Towards a Psychoanalysis of the Signifier 

Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud stated at the beginning of the twentieth century that in psychoanalysis “it is through language that what is essential is revealed.” Understanding, for him, is zurückführen, literally “leading back,” that is, bringing language back to its ground, to this Grundsprache, a language of the depths, or Seelesprache, the language of the soul.

In "The Interpretation of Dreams", Freud presents the dream as a rebus that must be taken literally; Jacques Lacan adds that this rebus is composed of letters as graphic signifiers and of sounds as phonic signifiers.This structure based on letters or phonemes, which articulates the signifier within discourse, is a dynamic element of the dream, as in the famous figure of “the man with a comma‑shaped head.”

The collective Unconscious, theorized by Carl Gustav Jung, guides social groups and humanity as the individual unconscious guides each subject. Freud showed that the individual unconscious manifests itself in discourse, notably in dreams and slips of the tongue, which he considers as the emergence of unconscious wishes. In the same way, for Jung, the collective Unconscious manifests itself in language.

For Jacques Lacan — who, in the 1960s, transferred the notion of signifier from linguistics into psychoanalysis—“the images of the dream are to be retained only for their value as signifiers,” for what they allow one to spell out of the proverb (or “pre‑verb”) proposed by the dream‑rebus.

For him, the signifier takes precedence over the signified. According to Lacan, the crossing of the bar between signified and signifier takes place through the play of signifiers among themselves in each subject, through an incessant sliding of the signified beneath the signifier that is articulated in psychoanalysis by the operations of metonymy and metaphor, which he names the “laws of language” of the unconscious.

Lacan maintains that “the unconscious knows only the elements of the signifier,” that it is “a chain of signifiers which repeats and insists,” and that it operates “without regard for the signified or for the acoustic boundaries of syllables.” For him, “the unconscious is a language,” made up of elements of the signifier that pre‑exist the signified. He goes on to say that “the unconscious is purely a matter of the letter and, as such, something to be read.”

Lacan further specifies that “any segmentation of the signifying material into units—whether phonic, graphic, gestural, or tactile—is of the order of the letter.” Yet, “if every signifying sequence is a sequence of letters, not every sequence of letters is, for all that, a signifying sequence.” The function of signifiers is to induce signification within the signified by imposing their structure upon it.

Almost everything is already there. This hidden or unrecognized motivation of signifying sequences has in recent years become the object of research among younger linguists, in particular in the study of what they call “submorphemes” in word‑initial position, especially in English (see the work of Jean‑Marc Chadelat, Didier Bottineau, Lise Argoud, Dennis Philips, Ingrid Frandrych, Georges Bohas), in which they bring to light a stable invariance of notion. All these new lines of inquiry converge on an unconscious semantics of such submorphemic units—units that have, in fact, already been inventoried and “psychoanalyzed” since 1995 in Maux à mots by Dr Christian Dufour, which describes around a hundred bivalent semantic units.

Lacan, who so precisely described all the characteristics of the language of the unconscious, never, curiously enough, discovered its Code: the exact and complete system of signifying sequences that this site undertakes to reveal. He did not see that the sliding of the signifieds beneath the supposed bar of the signifier is secondary to the existence of this hidden Code, because Lacan remained prisoner of his elaborated linguistic knowledge, even though he had perfectly grasped that certain literal sequences of the signifier, repeated across contexts, were what constituted the discourse of the unconscious.

Very little was missing for him to arrive at the literal code of these signifying sequences. This unconscious decoding has required lengthy work of decipherment, begun in 1995 in Maux à mots and then taken up again in Entendre les mots qui disent les maux (Éditions du Dauphin, 2000, 2006), with a preface by Jacques Salomé. The Code is revealed only progressively, in order to bring the reader to hear words otherwise (“autre ment”), to privilege listening to the resonance of words, to attend to sound before meaning, so as to discover a Code of the Unconscious that was staring us in the face and ringing in our ears, yet to which we have become blind and deaf. Formatted as we all are, programmed by the learning of our mother tongue through open syllables, we have repressed out of consciousness certain signifying sequences.

