Talk:Metonymy

Metonymy in Lacanian psychoanalysis designates a fundamental operation of the signifier that structures both language and the unconscious. While metonymy in classical rhetoric names a trope of contiguity (e.g., the crown for monarchy), Lacan treats metonymy as a structural principle governing how signifiers link together in a chain, how signification is deferred or slides, and how desire persists through displacement rather than reaching a final object. Metonymy is paired with metaphor as one of the two basic mechanisms of signifying functioning: metaphor operates via substitution (selection), while metonymy operates via contiguity (combination).

Lacan’s metonymy is central to his rereading of Sigmund Freud through structural linguistics. Lacan correlates metonymy with Freud’s mechanism of displacement (Verschiebung) in dream-work and symptom formation, and he correlates metaphor with Freud’s condensation (Verdichtung). Within this framework, metonymy is not a marginal stylistic device but the very logic of the signifying chain: it explains why meaning is never fully present in speech, why the unconscious speaks indirectly, and why desire is structurally on the move. Lacan’s thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language provides the horizon in which metonymy becomes a key concept for theory and clinical practice.

Definition and conceptual scope

In Lacan, metonymy names the diachronic (chain-like) dimension of signifying functioning. A signifier does not carry a self-contained meaning; it signifies through its position in a sequence and through its relations to other signifiers. Metonymy is the operation by which signifiers connect word-to-word, producing a movement in which signification is continually displaced along the chain rather than crystallizing into a stable signified. In Lacanian usage, metonymy is therefore closely associated with:

• the signifier as the primary unit of the unconscious;
• the sliding of the signified (deferral of meaning);
• Freud’s displacement in dreams, parapraxes, jokes, and symptoms;
• the structural account of desire as restless and non-saturable.

Standard Lacanian reference works emphasize that metonymy and metaphor together provide Lacan’s formal bridge between Freud’s dream-work and structural linguistics, and that Lacan links metonymy to desire in aphoristic form (desire is metonymy).

Classical and rhetorical background

In classical rhetoric and poetics, metonymy is typically defined as a trope in which one term designates another on the basis of contiguity or association (cause/effect, container/contained, instrument/action, part/whole). This rhetorical tradition contrasts metonymy with metaphor, understood as a figure based on resemblance or analogy.

Lacan does not deny the rhetorical sense; rather, he generalizes it. What matters for Lacan is the structural property presupposed by rhetorical metonymy: signification can shift along relations of adjacency, so that what is said points elsewhere. Psychoanalysis, he argues, encounters this logic not merely in literary language but in the ordinary speech of analysands, in dreams, and in symptomatic formations.

Linguistic sources

Saussure: differential signification and the sign

Lacan’s account presupposes Saussurean structural linguistics, which defines the sign as the coupling of signifier and signified and insists that meaning arises from differences within a system of signs rather than from intrinsic ties between words and things. Lacan radicalizes this framework by emphasizing the primacy of the signifier and by insisting that the signified is not a stable entity behind the signifier but an effect produced through signifying relations (especially in sequences and substitutions).

Metonymy concerns precisely this sequential dimension: the signifier’s meaning-effect depends on its adjacency to other signifiers, so that signification tends to slide rather than settle.

Jakobson: two axes of language (combination and substitution)

The decisive modern articulation for Lacan is Roman Jakobson’s distinction between two poles of language:

• the axis of selection/substitution (paradigmatic), associated with metaphor;
• the axis of combination/contiguity (syntagmatic), associated with metonymy.

Jakobson supports this distinction with clinical evidence from aphasia: some disturbances impair substitution (metaphoric operations), while others impair combination (metonymic operations). Lacan treats Jakobson’s model as confirming that the mechanisms of meaning production are structural properties of language itself, and thus available for a structural rereading of Freud.

Freudian sources: displacement (Verschiebung)

In Freud’s account of dream-work, displacement (Verschiebung) is one of the two principal mechanisms by which latent dream-thoughts are transformed into manifest dream content. Displacement shifts psychical intensity away from a significant latent element and onto a relatively minor element connected by associative links, so that the manifest content appears strange or trivial relative to what determined it.

Lacan’s claim is not that Freud secretly did linguistics, but that the clinical facts Freud discovered can be formalized as operations of the signifier. Displacement proceeds by associative contiguity; this makes it structurally homologous to metonymy as Jakobson defines it. Hence Lacan’s mapping:

• displacement ↔ metonymy
• condensation ↔ metaphor

This correlation grounds Lacan’s view that the unconscious does not express itself by direct representation but by signifying detours and displacements internal to speech.

Metonymy and the signifying chain

The chain (syntagmatic axis)

Lacan’s metonymy is inseparable from the concept of the signifying chain: a sequence in which signifiers refer to other signifiers, and in which what a signifier means depends on its differential position in the chain. Metonymy is the rule-governed continuity of this chain along the syntagmatic axis. Where metaphor produces a new meaning-effect by substitution, metonymy sustains discourse by linkage and adjacency, keeping signification in motion rather than producing a final signified.

