Jacques Lacan Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Jacques Lacan's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 39 quotes on this page collected since April 13, 1901! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by Jacques Lacan: Desire Language Psychoanalysis more...
  • Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

  • 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.

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

  • The I is always in the field of the Other.

  • 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.

    Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”
  • Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.

  • All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

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

    Jacques Lacan (2013). “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan”, p.321, Routledge
  • 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.

  • The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.

  • The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

  • 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.

    Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (2013). “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan”, p.76, Routledge
  • What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

  • The unconscious is structured like a language.

    "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" (1957)
  • 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.

  • 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.

    "The Truth Was Always Revolutionary": Luc Rioual on Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language", logger.believermag.com. August 11, 2017.
  • I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

    Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”
  • The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom

  • ...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.

    Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller (1988). “The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 2: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 19541955”, p.223, CUP Archive
  • For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

  • A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?

  • 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.

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

  • 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 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.

    Eye   Evil   Movement  
    Jacques Lacan (2004). “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”, p.164, Karnac Books
  • The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.

    Jacques Lacan, Alan Sheridan (1980). “Écrits: a selection”
  • Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 39 quotes from the Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, starting from April 13, 1901! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
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