"The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (French: L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient) is an essay by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later published in Lacan's 1966 book Écrits. Lacan begins the essay by declaring it to be "situated halfway" between speech and writing. By doing so, he foreshadows both the essay's notorious opacity and its theme: the relationship between speech and language and the place of the subject in relation to both. The paper represents a key moment in 'his resolutely structuralist notion of the structure of the subject ', as well as in his gradual 'incorporation of the findings of linguistics and anthropology...in the rise of structuralism'. Source: Wikipedia (en)