This chain logic is one reason Lacan emphasizes that psychoanalysis is concerned with speech: the unconscious is not a hidden store of images, but a structuring that appears in and through the signifier, in the order of language.

Sliding of the signified

Because metonymy operates by contiguity, it tends to maintain the separation between signifier and signified (the bar in Lacan’s adaptation of Saussure). Meaning is therefore unstable: the signified slides along the chain as adjacent signifiers modify what is heard and understood. This does not mean that speech is meaningless; rather, signification is treated as an effect produced locally and precariously, never fully totalized by a final term.

In Lacan’s account, the metonymic chain is the default condition of signifying functioning; metaphor is a special operation that can stop the chain at certain points and generate more decisive signification (e.g., in a symptom or a foundational signifier).

Formalization: The Metonymic Algorithm

In his seminal essay The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud (1957), Lacan provides a matheme (algebraic formula) for metonymy. This formalization differentiates it strictly from the formula for metaphor.

The formula for metonymy is written as:

$f(S_1...S_n)=S_1(-)$

Where:

• $f$ denotes the signifying function
• $S_1...S_n$ represents the signifying chain
• $(-)$ indicates the maintenance of the bar (no crossing)
• The result is a deferral of the signified

Interpretation of the Formula

The crucial element in this formula is the minus sign ($-$) in the parenthesis. In the formula for metaphor, the sign is a plus ($+$), indicating the crossing of the bar and the emergence of new meaning.

In metonymy, the bar is not crossed. The signified is not produced or pinned down. Instead, the meaning "slides" beneath the signifiers. This corresponds to the "sliding of the signified" (glissement du signifié), where the subject keeps talking, moving from word to word, circling the truth but never quite hitting it.

Metonymy and desire

"Desire is metonymy"

Lacan’s linkage of metonymy to desire is one of the concept’s most influential uses. In Lacanian reference works, metonymy is explicitly associated with desire’s structural restlessness: desire does not find an object that would saturate it but shifts from object to object, signifier to signifier, sustained by lack and by the signifying chain itself.

This point is often summarized by saying that desire is metonymic because it persists through displacement: what seems to be desired (this person, that achievement, this possession) is connected by contiguity to something else, and satisfaction is never final.

Lack and the non-saturation of the object

Lacan’s broader thesis is that the speaking being is constituted by language and thus by lack. Because demand is articulated in signifiers addressed to the Other (as the locus of language), what is asked for always exceeds biological need and becomes entangled with recognition, love, and symbolic coordinates. Desire emerges in the gap that language opens—an effect that cannot be fully filled by any object. Metonymy describes the ongoing displacement generated by that gap: desire circulates through signifiers without closure.

In this sense, metonymy is not simply a theory of meaning but a theory of why wanting continues: the signifier can represent an object, but cannot deliver the object as a final presence. The metonymic chain is therefore the structural engine of desire.

Need, demand, desire

Although Lacan’s tripartite distinction between need, demand, and desire is developed across multiple seminars and writings, the metonymic logic can be stated simply: once need is articulated as demand (addressed to the Other in language), it enters the signifying chain and becomes subject to displacement. Desire is what persists as irreducible to the satisfaction of need—what remains after demand is spoken. Metonymy names the way this remainder circulates: desire continues to move along the chain of signifiers that structure the subject’s relation to the Other.

Metonymy in the formations of the unconscious

Dreams, slips, jokes

If displacement is metonymic, then many Freudian formations of the unconscious can be described as metonymic effects. A dream element, for example, may stand not for a hidden content by resemblance, but through adjacency in associative networks; a slip of the tongue may follow phonetic or semantic contiguities; a joke may work by shifting along chains of signifiers rather than by expressing a direct intention.

Lacan’s structural point is that the unconscious does not “say” what it means directly. It speaks by detour—by displacement along signifying contiguities. Metonymy is the name for this detour as a formal operation.

Symptom: formation and persistence

Lacan is often cited for the complementary formula: "the symptom is a metaphor" / "desire is a metonymy". The pair is not meant to divide reality into two pure domains; rather, it isolates two dominant logics:

• Metaphor accounts for condensed meaning-effects (symptom formation as substitutive knotting);
• Metonymy accounts for the chain’s persistence—the way the subject’s speech circles, repeats, and displaces.

Clinically, symptoms are sustained by metonymic chains even when they are structured as metaphoric condensations. Analytic work often involves tracing these chains: how one signifier calls forth another, how the subject avoids a signifier by sliding toward adjacent ones, and how repetition is maintained by displacement.

