Abstract

Naming Freud the founder of psychoanalysis, Michel Foucault asserts that there is an "inevitable necessity" for a "return to the origin." Among all Freud's descendants who tread the route of return, Lacan is the most conspicuous. This essay attempts to examine the formation of the founding act of the discourse and revisit Lacan's returning route, particularly in light of the discursive practice of psychoanalysis. Much of this study reveals that the "origin" has been, since its inception, an absent destination, insofar as it is not a "place" with a determinate signified but a place of a signifier that is always referring to an "other." As far as Lacan's return is concerned, it acts like a "signifying practice" in which the laws of signification are staged and performed on a differentiating term. His return only calls into question again the existing mode of psychoanalysis. As the hyphen(-)of the word, "dis-cursivity", in the title suggests, the formation of the discourse, as a result of the interplay of metonymy and metaphor, is constantly barred by the errant and unpredictable "fading" movement. It, by all means, transforms as well as disorients the psychoanalytic orthodoxy, insofar as it always presents itself as what it is not.

Keywords: Freud, Lacan, psychoanalysis, discursivity, return, other, metonymy, metaphor