The point de capiton (French for “quilting point”) is a key concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan borrowed the term from upholstery—it’s the stitch that holds the padding in place on a cushion or quilt. In theory, it describes the moment a signifier “pins down” the floating chain of signification, temporarily stabilizing meaning.
In Lacan’s terms:
• The symbolic order (language) is a sliding chain of signifiers—one word refers to another, and meaning is never fixed.
• The point de capiton is a master signifier (S1) that halts this slippage and “quilts” a patch of meaning.
• It’s where the signifier and the signified are stitched together, making it seem like there’s stable sense.
Example:
Take a political slogan like “freedom”. On its own, the word is empty—it could mean personal liberty, capitalist ideology, or revolutionary struggle. But when a politician repeats it in a certain way, in a certain discourse, “freedom” becomes a point de capiton: it fixes meaning around a set of associations and desires.
Clinically:
In the subject’s speech, a point de capiton can be the moment a fantasy structure or a symptom gets anchored by a word—one that carries an excess charge of jouissance. For example, a childhood phrase from a parent might become the quilting point around which guilt, desire, or identity forms.
So, the point de capiton is the moment language “grabs” us, where a particular word stops being one word among others and becomes the Word that defines how we make sense of the world and ourselves.
Would you like to see how this relates to ideology? Or how it dissolves in Later Lacan, with lalangue and the sinthome?
