The Grammar of the Soul: “The Unconscious is Structured Like a Language”

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Today I want to explore a key idea in Lacanian psychoanalysis: the unconscious is structured like a language.

My name is Simone. I’m a psychoanalyst, and I’ll be your host for this episode.

The unconscious is structured like a language

The sentence “the unconscious is structured like a language” is probably the most well-known idea associated with Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst who reworked Freud’s discoveries in the twentieth century.

Freud revealed the unconscious as a place where desires, wishes, and conflicts are pushed out of awareness. Lacan agreed with this, but he went further. He argued that the unconscious is not a messy pile of impulses. Instead, it follows an order. It has rules, patterns, and connections, much like the rules that organise language itself. In other words, the unconscious does not speak randomly; it speaks in a structured way, using the same logic that shapes how we speak, listen, and understand meaning.

Moving Beyond Biology

Before Lacan, the unconscious was often seen as something biological or animal-like, driven mainly by instincts. Lacan rejected this idea. He believed that humans are shaped by words from the very beginning of life. For Lacan, we are born into a world where language already exists, and this world leaves a deep mark on how we think, feel, and desire.

From the moment we enter what Lacan called the Symbolic Order, the raw needs of a baby are turned into spoken demands. Symbolic Order simply means the world of language, names, and social rules since the symbolic is the very structure of human reality, and we are subjected to it, and our desire is structured by its laws and rules.

In the mid-1950s, Lacan began to rethink psychoanalysis using ideas from structural linguistics, especially those of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure described language as a system made only of differences. Words do not have meaning because of what they are, but because they are different from other words. There are no fixed, positive meanings, only relationships and contrasts.

This idea became central to Lacan’s notion of structure. For him, language is the main model for understanding how the human mind is organised. When Lacan says that “the unconscious is structured like a language,” he is making a precise point: to say that something is structured already means that it works like language. Meaning is produced through relations, gaps, and differences, not through instinct or biology alone.

For this reason, Lacan argued that the unconscious is not a primitive or chaotic place. It is carefully organised and follows the same rules that structure language itself, such as how words relate to each other and how meaning is created.

The Signifier and the Signified

In linguistics, a signifier is the word or sound we use, like the word “apple,” and the signified is the idea or thing it points to, such as the red fruit we can eat. Normally, we expect the word and the meaning to stay neatly connected.

Lacan argued that in the unconscious this connection often breaks down. The clear meaning – the signified – is missing, hidden, or pushed aside. What remains is a chain of words, images, and sounds linking to each other. The unconscious moves from one signifier to the next without stopping at a clear explanation.

LEARN MORE: Jacques Lacan Philosophy

This is why desire and symptoms often seem confusing. A person might be afraid of “birds,” not because birds are dangerous, but because the word “bird” is tied, through sound, memory, or wordplay, to something else entirely. It might echo a person’s name, a childhood scene, or a painful moment. The fear attaches itself to the word, not the animal. In this way, the unconscious speaks through language itself, using links between words rather than clear, logical meanings.

Conclusion

If the unconscious works like a language, then healing in psychoanalysis must happen through speaking. This is why psychoanalysis is often called a talking cure. The analyst’s task is not to search for biological faults, but to listen carefully to how a person speaks, especially when speech goes wrong.
Slips of the tongue, which Freud called parapraxes, are not accidents. They are moments when the unconscious inserts its own message into the conversation. It is as if the unconscious briefly takes a pen and writes a line of text through the speaker’s mouth.

By paying attention to how sentences are formed, where words break down, and where jokes appear, the analyst helps the person read this hidden message. In doing so, the person begins to recognise the underlying structure of their own desire and gains a clearer relationship to it.