On the 1975 Bloomsday (16 June), the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan opened the fifth International Joyce Symposium at the Sorbonne with a lecture titled ‘Joyce the Symptom’. His seminar of the following year was dedicated to the same theme, and a much-modified written version of the lecture was published in 1979. Using the transcription of the 1975 lecture as a way in to the themes presented in the seminar, we shall be examining how the writing of James Joyce contributed to Lacan’s re-configuration of psychoanalytic concepts, and how Lacan’s reading of Joyce offers an orientation to literary interpretation that avoids the pitfalls of psychobiography. In particular, we shall be looking at the question of the equivoque in speech and writing; and focussing on the distinction between …