Speech Speech Speech is human vocal communication using language. Each language uses phonetic combinations of a limited set of perfectly articulated and individualized vowel and consonant sounds that form the sound of its words (that is, all English words sound different from all French words, even if they are the same word, e.g., "role" or "hotel"), and using those words in their semantic character as words in the lexicon of a language according to the syntactic constraints that govern lexical words' function in a sentence. In speaking, speakers perform many different intentional speech acts, e.g., informing, declaring, asking, persuading, directing, and
The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud extreme controversy, and is not at all acknowledged as an informed criticism by Lacanian theorists. Nevertheless, Élisabeth Roudinesco concludes that 'this extraordinary intellectual operation, by means of which Lacan endowed psychoanalytic doctrine with a Cartesian theory of the subject and a "post-Saussurian" conception of the unconscious...alone would earn him a place among the great theoreticians of the twentieth century'. The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" () is an essay by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9,