Abstract

In his Rome speech entitled “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” delivered at the University of Rome in September 1953, Jacques Lacan refers to the dhvani theory of Sanskrit poetics that, he thinks, explains the psychoanalytic technique of linguistic interpretation. More than this, Lacan considers the dhvani theory of Sanskrit poetics as the poetics of the Freudian corpus, i.e., if Freud would construe any poetics, then it would be something like the dhvani theory of Sanskrit poetics. The present essay examines this important observation of Lacan carefully, and argues that the Sanskrit dhvani theory is incompatible with his proposed “poetics of the Freudian corpus”.