Jacques Lacan Quotes

38 quotes in 541 categories

• If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
• Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
• The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.
• The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales,…
• The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
• The I is always in the field of the Other.
• The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
• Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing…
• The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
• Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension
• What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
• Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself…
• What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
• Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a…
• In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before…
• Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.
• We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as…
• For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
• The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.
• Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.

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