This thesis aimed to investigate the status of the symptom in psychoanalysis and its outcomes in an analysis carried out to its conclusion. Our research was developed along four axes: (1) the symptom’s conception in the field of medical sciences and its distinction in relation to the psychoanalytic approach; (2) the symptom in its aspect of truth, which includes the subject of the unconscious; (3) the symptom as “jouissance”, a form of satisfaction combined with displeasure, which does not illicit interpretation; (4) the fates of the symptom at the end of an analysis. Considering that an analysis always leaves behind residual phenomena, based on published reports of what may occur when analyses end, we sought to define the residual part of the symptom and its possibility of being woven into daily life. Two notions, that of the sinthome and the letter, point a path to the possible fates of the symptom. We proposed that the symptom, at the end of analysis, is reduced to an indecipherable core that approaches the letter as a sort of writing that falls beyond the realm of meaning. For this incurable core, it is possible to find new uses. The sinthome was approached as a kind of gambiarra (a term in Portuguese that roughly translates into an improvised invention), which relates to the possibility of threading together the isolated elements collected from an analysis.