In this episode, William Gomes explores why Jacques Lacan insisted on a return to Freud, arguing that psychoanalysis had strayed from its radical foundations. Far from being a nostalgic retreat or conservative gesture, Lacan’s return to Freud represented a revolutionary rereading that uncovered dimensions of Freud’s work that had been obscured, diluted, or abandoned by post-Freudian schools. By examining what Lacan found in Freud that others had missed, this episode reveals why this return remains essential for understanding both the history of psychoanalysis and its contemporary relevance.
The Context of Lacan’s Return
Post-Freudian Psychoanalysis: What Had Changed
To understand why Lacan insisted on returning to Freud, one must first grasp what had happened to psychoanalysis after Freud’s death in 1939. The decades following saw psychoanalysis develop in directions that increasingly diverged from Freud’s original insights, particularly in the dominant schools of ego psychology and object relations theory.
Ego psychology, which became dominant particularly in the United States, emphasised the ego’s adaptive functions, its capacity for rational mastery, its role in mediating between inner drives and external reality. The goal of analysis became strengthening the ego, helping it achieve better control over unconscious impulses, adapting the patient to social reality.
Object relations theory shifted focus from drives to relationships, from intrapsychic conflict to interpersonal dynamics. The emphasis moved toward the mother-infant relationship, toward how early relational experiences shape psychological development, toward repairing deficits in early care through the therapeutic relationship.
Whilst these developments offered valuable clinical insights, Lacan argued that they had fundamentally betrayed Freud’s most radical discoveries. They had domesticated psychoanalysis, transformed it into a normalising therapy aimed at adaptation and social conformity, abandoned the subversive implications of the unconscious.
What Was Lost: The Radical Freud
Lacan argued that post-Freudian psychoanalysis had lost several of Freud’s most important insights. First, it had abandoned the primacy of the unconscious. Freud’s revolutionary discovery was that the subject is not master in their own house, that consciousness is merely the surface of psychic life, that unconscious processes determine thought and behaviour in ways the subject does not recognise.
Yet ego psychology treated the unconscious as something to be mastered by the ego, as primitive impulses to be controlled through rational deliberation. This reversed Freud’s fundamental insight, reinstating the ego as master rather than recognising its subordination to unconscious processes.
Second, post-Freudian analysis had lost Freud’s understanding of sexuality. Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality, of polymorphous perversity, of the drives’ resistance to complete socialisation: these were radical challenges to Victorian morality and conventional understanding of human nature.
Yet post-Freudian analysis increasingly understood sexuality in biological and developmental terms, as something that matured from infantile stages toward genital normality. This sanitised Freud’s insights, removed their subversive edge, reduced sexuality to a developmental trajectory rather than recognising its fundamentally disruptive character.
Third, post-Freudian analysis had abandoned Freud’s attention to language. Freud had shown that dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes operate through linguistic mechanisms: condensation, displacement, symbolic representation. Yet post-Freudian analysis increasingly treated language as merely a tool for communication, missing its constitutive role in psychic structure.
The Political Stakes of the Return
Lacan’s return to Freud was not merely theoretical or academic. It had profound political stakes. Post-Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly ego psychology, had become increasingly aligned with social adaptation, with helping patients adjust to existing social structures, with therapeutic goals defined by conventional norms of health and maturity.
Lacan saw this as a betrayal of psychoanalysis’s critical potential. Freud had revealed the costs of civilisation, the impossibility of complete socialisation, the ways in which social demands conflict with unconscious desires. Psychoanalysis should reveal these conflicts, not help patients adapt to oppressive social structures.
The return to Freud was thus also a political gesture. It meant reclaiming psychoanalysis as a critical practice, one that challenged rather than reinforced social norms, that respected the subject’s irreducible singularity rather than attempting to normalise them.
This political dimension remains relevant today. In an era of pharmaceutical psychiatry, cognitive-behavioural quick fixes, and therapeutic approaches aimed at symptom management and social functioning, Lacan’s insistence on returning to Freud’s radical insights offers an alternative vision of what therapeutic practice might be.
What Lacan Found in Freud
The Primacy of Language
One of Lacan’s most important contributions was recognising the centrality of language in Freud’s work. Freud had shown that unconscious formations operate through linguistic mechanisms: condensation and displacement in dreams, verbal associations in slips of the tongue, wordplay in jokes.
