making an endless series of purchases in order to satisfy their desire. The way out of this metonymical chain of unsatisfied desire, for Lacan, is a "crossing of the bar" by a signifier: Lacan emphasises 'the constitutive value of this crossing for the emergence of signification'. Lacan aligns this operation with metaphor rather than metonymy. When a signifier crosses the bar, from above it to under it, it becomes a signified. But this leaves a space or gap above the bar which, according to Lacan, is the subject. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the subject only appears fleetingly, on those rare occasions when a signifier crosses the bar, leaving an empty space above it. "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" With the fleetingness of the subject established, Lacan closes the essay by developing a maxim of Sigmund Freud's: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" (usually translated as: "where the id was, the ego shall be"). Rather than strengthening the ego as the great intellectual and ideological rival of Lacanian psychoanalysis, ego psychology, encouraged the patient to do, Lacan claims that the analysand 'must come to the place where that was...modifying the moorings that anchor his being'. This means breaking out of the metonymy of desire by crossing the bar. Criticism 'Whereas Saussure placed the signifier over the signified, dividing the two by a bar of "meaning", Lacan inverted this arrangement, placing the signified under the signifier, to which he ascribes the primary role'. In the same way, 'like Jakobson Lacan associated the Freudian idea of condensation with metaphor and displacement with metonymy'. Critics would contend that we see here a typical example of the way 'Lacan was...an intellectual magpie', illegitimately borrowing the intellectual kudos of linguistics to give a respectable veneer to his psychoanalytic theories, without submitting to the actual rigors of the discipline itself. It should be noted, however, that a criticism such as this remains a point of 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'. References Further reading Jacques Lacan, "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" in Écrits: A Selection, trans. B.