Lacan Posited That Relations Of Signification Do Not Exist In The

Lacan posited that relations of signification do not exist in the unconscious; rather, there are only negative relations in which one signifier can exist only if it is distinct from another signifier.
Because of this lack of signifieds, the chain of signifiers constantly slides and shifts in an endless series, like actors in search of a play. There is no anchor operating in the unconscious, nothing that ultimately gives meaning or stability to the system. The chain of signifiers is constantly in play, in Derrida's sense; there is no point at which a definitive meaning can crystallize. Rather, one signifier only leads to another signifier, and never to a signified (Lacan, 1966).
Lacan posited this as the nature of unconscious content: continually circulating chains of signifiers, with no anchor or center. This is Lacan's linguistic translation of Freud's depiction of the unconscious as a chaotic realm of shifting drives and desires. While Freud attempted to bring those chaotic drives and desires into consciousness so they could be understood and made manageable, Lacan theorized that becoming an adult, a "self," is the process of trying to halt the chain of signifiers so that stable meaning, including the meaning of "I", becomes possible. According to Lacan, however, this possibility is an illusion, an image created by a misperception of the relation between body and self
Even sexual identity is determined by the subject's relation to the signifier, not by some innate, biological predisposition. For Lacan, what Freud described as the oedipal phase is actually a moment in which the individual faces the option of accepting or rejecting the signifier in the place of the object or the imaginary other. Although Freud called this signifier the phallus, its primary characteristic is not its status as a biological organ that one may or may not possess. Rather, this primordial signifier possesses the fundamental property of being separable from the object it represents. Freud identified this possibility as "castration," but Lacan claimed that it is simply the functional principle that enables the signifier to appear as such. Sexuality and, more generally, personal identity is thus not biologically determined but instead constructed through one's relation to the symbolic order.
Most of Lacan's work from this period traces the connections between specific properties of the signifier and their effects in human experience. He claimed that the entire structure of intersubjective relations is determined not by the individuals involved but by the way those individuals model on a moment of the signifying chain which traverses them.