Yet post-Freudian psychoanalysis had largely missed this linguistic dimension. Dreams were understood as visual imagery expressing symbolic content. Slips were seen as revealing hidden wishes. Language was treated as a transparent medium through which unconscious contents could be expressed.
Lacan argued that Freud’s real discovery was that the unconscious itself is structured linguistically, that it operates through the same mechanisms that organise language: substitution and combination, metaphor and metonymy. The unconscious is not a realm of pre-linguistic drives or wishes; rather, it is structured through signifiers, through the play of language that determines meaning and desire.
This insight transformed how psychoanalysis understands the unconscious. Rather than being a biological or instinctual realm that language merely expresses, the unconscious is itself linguistic, is constituted through language, operates according to linguistic principles.
The Death Drive and Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud’s later work introduced the concept of the death drive, the idea that alongside life-preserving drives there exists a fundamental tendency toward dissolution, destruction, return to an earlier state. This concept was controversial even among Freud’s followers, many of whom rejected or minimised it.
Yet Lacan saw the death drive as one of Freud’s most profound insights. It captured something essential about the compulsion to repeat, about why subjects return to situations that cause suffering, about forms of satisfaction that go beyond pleasure into territory that is destructive yet compelling.
Lacan connected the death drive to what he called jouissance, excessive enjoyment that exceeds the pleasure principle. This helped explain clinical phenomena that seemed paradoxical from the perspective of pleasure-seeking: why addicts continue using despite harm, why trauma survivors repeat traumatic experiences, why symptoms persist despite the subject’s conscious wish to be rid of them.
Understanding the death drive and jouissance meant recognising that human motivation cannot be reduced to pleasure-seeking or adaptation. There are forms of satisfaction that involve suffering, that exceed rational self-interest, that reveal dimensions of psychic life that cannot be domesticated or normalised.
Castration as Symbolic
Freud’s concept of castration was often misunderstood in literal or biological terms, as if it referred to actual threats to the penis or to anatomical difference as such. Yet Lacan argued that Freud’s real insight was that castration is symbolic, that it refers to the subject’s fundamental lack, to the impossibility of complete satisfaction.
As discussed in Episode 15, castration in Lacanian terms is the structural condition through which the subject accedes to the symbolic order. It is not a threat or punishment but rather the acceptance that one cannot possess the mother, cannot be everything for the Other, cannot achieve imaginary completeness.
This symbolic understanding of castration was already implicit in Freud, particularly in his understanding that both sexes experience castration, that it is not simply something that happens to boys or to girls but rather a universal structure of subjectivity.
Returning to Freud meant recovering this symbolic dimension, recognising that castration is not about anatomy but about the subject’s relationship to lack, to language, to the impossibility that structures desire.
Sexuality Beyond Biology
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality was revolutionary precisely because it separated sexuality from biology and reproduction. Infantile sexuality is not preparation for adult genital sexuality; rather, it is polymorphously perverse, finding pleasure in multiple bodily zones and activities that have no reproductive function.
Yet post-Freudian psychoanalysis often treated sexuality developmentally, as if infantile sexuality were merely immature, destined to be superseded by normal genital sexuality. This biological understanding missed what was most radical in Freud: the recognition that sexuality is fundamentally excessive, that it cannot be reduced to reproductive function or biological maturation.
Lacan emphasised this excessive dimension of sexuality. Sexual pleasure is not simply natural or instinctual; rather, it is structured through fantasy, organised by language, mediated by the symbolic order. Human sexuality is denaturalised, separated from biological function, organised around drives that pursue satisfaction beyond reproductive ends.
This understanding has profound implications. It means that there is no such thing as “normal” sexuality, no natural developmental endpoint, no correct way of organising desire. Sexuality is always already perverse in Freud’s sense, always exceeding biological function, always resisting complete socialisation.
The Methodology of Return
Reading Freud Symptomatically
Lacan’s return to Freud was not a simple repetition or orthodox adherence. Rather, it involved what might be called symptomatic reading: attending to tensions, contradictions, and gaps in Freud’s texts, to moments where Freud says more than he consciously intends, where his insights exceed his theoretical framework.
This method recognised that Freud himself did not fully understand the implications of his discoveries, that his texts contain insights that he could not theoretically articulate, that require development beyond what Freud explicitly stated.