Metonymy, repetition, and insistence

Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion can be reread in Lacanian terms as the insistence of the signifier: what repeats is not necessarily a remembered event but a structural necessity in the signifying network. Metonymy offers a way to formalize this insistence: the same lack is displaced from one signifier to another, producing repetitive circuits of speech and action.

In Lacanian listening, repetition often appears as the return of particular signifiers, phrases, and narrative pivots, coupled with persistent detours around others. Metonymy is the conceptual tool for describing such patterns as effects of chain linkage rather than as intentional choices.

Desire and drive

Lacan distinguishes drive from desire: desire is articulated in the field of the Other and proceeds metonymically, while the drive is often described as a circuit around a partial object. Even so, drive objects are not simply biological things; they are symbolically configured and can be displaced and substituted. Metonymy is therefore relevant to how drive satisfactions become “attached” to signifiers and to how bodily aims are taken up in language.

This distinction becomes increasingly important in later Lacan (with the emphasis on jouissance and the limits of meaning), but the metonymic logic remains a baseline description of how signifiers continue to move even where satisfaction is partial or paradoxical.

Clinical implications

Free association and metonymic unfolding

Freudian free association depends on letting speech unfold without censorship; Lacan’s contribution is to emphasize that such unfolding is structurally metonymic. The analysand’s discourse proceeds along contiguities—phonetic echoes, semantic adjacency, cultural idioms, personal signifiers—so that unconscious determinants appear in the chain rather than behind it.

For the Lacanian analyst, the task is not primarily to “decode” a latent content, but to attend to how the chain is organized: which signifiers are linked, which are avoided, where sliding accelerates, and where it stops.

Interpretation, punctuation, and the chain

Lacan’s account of interpretation treats it as an intervention at the level of the signifier—punctuating, cutting, or producing equivocation so that the chain is reconfigured. Seminar XI is a key locus for Lacan’s account of analytic practice oriented to the unconscious rather than to ego-psychological explanation.

Metonymy matters here because interpretation often works by changing the linkages that sustain displacement: making a signifier audible in a new way, isolating a repetition, or producing a cut that allows a different articulation of desire. Metaphor (substitution) and metonymy (chain) are thus not only theoretical terms but coordinates for what analytic speech does and how interventions can have effects.

Metonymy, structure, and psychosis

In Lacan’s structural clinic, psychosis is distinguished from neurosis not by “more or less” repression but by the mechanism of foreclosure (Verwerfung) of the Name-of-the-Father. Lacan’s Seminar III is the classic statement of this thesis. Since the paternal metaphor is an exemplary metaphoric substitution that stabilizes signification, its foreclosure entails a structural instability in the symbolic order. Metonymy remains as the basic linkage of signifiers, but without the same anchoring function that produces stable signified effects. In psychotic phenomena, signifiers may thus be experienced as intrusive, unmoored, or directly addressed to the subject.

This is not to say that “metonymy causes psychosis,” but that metonymy, as the baseline operation of the chain, becomes clinically legible in different ways depending on whether decisive symbolic operators (like the Name-of-the-Father) are integrated or foreclosed.

Metonymy in later Lacan

Although Lacan’s later teaching increasingly emphasizes jouissance, topology, and the limits of signification, metonymy remains relevant as the description of how the signifier continues to move and how desire persists in language. Even where Lacan stresses what escapes symbolization (the Real), the metonymic chain remains the symbolic backdrop against which those limits are encountered.

Comparison with metaphor

Metonymy and metaphor form a structural pair in Lacanian theory, derived from Jakobson and mapped onto Freud:

Dimension	Metonymy (Lacan)	Metaphor (Lacan)
Linguistic pole (Jakobson)	Combination / contiguity (syntagmatic)	Selection / substitution (paradigmatic)
Freudian correlate	Displacement (Verschiebung)	Condensation (Verdichtung)
Relation to signification	Sliding / deferral of the signified; chain sustains movement	New effect of meaning via substitution; “stop” or knotting
Canonical Lacanian linkage	Desire is metonymic (restless displacement)	Symptom is metaphoric (condensed substitution)

Criticisms and discussions

Critiques of Lacan’s concept of metonymy often target (a) the risk of linguistic reductionism (treating psychic life as nothing but language), and (b) the abstraction of formal schemas. Lacanian responses typically emphasize that language in Lacan is not a mere tool for communication but the structuring condition of subjectivity: metonymy is meant to name how speaking beings are bound to lack, repetition, and displaced satisfaction—not to deny affect or embodiment. In clinical terms, the utility of the concept is measured by whether it sharpens listening to speech and clarifies why desire and meaning resist closure.

See also

• Metaphor (Lacan)
• Sliding of the signified
• Signifier
• Signified
• Signification
• Desire (psychoanalysis)
• Need (psychoanalysis)
• Demand (psychoanalysis)
• Displacement (Freud)
• Condensation (Freud)
• Dream-work
• Symptom
• Other
• Name-of-the-Father
• Foreclosure
• Psychosis