Language, the Unconscious, and the Question of Desire
There is a particular kind of impasse that brings people to psychoanalytic work. Not the impasse of not knowing what is wrong; many of them know perfectly well. It is the impasse of knowing and still not being able to change anything. The pattern continues. The relationship ends in the same way. The anxiety returns, despite the tools, the insight, the years of effort.
Cognitive frameworks offer an explanation for this in terms of faulty beliefs or maladaptive schemas. Psychoanalysis offers a different explanation: that the relevant processes are not primarily cognitive, and that they operate, by definition, outside the reach of conscious reflection. What keeps the pattern going is not a mistake in thinking. It is a structure, one organised at the level of the unconscious, sustained by desire, and expressed through the specific language the subject uses to describe their life.
Lacanian psychoanalysis names and theorises this structure with unusual precision. What follows is an account of its core claims, its clinical implications, and what it looks like in practice.
Lacan’s Return to Freud
Jacques Lacan was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose seminars, delivered in Paris from 1953 to 1979, constitute one of the most sustained and demanding engagements with Freudian theory in the history of the discipline. His central project was not to revise Freud but to return to him; or, more precisely, to retrieve what Lacan believed had been systematically misread by the ego-psychology tradition dominant in the postwar United States.
Ego psychology, broadly, held that the aim of psychoanalytic treatment was the strengthening of the ego, understood as the rational, reality-oriented part of the mind, and its adaptation to the demands of the social world. Lacan regarded this as a profound misreading of Freud’s discovery. Freud had not discovered the ego. He had discovered the unconscious: a radically heterogeneous agency that does not obey the laws of logic, time, or contradiction, and that speaks in the gaps and failures of ordinary speech.
Lacan’s return to Freud was therefore also a return to the unconscious as the primary object of psychoanalytic attention. His theoretical innovation was to describe its structure in terms drawn not from biology or neurology but from linguistics, specifically the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the work on language functions by Roman Jakobson (Lacan, 1957/2006; Jakobson, 1956).
The Unconscious Is Structured Like a Language
Lacan’s most cited proposition, that the unconscious is structured like a language, is both precise and frequently misunderstood. It does not mean that the unconscious communicates in sentences, or that it contains thoughts waiting to be translated into words. It means that the unconscious operates according to the same formal principles as language: through substitution and displacement, condensation and metaphor, the sliding of meaning under apparently fixed terms.
Saussure had described the sign as the combination of a signifier (the sound-image, or word) and a signified (the concept). He also described the relationship between them as arbitrary: there is no natural connection between the word ‘mother’ and the concept or the person it designates. Lacan took this further. He argued that in the unconscious, signifiers chain together without stable anchorage to any fixed signified. Meaning does not land; it slides. And it is precisely in these points of sliding, in the gaps and slippages of speech, that the unconscious makes itself known (Lacan, 1957/2006; Saussure, 1916/1983).
This has a direct clinical implication. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then it can be read, not decoded exactly, but attended to in its own terms. The analyst’s ear is trained not on the general content of what a person says, but on the specific signifiers they return to, the places where speech hesitates or contradicts itself, the moments where something says more than the speaker intended. As Lacan noted in his foundational paper on the function of speech: ‘The subject receives his own message from the Other in an inverted form’ (Lacan, 1953/2006, p. 208).
Three Registers: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary
Central to Lacan’s theoretical architecture is the distinction between three registers, which he maintained throughout his seminars as a framework for understanding the structure of subjectivity: the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. These are not stages of development or levels of consciousness. They are distinct dimensions of human experience that are always simultaneously in play.
The Imaginary is the register of images, identifications, and the dual relation between self and other. The ego, understood as the image we have of ourselves, is formed in the Imaginary. Lacan’s account of the mirror stage (1949/2006) describes the infant’s earliest identification with their reflection as the foundational moment of ego formation. But this identification is always a misrecognition: the image in the mirror is more unified, more stable, more whole than the fragmented bodily experience the infant actually inhabits. The ego is, from the outset, founded on an illusion.
The Symbolic is the register of language, law, and the signifier. It is the order into which the subject is born, and which precedes and determines them in ways they cannot fully apprehend. The Symbolic includes not only words but the entire network of social, cultural, and familial structures that organise a subject’s world. Lacan’s concept of the Other, written with a capital O, refers to this order: the locus of the signifier, the site from which the subject receives their identity and their desire.
