Equally, Drawing On Certain Moments Within Freud's Papers On The Psychology

Equally, drawing on certain moments within Freud's papers On the Psychology of Love, Lacan argues that desire is structured as a metonymy. In metonymy, one designates a whole concept (e.g.: military force) by naming a component of it (e.g.: a sword). Lacan's argument is that, equally, since castration denies subjects full access to their first love object (the mother), their choice of subsequent love objects is the choice of a series of objects that each resemble in part the lost object.
According to Lacan, the unconscious uses the multivalent resources of the natural language into which the subject has been inducted (what he calls 'the battery of the signifier') to give indirect vent to the desires that the subject cannot consciously avow.
While Freud is interested in investigating how the polymorphously perverse child forms an unconscious and a superego, and becomes a civilized adult, Lacan's focus is on how the infant develops the illusion commonly termed as a "self. His essay on the Mirror Stage describes that process, showing how the infant forms an illusion of an ego, of a unified conscious self identified by the word "I."
For Lacan's theory, the notion that the unconscious, which governs all factors of human existence, is structured like a language is central. Freud's account of the two main mechanisms of unconscious processes, condensation and displacement, reinforce this claim. Both are essentially linguistic phenomena; meaning is either condensed (in metaphor) or displaced (in metonymy). Lacan noted that Freud's dream analyses, and most of his analyses of the unconscious symbolism used by his patients, depend on word-play (e.g., puns, associations, etc.) that are chiefly verbal. According to Lacan, the contents of the unconscious are acutely aware of language and of the structure of language. Hence, the unconscious, structured like a language, serves to reveal a symptom of neurosis or psychosis through this medium.
Lacan followed ideas laid out by Saussure, but adapted them to his use. He argued that Freud had understood the linguistic nature of human psychology but that he had simply lacked the Saussurean vocabulary necessary to articulate it. Saussure talked about the relationship between signifier and signified in the formation of a sign, and contended that language is structured by the negative relation among signs (i.e., the existence of a sign is dependent on its distinction from another sign). For Lacan, the contents of the unconscious form signifiers and these signifiers form a "signifying chain." One signifier has meaning only if it is distinct from some other signifier. There are no 'signifieds' in Lacan's model; there is nothing to which a signifier ultimately refers.