The Significance of the Interpretant in the Field of Speech

In his classic paper “The Function and the Field of Language and Speech in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan wrote that psychoanalysis had abandoned its original interest in speech. It had turned instead to the countertransference as a window of insight into the patient’s preverbal fantasies. The danger, as the Lacanian tradition emphasizes, is that we might fall into “me-centered attention”: a focus on our own meanings and resonances over those of the patient. We find an echo of this concern in the more recent worry among some American analysts that we now privilege visual-behavioral evidence, that is, the data of nonverbal transference-countertransference enactment, often anchored in the data of infant observation, over aural-oral data. There is, however, another way to think about language, an alternative grounded neither in Lacan, nor in Saussure, but in Peirce’s theory of signs. I argue that when we use the countertransference—or at least when we use it well—we are not listening with egocentric attention, but, rather, engaging an interpretant, a beat in the signifying process, to hear the patient more fully. Far from abandoning speech, we find ourselves immersed in a semiotic field. I illustrate this approach in the case of single, middle-aged father.