It is this learning of the mother tongue through the “B‑A, BA” of open syllables that has induced our consciousness to go “dodo,” to hear in this so‑called childish word only the repetition of the open syllable do. Biological science is stubborn: the linear flow of the sound‑chain of the signifier does not correspond solely to what we have been conditioned to hear and to read. By concealing from us the cluster od, a so‑called closed syllable in the sound‑chain of dodo, our consciousness has shut itself off from one of these unconscious units, which in French and in the European languages carries two unique senses: wave and/or mass.

Human sleep is characterized, in its various phases, by specific electrical waves recordable by EEG, and, in French, when someone suddenly falls asleep, popular speech—which always tells the truth—says that “he fell like a dead weight” (tomber comme une masse). What professor has ever told you that “wave” is inscribed by od in ode, prosodie, mélodie or rhapsodie, and that the notion of “mass,” “massive,” is likewise borne by the signifying sequence od, as we find it in mastodonte, diplodocus, Iguanodon, in the Colossus of Rhodes, or in the giant Komodo dragon? Even modern physics links mass and wave in string theory; the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 is only a first experimental confirmation of its physical reality.

Human consciousness, Babelized by the construction of the skyscraper of its lexical stock out of bricks of open syllables, has, to put it with an introductory touch of humour, been well and truly struck “in the baba” (in a profoundly abyssal ab). The human being is a primate and has retained from his ancestors the capacity to mime, to imitate, to “ape.” To memorize is first of all to repeat. In acquiring the mother tongue, one repeats open syllables to form some fifty childish words and even other adult words (tutu, baba, coco, nana, etc.).

Whether it is a child learning a poem by heart or an actor learning a play, what is at stake is repetition. The existence of mirror neurons was brought to light in the 1990s by Giacomo Rizzolatti’s neuroscience team at the Faculty of Medicine in Parma; they showed that such neurons play an essential role in learning. A cortical area designated F5 possesses a “vocabulary of motor acts” which informs our perception, whether the act is actually performed or remains potential. Vision, which guides the hand in its gesture, amounts to a “seeing with the hand,” relative to which the perceived object immediately appears coded as a determinate set of possible actions.

The origins of language are thus not to be sought in primitive forms of animal vocalization, but in the primary modalities of gestural communication, made possible by the mirror‑neuron system. It seems that one can establish a continuity between gestural communication and verbal communication, in which the evolutionary development of the mirror‑neuron system plays a fundamental role.

A new category of so‑called “echo neurons” has been identified, arising from a probable evolutionary reorganization of the primitive system of gestural communication into a gestural communication specific to articulatory gestures: certain motor neurons of the tongue are in fact activated when listening to “fricative labiopalatal consonants” such as the rolled r (for example, in Italian).

As for phonosymbolism, several robust phonosymbolic correlations have been established by recent experimental studies, notably through protocols using pseudo‑words, which make it possible to isolate direct links between sound features and meanings. In summary, associations of the types sound–size, sound–shape, sound–light, sound–taste and sound–affect are now widely accepted in contemporary phonosymbolism. The sounds /i/, /e/, /t/, /p/, produced in the anterior part of the vocal tract and with a tight articulation, are consistently perceived as “smallness‑marking” in phonosymbolic experiments.

Since language is a crucial acquisition of the human species, understanding its nature and biological structure should allow us to grasp how our words were formed and to uncover their true origin—an actual etymology quite different from the current one, which is based on the entire signifying chain of the word. Today, no one can find any obvious semantic commonality between Frencc words: 

 mustang, puce (“flea”), musaraigne (“shrew”), montagne russe (“roller‑coaster”), bus, prépuce (“foreskin”), sucette (“lollipop”), secousse (“jolt”), tousser (“to cough”), se trémousser (“to wriggle”), transfuser, fusée (“rocket”), virus, sinusoïde.

What common point unites these signifiers of highly diverse origin that would single out one of their specific characteristics? The continuation of this site " LINGUISTIC SIGN " will provide the answer and reveal what the genuine units of language are.

https://signelinguistique.e-monsite.com