it can transform the subject’s relation to desire and to the symbolic network that structures their experience.

Clinical implications

Interpretation as work on the signifier

If the unconscious operates through metaphor and metonymy, interpretation is not primarily an empathic understanding of hidden feelings but an intervention in signifying structure. Lacan’s “return to Freud” encourages attention to:

• equivocations and puns (homophony, homography),
• substitutions and surprising word choices,
• recurring signifiers and their positional relations,
• and the way a single signifier condenses multiple associative threads.

Freud’s technique already attends to such phenomena in dreams and jokes; Lacan’s conceptualization gives them a formal status and integrates them with a theory of the symbolic.

In practice, a Lacanian interpretation may aim to shift the subject’s metaphoric knots: by isolating a key signifier and allowing new substitutions, the analysis can produce a reconfiguration of meaning. This is often described as working with the “letter” of the symptom rather than translating it into a pre-established narrative.

Differential diagnosis and the structures

Lacan’s structural clinic (neurosis/psychosis/perversion) is closely linked to the functioning of certain signifiers. The paternal metaphor, in particular, is treated as a key operator. When it functions, repression and symptom metaphorization are available; when it does not, the subject may confront holes in the symbolic that are managed through different means, including delusional constructions that can themselves be understood as attempts at metaphorical suturing.

This approach has influenced later Lacanian clinical work on psychosis, where clinicians attend to disturbances in metaphorization—unusual signifier links, neologisms, and idiosyncratic meanings—as not merely “nonsense” but as efforts to stabilize a fragile symbolic network.

Limits: metaphor and the real

Lacan’s later teaching increasingly emphasizes the “real” as what resists symbolization. Metaphor, as a symbolic operation, does not fully capture the real; it produces meaning effects, but it can also circle around what cannot be said. In clinical terms, a symptom may be interpretable as metaphor, yet something of jouissance (enjoyment) may remain irreducible to signification. This tension is already implicit in Lacan’s earlier claim that signification is an effect and that language introduces a structural lack.

A key clinical question becomes: when does interpretation (as symbolic/metaphoric work) transform a symptom, and when does it risk proliferating meaning without touching the kernel of jouissance? Lacan’s later seminars develop tools (such as topology and the sinthome) to articulate this, but even in earlier work metaphor already shows its double edge: it both reveals and veils, both produces meaning and testifies to an underlying gap.

Relation to rhetoric and poetics

Lacan’s metaphor is not identical to the classical rhetorical definition (metaphor as transfer based on resemblance). While Lacan draws on Jakobson’s linguistic account, he places metaphor inside a psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity. In rhetoric, metaphor is often treated as a conscious stylistic choice. In Lacan, metaphor can be unconscious and can constitute the subject’s symptom and desire.

This does not sever Lacan from literature. On the contrary, Lacanians have often used the theory to read poetic texts as privileged sites where signifying operations appear with special clarity. Yet Lacan’s primary concern is the clinic: the metaphor at issue is the one that structures everyday speech, fantasy, and symptom, not merely the one that decorates a poem.

Debates and critiques

Lacan’s theory of metaphor has been debated on multiple fronts:

• Linguistic critiques question whether psychoanalytic processes can be mapped onto Jakobson’s axes without remainder, and whether Lacan’s primacy of the signifier over the signified is linguistically warranted in all respects.
• Clinical critiques argue that not all symptoms are best understood as metaphoric messages, and that focusing on signification can overlook affective and bodily dimensions.
• Feminist and social critiques interrogate the paternal metaphor’s reliance on Oedipal and paternal-law frameworks, questioning its universality and its implications for gender and kinship.

Within Lacanian circles, the theory has also evolved: later Lacan shifts emphasis from the production of meaning to the handling of jouissance, leading some to treat metaphor as one tool among others rather than the master key to the unconscious.

Legacy and influence

Despite controversies, Lacan’s metaphor has been widely influential:

• It helped consolidate the “linguistic turn” in French psychoanalysis, providing a formal vocabulary for re-reading Freud.
• It shaped literary theory and criticism, especially where psychoanalysis and structuralism intersected, by offering a model of how textual meaning can be generated by substitution and condensation.
• It impacted clinical theory, particularly in the understanding of psychosis via the paternal metaphor and foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.

The enduring interest in Lacanian metaphor often stems from its dual character: it is at once a rigorous structural claim about signifiers and a practical clinical orientation toward speech as the medium in which subjectivity is formed, distorted, and transformed.

See also

• Metonymy (Lacan)
• Signifier (Lacan)
• Name-of-the-Father
• Foreclosure (Lacan)
• Condensation (Freud)
• Displacement (Freud)
• Point de capiton
• Unconscious structured like a language