The Real is the most difficult of the three registers to characterise, precisely because it is defined by what resists symbolisation. The Real is not reality in the ordinary sense. It is what cannot be absorbed into the Symbolic order, what returns insistently, what makes itself felt as trauma, as the body’s refusal to comply, as the persistent remainder that no amount of interpretation fully dissolves. Lacan described it as ‘that which always returns to the same place’ (Lacan, 1973/1981, p. 49). The four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, comprising the unconscious, repetition, transference, and the drive, are all elaborated in Seminar XI in relation to the Real (Lacan, 1973/1981).
Desire, Lack, and the Subject
One of Lacan’s most consequential theoretical moves was his account of desire. Where need belongs to the biological register, covering the need for food, warmth, and physical proximity, and demand is the articulation of need in language addressed to another, desire is what remains after demand has been subtracted from need. Desire is, structurally, a remainder. It cannot be satisfied, because satisfaction would require an object that does not exist.
This is not pessimism. It is a structural observation with clinical implications. The patient who arrives at treatment seeking relief from their symptoms, or hoping to find the relationship that will finally make them feel whole, is seeking an object that will close the gap, that will make good the originary lack that Lacan, following Freud, regards as constitutive of subjectivity itself. Analysis does not promise to fill this gap. It offers instead the possibility of a different relation to it: a less driven, less symptomatic, less compulsive way of inhabiting the fact of one’s desire.
Bruce Fink’s account of the Lacanian subject describes this clearly. The subject is always split, divided between their conscious intentions and the unconscious that runs its own logic beneath them, divided between the identity they present to others and the desire that exceeds and disrupts that presentation (Fink, 1995). This is not a defect to be corrected. It is the condition of subjectivity as such.
How the Clinical Work Proceeds
A Lacanian analytic session is structured differently from most other forms of psychological therapy. Its organising principle is free association: the invitation to speak without self-censorship, without editorial selection, without the implicit audience-management that ordinarily governs speech. Most people find this more difficult than it sounds. We are accustomed to presenting ourselves, to constructing a coherent narrative, to saying what we think will be understood or accepted. Free association asks something different: to follow the chain of thought wherever it goes, to say the thing that seems irrelevant or embarrassing or too small to mention.
It is in these apparently marginal moments, the slip of the tongue, the dream fragment, the sudden memory with no apparent connection to what was being discussed, that the unconscious speaks most clearly. Freud’s documentation of the psychopathology of everyday life, a systematic study of forgetting, slips, mistakes, and apparently random associations, demonstrated that these failures of ordinary speech are not accidents (Freud, 1901/1960). They have a logic. The task of analytic attention is to begin to hear it.
The analyst’s position in this process is carefully managed. The Lacanian analyst does not offer interpretations in the mode of expert commentary on the patient’s unconscious. They do not advise, reassure, or affirm. They occupy what Lacan called the position of the ‘subject-supposed-to-know’, the figure to whom the analysand attributes knowledge of their truth, while simultaneously working to dissolve that transference rather than sustain it. The analyst’s speech is sparse and precise. A well-placed question, a repetition of the analysand’s own words in a slightly different register, a punctuation of the session at a moment of particular density: these are the primary technical interventions (Fink, 1997; Lacan, 1958/2006).
The variable-length session, sometimes called the short session or scansion, is a specific Lacanian technical innovation. Rather than ending every session at a fixed clock time, the Lacanian analyst may choose to end the session at a moment of particular resonance: a slip, a significant silence, a phrase that has arrived unexpectedly and deserves time to reverberate. This is not arbitrary. It is a deliberate use of the frame to foreground the material that has emerged, giving the unconscious content time to work on the analysand between sessions rather than being immediately processed and managed. Lacan articulated the rationale for this in ‘The Direction of the Treatment’ (1958/2006).
Psychoanalysis, Repetition, and the Question of Change
One of the most common questions asked of psychoanalytic treatment is whether it produces change, and if so, of what kind, and on what timescale. These are reasonable questions, and they deserve honest answers.
Freud identified the compulsion to repeat as one of the central clinical phenomena of analytic work: the tendency to repeat, in the present, configurations of relationship and experience that originated in the past. The repetition does not bring pleasure; it persists because something in the earlier experience was not worked through, not symbolised, not absorbed into the subject’s history in a way that allowed it to become simply past (Freud, 1914/1958). The repetition is the unconscious’s way of returning to an unfinished problem.
