# quilting point

The quilting point is a term from [[Lacanian]] [[psychoanalysis]].

Lacan explains the quilting point as the moment when a chain of signifiers provides meaning.


## On the meaning of the term

> Once this signifier ‘the fear of God’ does exist it changes everything, because it dominates the meanings of this particular structuration of human discourse. It has become the “major and primordial signifier” that transforms all fears into “perfect courage”. Indeed Lacan invites us into the paradox that, “however constraining it may be”, what is called “fear of God” is the opposite of a fear.
> 
> Lacan suggests Racine’s artful introduction of the word “fear” and connected key words, such as “tremble” and “extermination”, which partly coincide in the discourse of the two protagonists, transforms “zeal” at the beginning, with its connotations of “everything that is ambiguous, doubtful, always liable to be reversed”, into the “faithfulness” of the end. This, Lacan says, is an example of “the transmutation of the situation through the intervention of the signifier”.
> 
> Lacan considers the effect of introducing “fear” into the narrative an example of a “quilting point”. The metaphor of a “quilting point” refers to the way upholsterers use buttons to secure the fabric of their work to the backing, in order to maintain a defined shape. There is a certain tensioning of the fabric involved as it resists this stitching down, and this tension can be seen in the way the fabric bunches up around the button and radiates out from it. In a similar way a major and primordial signifier (fear) can enter a discourse at a particular point and in a particular way as to ‘knot together’ signified and signifier, “between the still floating mass of meanings” that circulate between “the two characters and the text”. There is a tension involved as language resists such ‘buttoning down’, and the lines of force radiate out in language around these ‘quilting points’ situating the discourse both “retroactively and prospectively”.
> 
> — [Aukland Psychotherapy](https://aucklandpsychotherapy.co.nz/what-is-the-quilting-point/)


## Source

The term was introduced in Lacan’s [[Seminar III]].