For example, Freud discovered that dreams operate through condensation and displacement, yet he understood these in energetic terms, as movements of psychic energy. Lacan recognised that these mechanisms are linguistic, that they correspond to metaphor and metonymy. This was not abandoning Freud but rather developing what was already implicit in his discoveries.
Similarly, Freud recognised the importance of the mirror stage in ego formation, yet he did not develop its full implications. Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage develops what was already present in Freud, making explicit what remained implicit.
Formalisation and Mathemes
Lacan argued that psychoanalysis required formalisation, mathematical notation, rigorous conceptual apparatus. This was not pedantry or abstraction for its own sake. Rather, it reflected Lacan’s belief that ordinary language is inadequate for psychoanalytic theory, that linguistic formulations inevitably import assumptions and associations that distort psychoanalytic insights.
Mathematics and logic offered precision that ordinary language cannot achieve. The formulas and mathemes that Lacan developed were attempts to capture psychoanalytic structures in ways that resist the ambiguities of everyday speech.
This formalisation was also a return to Freud. Freud himself had attempted to formalise psychoanalytic concepts, had used diagrams and schemas, had sought rigour and precision. Yet post-Freudian psychoanalysis had largely abandoned this project, preferring clinical description and case studies to theoretical formalisation.
Lacan’s insistence on formalisation thus recovered something essential in Freud’s approach: the commitment to theoretical rigour, to developing concepts that could capture the structures of psychic life with precision.
Integration with Contemporary Thought
Lacan’s return to Freud also involved bringing psychoanalysis into conversation with contemporary intellectual developments: structuralist linguistics, philosophical phenomenology, mathematical topology, logical formalisation.
This might seem to move away from Freud rather than returning to him. Yet Lacan argued that Freud himself had engaged with the most advanced scientific and philosophical thought of his time: thermodynamics, evolutionary biology, contemporary neurology. Remaining faithful to Freud meant continuing this engagement, bringing psychoanalysis into dialogue with current intellectual frameworks.
Structural linguistics, particularly Saussure’s insights about the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, provided tools for understanding what Freud had discovered about the unconscious. Topology offered ways of formalising psychic structures that resist linguistic representation. These were not impositions on Freud but rather developments of what Freud had already begun.
The Implications of Return
Psychoanalysis as Radical Practice
Returning to Freud meant reclaiming psychoanalysis as a radical practice, one that challenges rather than reinforces social norms, that respects the unconscious rather than attempting to master it, that recognises irreducible singularity rather than imposing normative standards.
This has clinical implications. The analyst does not aim to strengthen the ego, does not help the patient adapt to social reality, does not provide guidance or direction. Rather, the analyst maintains a position of abstinence, creates space for the unconscious to emerge, interprets rather than advises.
The goal is not cure in the sense of symptom removal or social adjustment. Rather, it is helping the subject recognise their unconscious formations, take responsibility for their desire, establish a different relationship to impossibility and lack.
This radical practice stands in opposition to contemporary trends in mental health treatment: medication, brief cognitive interventions, evidence-based protocols aimed at measurable outcomes. Psychoanalysis offers something fundamentally different: sustained engagement with unconscious processes, respect for the subject’s singularity, acceptance that some forms of suffering cannot be eliminated but can be transformed.
The Subject of the Unconscious
Returning to Freud meant recovering the concept of the subject of the unconscious. This is not the ego, not the conscious “I,” not the rational deliberator. Rather, it is the subject who emerges in the gaps of discourse, in slips and symptoms, in dreams and desires that the conscious subject does not recognise.
This subject is divided, barred, fundamentally incomplete. There is no unified self, no transparent self-knowledge, no possibility of complete rational control. The subject is constituted through division, through the gap between consciousness and the unconscious, through language that both enables and alienates.
Understanding the subject of the unconscious has ethical implications. It means respecting what the subject does not know about themselves, recognising that rational deliberation is not the whole story, accepting that unconscious formations will exceed conscious control.
It also challenges contemporary assumptions about autonomy and agency. The subject is not a self-determining individual making free choices. Rather, the subject is determined by unconscious formations, structured through language and culture, driven by desires they do not recognise. Yet within this determination, a different form of freedom becomes possible: the freedom to recognise one’s determination, to understand unconscious structures, to take responsibility for one’s jouissance.
