Beyond the system

There's a frequent confusion that current clinical practice compels us to clarify: discourse is not simply language. While language operates as a formal system of signs and rules, discourse is that point where words intertwine with desire, where grammar meets subjectivity. We don't speak just with linguistic code: we speak from our wounds, from our voids, from the identifications that constitute us.

Language can be studied as an abstract structure, but discourse always implies a subject who is at stake in what they say. Every time we speak, we don't just transmit information: we reveal our subjective position, our unconscious identifications, our singular way of inhabiting the symbolic world. Discourse is language traversed by desire.

What constitutes us as subjects is not the mastery of a linguistic system, but our unique way of being caught in discourse. The analysand doesn't suffer from poor use of language: they suffer from their position in discourse, from the place from which they speak and from which they are spoken. Analysis operates precisely in this dimension, where saying always exceeds what is said.