This paper is concerned with Jacques Lacan's statement "the unconscious is structured like a language". It is a reading of Freud through Lacanian spectacles, a reading that refers to those aspects of the work of de Saussure and Jakobson that informed Lacan's original concept of the unconscious chain. It is an inadequate account in so far as it reduces the complexity of Lacanian theory in favour of a clarity that can only mislead. This simplification derives in large part from this article's reliance on a paper by lean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, entitled "L"Inconscient: une étude psychanalytique" (1961/1972).