What happens when language fails in the therapy room? When a client reaches for words and finds only metaphors, silences, or tears? In psychoanalytic work, these moments are not signs of failure but indications of something deeper: the presence of the unconscious, of affective material that has not yet—or perhaps cannot ever—be fully symbolised.
This article traces the contours of that space—where meaning slips, where words fall short, and where something raw and unfinished makes itself known. Drawing connections between Freud’s early distinction between thing- and word-presentations, Lacan’s linguistic theory of the unconscious, Laplanche’s notion of enigmatic signifiers, and Ogden’s analytic third, the piece explores how psychoanalysis conceptualises the terrain between language and affect. This is not a place of deficit, but of potential—where something deeply human begins to emerge in the gaps between speech and experience.
Freud: Between Thing and Word
Freud’s metapsychology offers a foundational framework for understanding the structural limitations of language. In The Unconscious (1915), he distinguishes between thing-presentations (Sachvorstellungen) and word-presentations (Wortvorstellungen). The former are pre-verbal, imagistic traces of experience tied to drives and sensory impressions. These “concrete ideas” are embedded in the unconscious, not yet integrated into the symbolic order of language.
Word-presentations, by contrast, are the linguistic forms that allow these traces to enter consciousness. For Freud, it is only through the binding of thing-presentations to word-presentations that unconscious material becomes accessible to thought. This model suggests that unconscious life is populated by unbound affective residues—raw material not yet symbolised. The gap between experience and its verbal form is thus not merely a failure of articulation, but a structural condition of psychic life.
Lacan: The Sliding of the Signifier
Jacques Lacan builds on this Freudian insight by reconfiguring the unconscious through the lens of structural linguistics. In his famous claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan, 1957/2006), he emphasises the primacy of the signifier (the linguistic form) over the signified (concept). Meaning, in Lacan’s model, is not anchored in stable concepts but emerges through a differential network of signifiers in constant displacement.
What Freud cast as the failure to bind affect to language becomes, in Lacan, a constitutive feature of the symbolic order. The subject is always split—alienated within language—and unable to fully articulate desire. The signified is forever deferred, and what is meant is never quite what is said.
While Lacan’s model offers profound insights into the instability of meaning, it also foregrounds a structural alienation from affect. Language does not capture experience so much as structure its failure to be captured. Yet this begs the question: what happens to the remainder—the part of experience that resists symbolisation altogether?
Laplanche: Enigmatic Signifiers and Non-Translation
Jean Laplanche provides a crucial answer to this question. His theory of general seduction reintroduces the Other into the formation of the unconscious. For Laplanche, the unconscious is not simply the result of repression, but the effect of enigmatic messages implanted by the adult world into the child’s psyche—messages the child is unequipped to decode (Laplanche, 1999). These messages are sexualised, affectively charged, and often unconscious even to the adult who transmits them.
Unlike Lacan’s emphasis on the signifying chain, Laplanche focuses on what remains untranslated. The child attempts to translate these messages but can only do so partially, leaving behind residues that become the kernel of the unconscious. The result is not merely repressed content but something more opaque: enigmatic signifiers that persist as sites of psychic disturbance, deferred meaning, and affective charge.
This model reframes the unconscious not as a linguistic structure but as a space of failed or incomplete translation. Affect, in this sense, is not simply pre-verbal—it is untranslatable in principle. And yet, it continues to seek expression.
Ogden and the Analytic Third: Intersubjective Symbolisation
It is in the therapeutic encounter that the interplay between the unspoken and the spoken becomes most evident. Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third is particularly useful for thinking about how meaning emerges in the intersubjective field between analyst and patient (Ogden, 1994). He moves beyond the idea of the analyst as interpreter of latent content and instead focuses on a co-created psychic space where unconscious processes are jointly registered, held, and potentially symbolised.
This analytic third is not confined to verbal communication. It includes bodily affect, emotional tone, and unconscious transmission. One of the primary tools in navigating this space is countertransference—not as interference, but as a form of receptivity. In the analyst’s own emotional responses, something of the patient’s unconscious can be felt, even before it is spoken.
A clinical moment illustrates this dynamic. A client once described herself as a ship drifting in wavy waters, waiting for a captain—someone who could steer her, take her on an adventure, and guide her through the unknown. On the surface, the metaphor suggested desire for romantic or sexual connection. But in my countertransference, I sensed something more: a profound longing for protection and paternal presence. The captain became a symbolic condensation of both erotic yearning and the absent father who, as she had previously reflected with ambivalence, had failed to stand by her during life’s storms. Beneath the metaphor, there was also a quieter wistfulness—a desire to experience such a guiding and attuned relationship with her therapist, someone she felt could navigate the waves of her life’s challenges. In later sessions, while reflecting back on this metaphor, she expressed this more directly: she wished “there was a captain who knew her like the therapist.”
The metaphor carried conflicting registers—erotic, traumatic, idealised—and It was only within the shared space of the analytic third, and through the use of countertransference, that these meanings began to cohere. It was not interpretation alone that moved the work forward, but a shared resonance—an affective understanding that made room for complexity.
Here, the analytic third enables affect to become thinkable without being prematurely reduced. What is not yet symbolised may first be registered in the analyst’s body or affective atmosphere, and only later take shape in words.
Towards a Psychoanalytic Epistemology of the Untranslated
Taken together, these theoretical strands reveal a shared concern: the irreducibility of affect to language, and the necessity of a space—psychic, symbolic, relational—where what resists articulation can nonetheless be approached. From Freud’s thing-presentations to Lacan’s slippage of the signifier, from Laplanche’s enigmatic messages to Ogden’s intersubjective field, we find a psychoanalytic tradition that does not attempt to eliminate the gap between language and experience, but rather dwells within it.
In this sense, psychoanalytic listening is not only about decoding hidden messages, but also about creating a space where translation becomes possible—even if never complete. It is a practice of approximation, of bearing with ambiguity, and of trusting that meaning can emerge through reverberation, not assertion.
The therapy room becomes not a space of perfect knowledge, but of shared exploration—where affect can find form not by force, but by being held long enough to be spoken.
References
- Freud, S. (1915). The Unconscious. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14. London: Hogarth Press.
- Lacan, J. (2006). The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud. In Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). London: Norton. (Original work published 1957)
- Laplanche, J. (1999). Essays on Otherness. London: Routledge.
- Ogden, T. H. (1994). The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 3–19.
- Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.
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