The term ‘signified’ occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, operating at the intersection of structural linguistics, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory. Its primary Saussurean definition — the conceptual face of the linguistic sign, paired with the signifier as acoustic image — enters the corpus chiefly through Benveniste and Lacan, each of whom subjects it to critical pressure. Benveniste, working from within linguistics, challenges the simple duality of signifier/signified by proposing the notion of ‘signifiance’ as a more comprehensive account of language’s meaning-generating capacity, one that crosses the semiotic into the semantic and anchors signification in enunciation and experience. Lacan’s intervention is more radical: he famously inverts the Saussurean bar, insisting on the primacy of the signifier over the signified, severing the easy correspondence between them and thereby opening the space of the unconscious as a discourse irreducible to fixed meaning. Derrida, meanwhile, subjects the signified to its most thoroughgoing deconstruction, arguing that the classical semiology which grounds the signified in presence — as deferred but recoverable meaning — repeats the metaphysical gesture of making presence foundational. The concept thus functions as a pivot: where one locates the signified in relation to the signifier, the referent, and the subject determines the entire architecture of one’s theory of meaning, language, and psychic life.
making every signifier a metaphor of the signified, although the classical concept of metaphor designates only the substitution of one signified for another, one signified becoming the signifier of the other.
Derrida exposes how Nietzsche’s generalization of metaphor destabilizes the classical signifier/signified hierarchy, revealing the signified as itself capable of becoming signifier — and thus undermining the fixity of the distinction.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
The pyramid becomes the semaphor of the sign, the signifier of signification. Which is not an indifferent fact. Notably as concerns the Egyptian connotation.
Derrida reads Hegel’s pyramid as the figure that encodes the sign’s structure — the soul (signified) monumentalized in stone (signifier) — thereby diagnosing metaphysics as a semiology of preserved presence.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
I am placing this example under the category of the absence of the signified, although the tripartition signifier/signified/referent does not pertinently account for Husserl’s analysis.
Derrida, reading Husserl, distinguishes the absence of the signified from the absence of meaning and of the referent, demonstrating that the signified is not coextensive with meaning and that its absence does not entail the collapse of signification.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
There is then an original force at work behind the great separations of units that appear to us eternally divided, such as ‘form’ and ‘meaning’, ‘signifier/signified’.
Benveniste argues that language’s signifying force precedes and underlies the very distinction between signifier and signified, proposing ‘signifiance’ as the name for this prior generative condition.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
the sign, which defers presence, is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and moving toward the deferred presence that it aims to reappropriate.
Derrida identifies the classical semiological structure: the signified is the presence that the sign both derives from and moves toward, a structure he reads as the foundational gesture of Western metaphysics.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
seules les corrélations du signifiant au signifiant y donnent l’étalon de toute recherche de signification, comme le marque la notion d’emploi d’un taxi
Lacan asserts that it is the correlation of signifier to signifier — not the relation of signifier to signified — that provides the measure of all signification, radically displacing the signified from its classical anchoring role.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
tant qu’on ne se sera pas dépris de l’illusion que le signifiant répond à la fonction de représenter le signifié
Lacan diagnoses as illusion the assumption that the signifier’s function is to represent the signified, thereby opening the structural autonomy of the signifying chain as the proper domain of psychoanalytic inquiry.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
quand on dit que tel élément de la langue a un sens, on entend par là une propriété que cet élément possède en tant que signifiant, de constituer une unité distinctive, oppositive, délimitée par d’autres unités.
Benveniste locates ‘meaning’ as a property of the signifying element within the linguistic system, understood through its differential and oppositional relations, thus grounding the signified in systemic structure rather than reference.
, Problèmes de linguistique générale, I, 1966supporting
why does it necessarily determine the sign as a progression with its sight set on truth? With its sight set: conceived in its destination on the basis of the truth toward which it is oriented.
Derrida interrogates the Hegelian-metaphysical determination of the sign as oriented toward truth, showing how the signified-as-truth functions as the telos that organizes the entire movement of signification.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Far from abandoning the ‘sign’, signifiance includes it in ‘discourse’ as an intersubjective illocutionary act which transmits ‘ideas’.
Benveniste’s concept of signifiance does not dissolve the signifier/signified dyad but subsumes it within discourse as a living, enunciative event, shifting the unit of meaning from the sign to the speech act.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
in reasoning, there is a coupling not of names, but of the things signified by the names; and I am amazed that anyone can think the contrary.
Descartes defends the priority of the signified (the res cogitata) over the name, asserting that reasoning operates on the things signified rather than on words themselves — a pre-Saussurean affirmation of the signified’s foundational status.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
Benveniste proposes two types in the signifiance of language: the semiotic and the semantic.
Benveniste’s division of language into the semiotic (sign as recognized unit) and the semantic (sign in discourse) reframes the signified as operative at two irreducible levels, complicating the Saussurean binary.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
The time of the sign, then, is the time of referral. It signifies self-presence, refers presence to itself, organizes the circulation of its provisionality.
Derrida frames the sign’s temporality as one of self-referral toward presence, a structure in which the signified functions as the provisional telos that the sign circles but never fully reaches.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside
‘Dried meat’ signifies toughness; ‘yellow,’ centrality or the Mean; and ‘metal,’ hardness.
Wang Bi’s exegesis of the I Ching enacts a pre-theoretical practice of the signified, assigning stable conceptual contents to symbolic tokens within a systematic interpretive framework.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994aside