The Purloined Letter

The Paris police cannot find a compromising letter. A minister has taken it from a royal apartment, and the Prefect's men have searched his rooms by the inch, probing furniture and floorboards, without result. Dupin recovers it by reasoning instead about the kind of place such a man would choose, and about what the police method cannot see.

Lacan gave the tale a full seminar, reading the letter as a signifier whose location assigns each holder a place: the one who sees nothing, the one who believes the secret safe, the one who takes it in turn. The scene plays twice, with the roles passed along, so possession keeps changing hands while the structure holds. For a clinician the value is a worked case of how a single element can govern the people who handle it, arranging their positions and their blindness without their consent, and of how such an arrangement repeats.