2 - Treeing Lacan, or the Meaning of Metaphor

Summary

The chain of associations always has more than two links; and the traumatic scenes do not form a simple row, like a string of pearls, but ramify and are interconnected like genealogical trees.

(Freud, ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’)

All of what I experienced with my patients, as a third [person] I find again here [in my self-analysis] – days when I drag myself about dejected because I have understood nothing of the dream, of the fantasy, of the mood of the day; and then again days when a flash of lightning illuminates the interrelations and lets me understand the past as a preparation for the present.

Freud to Fliess, 27 Oct. 1897

Lacan summons reason and the letter together in the title of his 9 May 1957 lecture at the Sorbonne, ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’. This joint convocation, made before the Philosophy Group of the Fédération des Etudiants ès Lettres, seems to imply that the epoch of Freud has effected some historical shift in the ancient relation of logic and language, philosophy and poetry, metaphysics and metaphor. Whether the connective word ‘or’ signifies a conjunction of the two terms, in the sense that western philosophy has always considered language to be the instrument, or even the essence, of reason, or a disjunction, along the lines of Plato's primordial quarrel between mythos and logos, the title does not specify.