A Crisis of Redefinition
An academic essay on Speech, Symbolic Instability, and Lacan's Divided Subject in Ann Quin’s Berg.
Beyond merely adding a new vocabulary to the study of language, psychoanalysis fundamentally reorders and revises how language operates. Speech is conventionally assumed to carry transparent meaning, from a coherent inner self out into the world. Psychoanalysis challenges this framing, insisting that this transparency is an illusion. For Freud, speech is the primary route into the unconscious, a rubric shaped by the forces that oppose access; repression, displacement, and resistance (Breuer & Freud, 1895). The subject never says what they simply mean, and desire surfaces in slips and substitutions, in what is avoided, the hitches and sharp breaths, as much as in what is said. Lacan extends this — the subject is not a pre-existent self that then enters into the linguistic contract, but a subject constituted by the signs and symbols that it utilises for speech, language, conversation — a subject at the same time divided by this semiotic order. To speak, for Lacan, is already to be alienated — from desire that cannot be named, brought to light — and from a self that language simultaneously produces and withholds.
Ann Quin’s Berg understands and reproduces this problem. Alistair Berg arrives in Brighton with the express intention of killing his estranged father. But Quin refuses to resolve this murder plot — it instead dissolves into obsessional neuroses and an impotent repetition. Berg is a fragmented self, unable to trust his own perception, his communication with others stunted and often failing. His crisis is not merely psychological but linguistic; he cannot find himself a stable position from which to communicate with others, to articulate his desires, because the same structures that produce his identity are keeping him from controlling it. His repeated attempts to redefine himself — to rename himself, to annihilate his father, to occupy a different position in the world — are curtailed by the very language through which this redefinition has to occur.
This essay argues that Berg presents speech as a site of symbolic instability with dire consequences, rather than a self-possessed mode of social integration. Through Berg’s fluid naming, Oedipal fixation, failed acts of communication and outreach, and fractured narrative consciousness, Quin fictionalises a fundamentally psychoanalytic account of subjectivity in which language divides, rather than helps to express. Using Freud’s account of the talking cure and its limits, alongside the Uncanny, this essay will illuminate how Berg’sspeech circles the desire it stops itself from directly expressing, and how this semiotic impotence prevents Berg from self-restoration. Lacan’s notions of symbolic order and the divided subject clarify why it is that Berg’s identity remains dependent on the same paternal authority that he seeks to negate, and the novel uses its own experimental prose to enact what it narrativizes; not just representing the psychic fragmentation that Berg undergoes, but producing the conditions for that symbolic breakdown in the language of the text itself. Berg’s inability to speak clearly and act decisively reveals that his Oedipal crisis is not simply a personal conflict with the father, but a crisis of redefinition and symbolic identity.
Psychoanalysis has long been concerned with the problem of speech — Freud held that speech was never innocent, the primary vehicle for expressing our repressed thoughts and desires. Psycho-physical symptoms, slips of the tongue, jokes that express with insincerity what we truly want to say — all show, for Freud, that language is shaped by unconscious forces (Freud, 1895). Freud uses this knowledge to inform his ‘talking cure’, dependent on the possibility of putting psychic material into words, making hidden conflicts visible, and therefore available for interpretation. However, speech is not simply honest testimony or confession, but indirect, displaced, resistant in nature. Informed by the unconscious drives and desires of the subject, our speech often conceals what it is we wish to convey. This suggests that the talking cure is less of a straight path to truth and more concerned with navigating a verbal labyrinth; the patient speaks in order to work through the blockages, the gaps and silences that define their neurosis. Consequently, ‘meaning’ to Freud is always over-determined — layered with conflicting impulses and desires, ensuring that the subject is always, in part, a stranger to their own vocabulary.
Lacan radicalises Freud’s suspicion of speech by shifting the focus; instead of fixating on what speech hides, Lacan wrote on the linguistic constructions that constitute the subject in the first place. Lacan saw the unconscious as ‘structured like a language’ (Lacan, 2006), page numbers please! decentering the self from its own utterances. Where Freud sees a slip of the tongue as unconscious desire pushing itself into the foreground, Lacan thinks that we are the slip-up — a ‘divided subject’, held since birth to the standard of the ‘symbolic order’. This order, the pre-existing, complex network of social laws and linguistic rules, demands that we give up our reckless, wordless freedoms in place of rigid, structured grammatical and lexical laws. Lacan’s tragedy, mirrored in Berg, is that by entering this unavoidable system we are alienated from ourselves, forever unable to bridge the gap between the inner self and our linguistically-acceptable presentations (Lacan, 1978). We become dependent, Lacan argues, on the ‘sliding signifier’ — the burgeoning slideshow of one word leading only to the next, but never to the actual ‘thing’ in question — and our identity becomes a perpetual catch-up as a result.
