LACAN: THE UNCONSCIOUS IS STRUCTURED LIKE A LANGUAGE The unconscious manifests itself at those moments in which processes beyond conscious thought disrupt speech, points when language fails. Lacan defines the unconscious in terms of "impediment", "failure" and "splitting". The unconscious is precisely this gap or rupture in the symbolic chain. That the unconscious is structured like a language is Lacan's central thesis and probably his most influential contribution to psychoanalysis.The unconscious is governed by the rules of the signifier as it is language. We can only know the unconscious through speech and language; therefore the unconscious is constituted through the subject's articulation in the symbolic order. The Lacanian unconscious is not an individual unconscious, in the sense that Freud speaks of the unconscious. It is rather the effect of a trans-individual symbolic order upon the subject. Fink argues that the Lacanian unconscious is not only structured like a language but is language, insofar as it is language that makes up the unconscious. This involves us in rethinking, however, what we mean by language. Language, for Lacan, designates not simply verbal speech or written text but any signifying system that is based upon differential relations. The unconscious is structured like a language in the sense that it is a signifying process that involves coding and decoding, or ciphering and deciphering. The unconscious comes into being in the symbolic order in the gap between signifier and signified, through the sliding of the signified beneath the signifier and the failure of meaning to be fixed. In short, the unconscious is something that signifies and must be deciphered. Lacan thought that Freud's ideas of "slips of the tongue," jokes, and the interpretation of dreams all emphasized the agency of language in subjective constitution. In " The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud ," he proposes that "the unconscious is structured like a language." The unconscious is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, he explained, but rather a formation as complex and structurally sophisticated as consciousness itself. One consequence of his idea that the unconscious is structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity. He is in opposition to American psychologists who see the ego at being central. Lacan puts the subjective 'self' at the center, where it is alienated from its own history, formed in and through otherness, and is inserted into an external symbolic network. 'I' is a fiction borne of a misrecognition that masks a fractured and unconscious desire for reunification that permeates adult life. Lacan says that the unconscious is inserted into the symbolic order from the 'outside' and is 'structured like a language', operating according to differential relationships in language. It thus does not 'belong' to the individual and is an effect of signification on the subject.