The function of writing in Lacan

Abstract

This essay pretends to introduce and elucidate the complex relationship of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan with writing through his theory of the autonomy of the signifier. To reach this goal i will focus primarily, but not only, in some lessons of the seminar XViii-year 1971 – titled “on a Discourse That Would not Be semblance’. This seminar is located in a historical moment of fundamental importance to its author: political and social changes do not leave indifferent the French psychoanalyst, who the precedent year, 1970, stands with a critical sign of himself; after this year we can distinguish between Lacan i and Lacan ii, and we can also talk about Freud, in a personal way and as founder of psychoanalysis. This movement bears the title of an important workshop: ‘The other side of psychoanalysis’, which shapes the fundamental notion of discourse as a structure that sets the nucleus of any act in which words are involved, words that are severely constrained of a structure that precedes it and that are called by Lacan ‘discourses’ .He will resume them in four types: the master, the hysteric, the analyst and the discourse of the university. after the important seminar on The Purloined Letter” of 1956 and the text of 1957 «The instance of the Letter in the Unconscious», Lacan will return, after fourteen years, to the argument of writing in a period marked by change: in society and in his doctrine.