Quin’s Berg narrativizes this psychoanalytic function — the novel’s prose works as a literalisation of the Lacanian divided subject, where the boundaries between inner monologue, external narration, and authorial observation are bleeding into one another. Berg’s speech and patterns of thought do not provide a window in a coherent consciousness; instead, they are evidence of a psychical impasse, a blockade between repressed desires and the external self. His repetitive, often circular syntax mirror Freud’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ (Freud, 1920) page number?, showing us a mind unable to move past primary trauma.
In this sense, the experimental form of the novel is itself a ‘symptom’, a hallmark of the psychological instability characterised by this relationship with speech. Rather than serving as a tool for Berg to master his reality, language becomes the prime mover of his undoing. Berg finds himself ensnared in a semiotic loop; his desires, his true wishes, are repressed by the very words with which he seeks liberation. Ultimately, Berg demonstrates what Lacan finds so tragic — that when symbolic order fails to provide a stable identity, the subject is jettisoned, drifting among sliding signifiers, unable to distinguish between — in this case — the desire to annihilate his father, who had ‘died in thought alone’ (Quin, 2019) and the realisation that his own self is merely a linguistic shadow of the paternal figure he seeks to kill.
Berg’s exploration of naming and its effects provides another lens through which we can observe the psychoanalytic effects of language and speech. Berg’s first act of rebellion is not the attempted murder of the father, but an act of linguistic defiance — the adoption of a pseudonym. By arriving in Brighton not as ‘Alistair Berg’, but as ‘Greb’, he attempts a radical redefinition of the self. The name is considered the primary anchor that hooks the subject to the ‘symbolic order’, a gift from the Other that precedes our birth and succeeds us in death, dictating our position in the structures of law, family, and social recognition (Lacan, 2006)page number. Berg’s attempt to regain control of the self through a name-change is, therefore, a doomed project, and ‘Greb’ provides no more stability than the inverse identity that he was compelled to flee.
Lacan saw names as manifestations of the Name-of-The-Father (Lacan, 2006), the fundamental signifier that regulates desire. By attempting to move from his ‘real’ name, Berg seeks to undermine the paternal law itself. However, instead of granting him autonomy, Berg’s redefinition exposes a void in place of a structured self — for Berg, even the name has become a ‘sliding signifier’, a dynamic construction he now must cling on to, in place of the rigid designator created to anchor his self to the symbolic order. His entire identity becomes an inversion of the father — his mother mentions that ‘There’s definitely something about you, Aly… your father was the same’ (Quin, 2019). Consequently, he seeks to destroy the father, rendering his self-definition paradoxically dependent on the paternal figure.
Berg discovers that language does not express his true self — it alienates him from it. Every introduction of himself as ‘Greb’ reminds him of the gap between his lived experience and the symbolic label he is attempting to masquerade as. He wishes language to be a tool for liberation, but frustratingly, all it does is condemn him for his displacement, provide proof of his crisis of redefinition. He tries, in vain, to use the tools of the symbolic order, names and labels and stories, to escape the primary rule of these constructions — that the self is authored and defined by the Other (Lacan, 1978).
The instability of Berg’s name serves as a microcosm for his larger psychical collapse. Quin uses the failure of the pseudonym to show that identity is never self-contained, or self-authored. Berg’s subjectivity is a product of the very language he desperately attempts to manipulate, and that language cannot be freed from the imposition of the father. As the novel progresses it becomes clear that ‘Greb’ is less of a person and more of a site of conflict, a collection of fragments failing to coalesce into a coherent self. Quin demonstrates the psychoanalytic truth offered by Lacan — that language allows us to speak ourselves into existence, but in doing so ensures that the ‘self’ we speak of is a fragmentary, divided, untethered and alienated construction, haunted by the paternal structures it tries failingly to outrun.
Freudian theory provides the initial map for Berg’s desire — a rivalry with Nathaniel, and gravitation towards mother-substitutes (Freud, 1905), but Quin resists a mechanical, thoughtless application. Instead, she renders the Oedipal structure of the novel as something linguistically fluid, with the father not simply a biological obstacle, but a lexical and psychical double. The narration frequently blurs the boundaries between the two men, with unclear pronouns and untethered utterances suggesting that Berg’s aggression is inextricably — and perhaps foundationally — linked to an identification with the father so deep that it becomes near-mimetic. Berg does not simply want to kill the father, but ‘power unequivocal’ (Quin, 2019) — to become the father, a linguistic compulsion that renders his aims inherently contradictory.
