Jacques Lacan Quotes

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 purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.

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, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.

That the Sadian fantasy situates itself better in the bearers of Christian ethics than elsewhere is what our structural landmarks allow us to grasp easily. But that Sade, himself, refuses to be my neighbor, is what needs to be recalled, not in order to refuse it to him in return, but in order to recognize the meaning of this refusal. We believe that Sade is not close enough to his own wickedness to recognize his neighbor in it. A trait which he shares with many, and notably with Freud. For such is indeed the sole motive of the recoil of beings, sometimes forewarned, before the Christian commandment. For Sade, we see the test of this, crucial in our eyes, in his refusal of the death penalty, which history, if not logic, would suffice to show is one of the corollaries of Charity.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

My thesis is that the moral law is articulated with relation to the real as such, to the real insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing.

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.

I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.

The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

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 caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire (Seminar 7, 319)

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.

Reading in no way obliges us to understand.

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you - the object petit a - I mutilate you.

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

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 his birth.

Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn't even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where it is, wherever it goes.

I am where I think not.

When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

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 it is in its submission to symbols.

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological.

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

The hand that extends toward the fruit, the rose, or the log that suddenly bursts into flames – its gesture of reaching, drawing close, or stirring up is closely related to the ripening of the fruit, the beauty of the flower, and the blazing of the log. If, in the movement of reaching, drawing, or stirring, the hand goes far enough toward the object that another hand comes out of the fruit, flower, or log and extends toward your hand – and at that moment your hand freezes in the closed plenitude of the fruit, in the open plenitude of the flower, or in the explosion of a log which bursts into flames – then what is produced is love.

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss ... with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo

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 consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body and I do so unbeknownst to myself. Thus I always say more than I know.

This is where I arrive at the meaning of the word "subject" in analytic discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me "I," subject of the verb. That doesn't suffice to bring me into being. That has nothing to do with what I am forced to put in - enough knowledge for it to hold up, but not one drop more.

The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending.

What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?