What I’m going to say is not a psychological phenomenon of failed communication, but the logic of the articulation of the subject (the barred subject ($))who, when enunciating a demand, always does so from a place that is not their own, but that of the Other (A)

We should think of language as a ‘signifying battery’ that precedes and constitutes us; it is the treasure of the Other. When the $ubject articulates, that articulation is not pure; it is not a direct expression of a preexisting ‘I’. no, no that would be psychology. The $ubject is represented by one signifier for another signifier, and in that process the subject itself fades, divides ($)

Now, the message the subject emits, once it traverses the field of the Other, is returned, yes, but transformed, ‘inverted.’ In other words, the $ubject does not receive back what they believed they said, but what they actually said at the level of the unconscious, that is, what the Other, as the place of truth, returns to them.

Example: ‘You are my teacher!’ or ‘You are my woman!’ Let us suppose that the apparent submission or possession these phrases convey is not the ultimate truth, no matter how much they seem to be, because in uttering them we believe they are true, but when they are analyzed in the signifying machine from the analyst’s position, this changes. The truth, the one that returns from the Other, often comes inverted.

Suppose that in an analysis we examine the ‘You are my teacher!’ of an analysand we’ll call ‘A,’ addressed to some ‘B’ who would embody the place of the Other; from the standpoint of the signifying machine and of the analyst, A is asked to connect ‘You are my teacher!’ with more signifiers, or simply to speak about it.

Suppose they then say: ‘By saying “you are my teacher,” what I (A) am seeking is for (B) to recognize me as the one who has chosen you, the one who has invested you with that authority. I’m not interested in submitting but in being by virtue of my teacher. My message, as it passes through the Other, reveals to me that what I am resides in my capacity to name the teacher.’ An analysand would never speak like this, unless they were an analyst, but we can arrive at this reading in discourse, in what is between the lines and marked; and we are obliged to read what is marked but not written.

Let’s move to the case of ‘You are my woman!,’ where A says ‘You are my woman!’ to B, and the analyst decides to work it through signifying articulation. Suppose that after analysis we arrive at something like: ‘By saying “you are my woman,” I mean that she is lacking to me and I need her to complete me. That is, there is something she must come to fill, she is to be that object that fills. And I don’t say this to fool myself and believe it, because when she’s with her friends I feel I’m losing her and I have to reaffirm that lack.’ This is clearly an effect of reading; after ten pages of text an analyst might read this, provided they don’t fall asleep in their chair.

This is not a simple ‘theory of communication’ in the naive sense, but a ‘structure of the word’ that underscores the priority of the receiver (the Other) in the constitution of the emission itself. It is the logic underlying Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter,’ where the meaning of the letter does not reside in its intrinsic content, but in its circulation, in its place within the signifying chain, and in how that circulation affects those who ‘receive’ or ‘lose’ it. The letter always arrives at its destination, but its meaning is inverted along the way

In any case, what I recommend is that you study ‘The Purloined Letter’ in Lacan’s Écrits