What psychoanalytic treatment offers is not the elimination of this tendency, which is structural, but a gradual change in the subject’s relationship to their own unconscious formations. When a patient begins to recognise their repetitions, not intellectually but in the felt encounter with them as they arise in the transference and in the material of sessions, something shifts. Not a cure in the medical sense, but a loosening. A greater degree of freedom in relation to what had previously been compulsive.
The evidence base for psychoanalytic and psychodynamic treatment is more substantial than is generally acknowledged in mainstream mental health discourse. Shedler’s meta-analysis, published in ‘American Psychologist’, found effect sizes for psychodynamic therapy comparable to those reported for other therapies, with a distinctive pattern of continued improvement after treatment ends, a finding rarely observed in briefer, more structured approaches (Shedler, 2010). Fonagy and colleagues’ pragmatic randomised controlled trial found that long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy produced superior outcomes to shorter-term treatment for chronic depression, particularly at long-term follow-up (Fonagy et al., 2015). Leichsenring and Leibing’s meta-analytic review found psychodynamic therapy comparable in efficacy to CBT across a range of conditions, with advantages for more complex presentations (Leichsenring and Leibing, 2003).
These findings matter. They suggest that the distinction between depth-oriented and symptom-focused approaches is not merely a philosophical preference but a clinically meaningful one, particularly for presentations characterised by complexity, chronicity, or the failure of briefer interventions.
What Lacanian Psychoanalysis Is Particularly Suited To
Lacanian psychoanalysis is not designed for everyone, and it makes no such claim. It is specifically suited to presentations and clinical questions that cannot be adequately addressed through the modification of conscious behaviour or the acquisition of new cognitive skills.
It tends to suit people who have accumulated insight, who can articulate their patterns with considerable precision, and who have found that this insight does not produce change. It suits people for whom the recurring difficulty is not a discrete symptom but a more pervasive sense of inhabiting a life that does not quite fit, of wanting something they cannot name, of arriving repeatedly at the same impasse without knowing how they got there again.
It suits people who take ideas seriously and who are willing to engage with the unfamiliar. Lacanian theory is not intuitive in the way that many contemporary therapeutic frameworks are designed to be. It does not offer a vocabulary of wellness or a set of tools for self-improvement. What it offers is a framework for taking one’s own speech seriously, for beginning to hear what one is actually saying, rather than what one intends to say.
It is also particularly relevant for clinicians and allied health professionals seeking supervision with a psychoanalytic orientation, specifically for those who want a framework rigorous enough to match the complexity of the work they are encountering in their own practice.
The Freudian School of Melbourne and the Local Context
In Australia, Lacanian psychoanalysis has been developed and taught primarily through the Freudian School of Melbourne (formerly the Melbourne School of Freudian Studies), which maintains close ties with international Lacanian networks, including the World Association of Psychoanalysis. The MFSM offers training, supervision, and theoretical formation in the Lacanian tradition, and its membership includes clinicians working across Melbourne and other Australian cities.
This is the tradition in which my clinical work is grounded. I undertook my formation within the MFSM, and my practice in Richmond is conducted in accordance with Lacanian principles: free association as the fundamental rule, careful attention to the specific signifiers that structure each patient’s account of their life, and a commitment to the analytic frame as a space where the patient’s own truth can emerge rather than being prescribed in advance.
Lacanian psychoanalysis in Melbourne remains rare. The number of practitioners working explicitly within this tradition, with sustained theoretical formation, is small. For people searching for this specific approach, particularly those who have found other frameworks insufficient, this matters.
Sessions are available in person at 53 Erin Street, Richmond, and via Telehealth across Victoria and nationally. I am a registered Clinical Psychologist, and Medicare rebates are available with a Mental Health Care Plan from your GP. A free fifteen-minute phone consultation is available for anyone wanting to understand whether this approach is suited to their situation. There is no obligation.
About Myles Medwell
Myles Medwell is a Clinical Psychologist and Lacanian psychoanalyst based in Richmond, Melbourne. He holds a Master of Psychology (Clinical) from Federation University and is registered with AHPRA. He is a member of the Australian Clinical Psychology Association and is currently undertaking ongoing psychoanalytic formation at the Freudian School of Melbourne.
He works with adults and older adolescents across a wide range of presentations, including complex trauma, anxiety, depression, identity and relational difficulties, Functional Neurological Disorder, and personality disorders. Psychological assessment and psychoanalytic clinical supervision are also available. GP, psychiatrist, and allied health referrals are welcome.
53 Erin Street, Richmond Melbourne VIC 3121 | www.mylesmedwell.com.au | 0466 509 179
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