Most psychoanalysts explain poetry by means of psychoanalysis; for many years, Lacan explained psychoanalysis by means of poetry. ‘The symptom is a metaphor.’ ‘Desire is a metonymy.’ ‘The primary processes of condensation and displacement are equivalent to the rhetorical tropes of metaphor and metonymy.’ ‘The subject is a poetic creation.’ ‘Love is a metaphor.’ ‘Transferential repetition is a poetic process.’ ‘Psychoanalytic interpretation is metaphoric.’ ‘The only thing you need to find in psychoanalysis is the trope of tropes called destiny.’ ‘Destiny is a figure, a figure of fate, as well as a rhetorical figure.’ If it is obvious that such statements must appear totally alien to the positivist or idealist perspectives of standard analysts, it is equally clear that they will seem rather opaque to the student of literature, whether educated in traditional rhetoric or in structuralist or poststructuralist poetics. In fact, the theory of poetry which subtends these assertions is not to be found in any textbook, nor can it be attributed to any single well-known figure or school of thought.