Lacan’s transition from the literal father to the ‘symbolic father’ clarifies why Berg’s rebellion is doomed to fail — the father representing the primary signifier ensures that even if Berg were to kill Nathaniel, this physical annihilation does nothing to destroy the symbolic function that the father serves. The father structures the very language and symbolic order through which Berg communicates, participates in society, and understands himself, showing that any move Berg makes towards autonomy is structured by paternal guidelines (Lacan, 2006).
This mediation is most evident in Berg’s desire for Judith. She becomes a point on the oedipal triangle — Berg desires her because she belongs to the world of the father. Judith, in this sense, functions as a signifier of the father’s power, rather than a person in her own right. By pursuing her, Berg participates, or gets to participate, in the father’s economy of desire. However, Berg’s outreach to her is inevitably a failed act of communication, because it is spoken in a ‘borrowed’ language, his desire being mimetic rather than genuine.
Ultimately, Quin shows us that Berg’s Oedipal crisis is a linguistic one. He is trapped in a symbolic loop, where every act of defiance — renaming himself, seducing Judith, plotting a murder — unwillingly confirms the centrality of the father. He cannot find a position of speech from which he can operate outside of the paternal structure. Quin uses this impasse to show that the subject is never truly free from the structures that birthed them; Berg remains a prisoner of the father’s shadow, because he is in every sense a prisoner of the father’s language.
The structural failure of Berg’s mission is rooted in the failure of his speech. Psychoanalysis itself is coined under the ‘talking cure’, a method of self-discovery and unburdening the mind through vocalisation. This inauguration grounds the methods of psychoanalysis in speech and language. Freud’s foundational premise was that repressed material, once translated from the primary storage of the unconscious into more digestible syntax, could be mastered and analysed, and then integrated into the subject’s consciousness. However, for the neurotic subject, speech is rarely a transparent vehicle for truth, but is instead shaped by condensation, displacement, and a compulsive circling around the very trauma rendering the subject unable to talk coherently and honestly in the first place.
In Berg, this therapeutic process is reversed — instead, Berg’s talking functions only as an enclosure. His internal monologues and fractured interactions reveal a profound semiotic impotence, a language characterised by excess but lacking meaning. He speaks and thinks incessantly, but his words constantly hit a wall — ‘there can never be any kind of communication between us’ (Quin, 2019). Berg is a subject who is talking away his desire, rather than working towards it. His speech is pockmarked with displacement, where the primary Oedipal rage is transported onto more available objects — the sounds of the floorboards, the textures of the room.
Berg’s speech is not cathartic, but compulsive, doomed to repeat his obsessive intentions, while at the same time stalling his active plot. He repeats these intentions to himself — the Hamletian need to act, to kill, to become ‘Greb’, but the more he speaks, the more the possibility of his springing to action dissolves. Language becomes a substitute for action, a way of acting out his neuroses without ever resolving the underlying conflict.
This linguistic failure, and impotence, extends to his dialogues with Nathaniel and Judith. These exchanges are rarely communicative, but are instead scenes of misunderstanding and psychical projection. The characters talk at or through one another, never truly communicating or understanding their interlocutor. This suggests that for Berg, language has lost its ability to control or negotiate desire. He is a fragmented, divided self, because his symbolic tools — his words — no longer correlate to his real drives.
Ultimately, Berg’s failure to speak mirrors his failure to act coherently. His Oedipal mission remains unresolved because he does not have the linguistic position from which he can supersede the father, and authorise this mortal act. Quin uses this impotence to show that language itself is part of the conflict, and that Berg’s talking forms part of his paralysis; he is trapped in a linguistic labyrinth where every sentence is a detour from his ultimate goal. He is a divided subject, with his own speech leading him not towards freedom, but mapping out the boundaries of his restriction.
The structural instability in the text highlights how Quin utilises Lacan’s ‘sliding signifier’. In Lacanian theory, meaning is never fixed, but signifiers — the words and symbols we use to communicate — move constantly, deferring meaning to the next signifier in the chain (Lacan, 1993). There is no anchoring point, and Berg’s narrative behaves with this exact fluidity. There is rarely a moment of secure footing for the reader — events drift between the protagonist’s memory, his immediate perceptions, and his psychical projections of himself as ‘a man of action conquering all’ (Quin, 2019). Each moment is in flux, unable to be placed in neat sequence, unmoored from a stable reality.
Quin’s prose style is the primary engine of this instability. Her use of fragmented sentences and clipped, verbless syntax performs this psychical breakdown. This narrative slippage prevents the reader from ever establishing a coherent ‘I’ to ground the story in, forcing the reader to confront, and become, the same kind of divided subject that Lacan explicates as the function of participating in language.
