Consider words as these vehicles of "the abstract". We are giving abstraction a recognizable shape, a word, to get a certain message across. Let us add "articulation" into this process. All of this is a continuous movement, a flow, that leads to the creation of meaning. We use words to capture and constrain ideas. We lock them down into temporary manifestations showing only aspects of our idea.
This is where we realize that communication is subjective. Your associations with an idea as you stand in front of a crowd looking for the proper words to express your idea, will never be the same as the associations of your listeners. Your idea will probably, for the greatest part, come across as you intended it, but never as precisely. Each of your listeners will interpret your idea to the best of their own understanding; Within the limits of their own reference.
"Neither the sender nor the receiver of a text has a perfect grasp of all language. Each individual's relatively small stock of knowledge is the product of personal experience and their attitude to learning. When the audience receives the message, there will always be an excess of connotative meanings available to be applied to the particular signs in their context (no matter how relatively complete or incomplete their knowledge, the cognitive process is the same)."³
"The limits of my language are the limits of my words." -- We keep running up against the walls of our cage."4 In this context, as aspects of a same idea, words mirror each other, link to each other, work together, correspond, correlate, combine, join and divide.
"That the subject should come to recognize and to name his/her desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."
We have reached the point where we separate from what is already a given, speaking your mother tongue. We get introduced to a new language. A whole new system which comes forth from a whole new culture. "We may add that the Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature." So we take on naming a step further, in this other language. It is now that you start perceiving language as outside of yourself. The process not automated anymore, as it doesn't come naturally. Yet, you can perform in this new language, following the new rules.
This is when for you, structures surface up. Your mind becomes (as it has always been) this juggler, who now makes acute distinctions between everything that's external to you, giving it a name, placing it somewhere; In one system; Then another system. Maybe a third system as well. Or, "The Other is then another subject and also the Symbolic order which mediates the relationship with that other subject [...] thus the Symbolic is a linguistic dimension.
Yet, he (Lacan) does not simply equate this order with language since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper of language in the Symbolic is that of the signifier, that is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
You are aware of the sphere of symbols, and the different systems where these abstract ideas belong to and perform a specific function. This is when you understand the subtlety of names. That within each system, each name is only an aspect. This is why we have more words to express the same idea, depending on the situation. Moreover, the system, determines the proper name.
It is by working in the Symbolic order that the analyst can produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand; these changes will produce imaginary effects since the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic. Thus, it is the Symbolic which is determinant of subjectivity, and the Imaginary, made of images and appearances, is the effect of the Symbolic.
"Now, although the truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, discourse can never articulate the whole truth about desire: whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus." 6
