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The paper of [[language]] and [[speech]] in [[psychoanalysis]] (1953) read to the founding congress of the [[SPFSFP]] in Rome in 1953 (and therefore often referred to as the "Rome Discourse") is the first great manifesto of [[Lacanian psychoanalysis]].
[[Lacan]] calls for a "[[return to Freud]]," stressing the pressing need to read [[Freud]] in detail (and preferably in German) and enouncing the dominant tendencies within contemporary [[psychoanalysis]] ([[ego-psychology]], [[Kleinian psychoanalysis]] and [[object-relations theory]]) as so many forms of revisionism.
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Although the 1953 paper abounds in reference to [[language]] and [[linguistics]], it is only in his paper on the aency of the letter (1957) that [[Lacan]] truly begins to explore and appropriate the legacy of [[Saussure]].
At the same time he also relies heavily on [[Jakobson]]'s work of [[phoneme]] analysis and on [[metaphor]]/[[metonymy]], which are likened to the mechanisms of [[condensation]] and [[displacement]].
[[Language]] is now defined as a [[synchronic]] system of [[sign]]s which generate meaning through their interaction; meaning insists in and throuhg a [[chain]] of [[signifier]]s, and does not reside in nay one element.
The structural isomorphism between the workings of [[language]] and the [[unconscious]] mechanisms of [[dream-work]] allows [[Lacan]] to conclude that the [[unconscious]] is structured like a [[language]].
For [[Lacan]] there is never any direct correspondence between [[signifier]] and [[signified]], and meaning is therefore always in danger of sliding of [[slip]]ping out of control.
An element of stability is, he argues, provided by privileged signifiers such as the [[phallus]] and the [[Name-of-the-Father]], and it is this claim that exposes him to [[Derrida]]'s accusations of [[logocentrism]] and [[phallogocentrism]].
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[[Lacan]]'s early use of [[linguistics]] anticipates a distinctive feature of his later work in that he makes use of quasi-mathematical formulae to illustrate the workings of [[metaphor]] and [[metonymy]].
The initial formulae are no doubt little more than pedagogic devises, but they gradually develop into a so-called [[Lacanian]] [[algebra]] and a set of [[amthemes]] designed to ensure that [[psychoanalytic theory]] can be subjected to a [[formalization]] and to guarantee its integral transmission.
