This article takes up Lacan’s work on Joyce in 1975-1976 and examines the translation decision “wanting to make a name for oneself” -and its reductive derivative “making a name for oneself”- instead of “wanting a name”, as in the original French version. In the article we review the implications of both expressions, both in French and Spanish, and then develop a possible reading of the Joyce case that considers the difference between “wanting a name” and “making a name for oneself”. For this, we methodologically resort to the author’s work considered autobiographical and comment on the sections concerning this dimension of “wanting a name”. We conclude that, in the case of Joyce, “wanting a name” - understood in terms of his desire to be THE artist - accomplishes a function of knotting the registers that precedes that of the corrective ego and the footstool that he achieved as a writer of the enigma, usually associated with “making a name for oneself”.