This article aims to examine Lacan’s thought on literary creation. With this aim in mind, we take as a point of reference Seminar 23, in which he deals with what Lacan calls the sinthome, a word in which he injects classical Greek into French, following the model of the Irish writer James Joyce, the object of analysis in the seminar. At the same time, some considerations are made with respect to some aspects of the sinthome that studies have interpreted in different ways, to end up proposing a new formula for this concept: sinthome 2. This comes from the fact that, at a certain point in this seminar, Lacan asserts that in the oedipal process the father is a sinthome. If this is so, it follows that literary writing as a sinthome can only be a second sinthome in relation to the first.

In the following pages, we propose to organise and connect the different parts that make up Freud’s text A propósito de un caso de neurosis obsesiva (el Hombre de las ratas) from a Lacanian perspective. Freud’s writing, at times, gives the impression of accumulating ideas about obsessional neurosis, without the connection between them always being clear. In the introduction, Freud himself warns that his work consists of ‘fragmentary communications’, and this analysis seeks to link these fragments together. Furthermore, it traces the path that has allowed the Lacanian reading of Freud, although, without going into this aspect in depth, it leaves open the possibility of addressing it in future studies.