Desire as Fundamental
Freud discovered that human motivation cannot be reduced to need or instinct, that desire operates according to principles that exceed biological function. Yet post-Freudian psychoanalysis often reduced desire to developmental deficit, to wishes for objects that would satisfy needs.
Lacan’s return to Freud recovered desire as fundamental, as the structure through which the subject relates to impossibility, as the ongoing movement toward what cannot be attained. Desire is not a wish for particular objects; rather, it is constitutive of subjectivity, is what keeps the subject moving, what prevents final satisfaction.
Understanding desire as fundamental means recognising that it cannot be satisfied, that the subject will always lack, that complete fulfilment is structurally impossible. This might seem depressing, yet it is also liberating. When the subject accepts that satisfaction is impossible, they are freed from the desperate pursuit of imaginary completion, can invest energy in projects that accept limitation rather than seeking to overcome it.
Language as Constitutive
Perhaps the most important implication of returning to Freud is recognising language as constitutive of subjectivity. The subject is not a pre-linguistic entity that then acquires language; rather, the subject is constituted through language, emerges as an effect of the symbolic order.
This means that thought does not precede language, that we do not first have ideas that we then express in words. Rather, language structures thought, determines what can be thought, produces the categories through which we understand experience.
Clinical practice based on this understanding attends to how patients speak, to the signifiers that organise their discourse, to the linguistic mechanisms that reveal unconscious formations. Interpretation works on the signifying chain rather than on meaning, creates shifts in how signifiers are connected rather than explaining hidden content.
Why the Return Remains Necessary
Contemporary Challenges to Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis today faces challenges that make Lacan’s return to Freud more relevant than ever. Biological psychiatry reduces mental suffering to brain chemistry, treats symptoms with medication whilst ignoring unconscious meanings. Cognitive-behavioural approaches focus on conscious thoughts and behaviours, missing the unconscious formations that structure them.
Therapeutic culture emphasises quick fixes, measurable outcomes, evidence-based protocols. Suffering is understood as something to be eliminated efficiently rather than as something meaningful that might require sustained engagement and transformation.
Against these trends, returning to Freud means insisting on the irreducibility of unconscious processes, on the meaningfulness of symptoms, on the necessity of sustained therapeutic work that respects the subject’s complexity and singularity.
The Relevance of Freud’s Insights
Freud’s insights remain relevant because they address fundamental features of human subjectivity that have not changed despite social and technological transformation. The unconscious still operates, desire still structures human motivation, language still constitutes subjectivity, the symbolic order still organises experience.
Contemporary phenomena, from social media addiction to identity politics, from conspiracy theories to political polarisation, can be understood through Freudian concepts: repetition compulsion, narcissism, projection, the return of the repressed. Returning to Freud provides tools for understanding contemporary life that purely sociological or biological approaches miss.
Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory
Finally, returning to Freud means recovering psychoanalysis as critical theory, as a framework for understanding how subjects are constituted through social and linguistic structures, how power operates through unconscious formations, how resistance and transformation become possible.
This critical dimension is essential in an era where subjectivity is increasingly shaped by algorithms, where attention is commodified, where identity is performed through social media. Psychoanalysis offers tools for understanding these processes, for recognising how subjects are determined whilst also identifying possibilities for agency and change.
Lacan’s insistence on returning to Freud reminds us that psychoanalysis is not merely a clinical technique but also a way of understanding human subjectivity, culture, and politics. This broader relevance makes the return to Freud not nostalgic retreat but necessary engagement with resources that remain essential for contemporary critical thought.
Related Episodes in The William Gomes Podcast Series
Episode 6: The Real: Lacan, Trauma and What Lies Beyond Words Episode 9: Objet Petit a and the Quiet Engine of Desire Episode 10: Fantasy and Desire in Emotional Life Episode 13: The Name of the Father: How Symbolic Authority Takes Shape Episode 15: Castration: Why Limits Shape Desire and Identity Episode 16: Jouissance: The Paradox of Painful Enjoyment Episode 18: The Subject of the Unconscious: Understanding the Divided Self Episode 19: The Chain of Signifiers: How Language Shapes the Psyche Episode 25: A Whole-System View of Lacanian Subjectivity: Bringing the Theory Together
Listen to the Full Episode: Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and at williamgomespodcast.com
This article is part of The William Gomes Podcast’s ongoing exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis and neurodevelopmental psychology. For more information, visit williamgomespodcast.com or connect with William Gomes on LinkedIn.