This instability is most potently performed in the blurring of fantasy and reality regarding the central act of the novel, the patricidal murder. In Berg, the murder is perpetually deferred or reimagined, sliding away from the reader just as the moment of action seems ripe to occur. Often it is unclear whether an event belongs to the external world of Brighton, or the internal chaos of Berg’s obsessional neuroses, reflecting the psychoanalytic truth that for the subject, the real is often less impactful than the psychic reality of fantasy.
Berg is not simply about a man undergoing a psychical and semiotic breakdown; it is the very playground for this breakdown to occur in the reader. It produces the perfect storm, the ideal conditions for the semiotic impotence and uncertainty that afflicts Berg’s subjectivity to be transferred onto the reader. Just as Berg cannot find a stable position from which to articulate his fantasy and his desires, so too does the reader struggle to find a position suitable for mastering, comprehending, the novel. Quin demonstrates that the reader cannot resolve the narrative for the same reason that Berg cannot resolve his Oedipal trauma — the language we use to understand it is the very same thing that keeps us alienated from the truth.
Freud’s understanding of the Uncanny is of something once familiar but now repressed, returning in unsettlingly imitative form (Freud, 1919). The disturbing aspect to the Uncanny is that it draws out hidden psychical material in a new, unsettling form — exposing us to these deeply-rooted traumas, fears, and desires, but with a digestible buffer. Language and speech cannot contain these forbidden objects, and the subject is required to reformulate these mysterious but impactful parts of the self in uncanny ways, resulting in thoughts or perceptions that feel familiar yet impersonal, distant from the self and the subject but still causally tethered. In Berg, the overarching narrative progression of Alistair Berg is fundamentally an uncanny relation — a return to homely origins, his biological father, that had been for his whole adult life unfamiliar, repressed, disavowed.
Quin uses Freud’s Uncanny primarily through the double, and the confusion of the animate and inanimate. Berg’s relationship with his father is one of uncanny symmetry; the boundaries between the self and the other dissolve, creating a doubling effect symptomatic of Freud’s notion. This doubling provides a kind of psychic substitute for the speech that Berg cannot master. When language fails to establish a clear distinction between the I and the father, the uncanny emerges to fill in this gap.
In the narrative, the recurring presence of dead or mummified animals — the ‘taxidermal creatures’ that ‘stared from their glass houses’ (Quin, 2019) serve to highlight this uncanny replacement, the grotesque imagery providing a substitute language, a material kind of speech that gives a tangible form to the repressed anger and aggression that Berg cannot articulate with words. The dead cat, for instance, becomes a focal point for his obsessive fury and his fascination with mortality, acting as a physical signifier for the death of his own symbolic identity.
The reliance on uncanny imagery reveals the limits of talking, speech, and language in the world of Berg. When the symbolic order, the world of lexical laws and rules, breaks down, the subject is forced to confront the real in gruesome, material ways — a dead animal, a rotting corpse. The uncanny objects of the novel are evidence of Berg’s linguistic crisis; they express what he cannot, what he is too inarticulate to say but is at the same time most foundationally true about his actions, his desires, and his self. The uncanny is the final failure of redefinition, the point at which his subject comes to understand that the new identity it sought is nothing more than a repurposing, a hasty portmanteau of old, repressed trauma.
Ultimately, Berg’s inability to murder his father is not a failure of will, but a failure of speech. Quin demonstrates that the Oedipal crisis is just as much a semantic struggle as it is a psychological hurdle. Through Berg’s failed attempts to redefine himself as ‘Greb’, the novel dramatizes the futility of trying to self-author identity outside of the paternal symbolic structure. Berg’s stunted communication and obsessive, whirling monologues demonstrate a compulsion to repeat that highlights the failure of the talking cure — his words do not clarify his intent, but map out the boundaries of his own neuroses. Quin uses the novel’s experimental prose to goad the reader into experiencing the same linguistic alienation that Berg embodies. Berg therefore proves that the subject does not simply speak language; rather, language controls the subject, bringing to light the foundational unconscious conflicts, desires, and beliefs that make identity, and the language we reach for to sustain it, inherently unstable.
Psychoanalysis, then, offers a radical redefinition of speech, transforming it from a vehicle of self-expression into a psychical battleground. It insists on a self fundamentally caught within language, a divided subject with utterances pockmarked by repression, displacement, and semantic dynamism. By guiding us away from the illusion of a coherent, autonomous voice, psychoanalysis allows us to pay attention to our slips, repetitions, and silences as authentic markers of human desire.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Breuer, J. and Freud, S. (1895) Studies on Hysteria. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1905) ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905). Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1919) ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. London: Vintage, pp. 217–256.
Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Lacan, J. (1978) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Lacan, J. (1993) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955–1956. Translated by R. Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by B. Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Quin, A. (2019) Berg. Sheffield: And Other Stories.