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How and Why the Letter Arrives at its Destination: Rereading Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'"

Jacques Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" published early in his career, placed at the head of Écrits, and including later addenda, invites a reinterpretation from the perspective of his later theory. His famous conclusion to this seminar that the letter always arrives at its destination needs to be reread accordingly. This essay examines this seminar in the context of his theoretical development, critically referring to Jacques Derrida, who deconstructed Lacan's argument without considering its analytic context and regarded Lacan's interpretation of the tale as a similar and even inferior version of Marie Bonaparte's interpretation, missing crucial differences between them. Bonaparte's psycho-biographical reading renders "The Purloined Letter" an expression of Poe's unconscious infantile desire to retrieve the maternal penis deprived by his (foster) father. The letter is none other than the maternal penis while the queen is Poe's mother, the minister her mysterious lover and his foster father John Allan, and Dupin Poe himself. While Bonaparte is concerned with finding the final signified of the letter, Lacan, reading the tale as an illustration of his psychoanalytic theory, sees the letter as an unconscious signifier, and its circulation among the characters as the unconscious signifier's movement along the signifying chain. This insistence of the unconscious signifier in the subject induces "repetition automatism," which compels the subject to repeat even a traumatic event despite his resistance, demonstrating that the subject is determined by the symbolic order.The seminar, however, insinuates later Lacanian emphasis on the real object a that the subject misses in the symbolic order. In "Freud and the Scene of Writing," Derrida claims that Freud, in Project for a Scientific Psychology, explained how unconscious memory traces are produced by the differences of bahnung (facilitation or breaching) among contact-barriers of ψ neurons, thus revealing différance as the source of memory and writing. Yet Derrida leaves the compulsive nature of unconscious memory traces unaccounted for. Lacan, in contrast, is keenly aware of Freud's account in Project for a Scientific Psychology of how the repetition compulsion of an unconscious signifier is initiated by the loss of an object. Lacan's attention to the process of refinding a fundamentally lost object in this seminar leads to an alternative interpretation of the letter. What the analyst discerns in the speech of the analysand (the subject) and returns to him is not the unconscious signifier that repeats itself without the analysand's awareness as the standard interpretation suggests, but the object a the analysand originally lost. In this interpretation, the letter always arrives at its destination, the subject, as the real object a.