Jacques Lacan Quotes & Sayings

The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom — Jacques Lacan

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

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

The unconscious is the discourse of the Other. — Jacques Lacan

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

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

The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there. — Jacques Lacan

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

The unconscious is structured like a language. — Jacques Lacan

by Baudelaire! things are pretty hot! — Jacques Lacan

But what Freud showed us ... was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia. — Jacques Lacan

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers to them most truly. — Jacques Lacan

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

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term. — Jacques Lacan

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you — Jacques Lacan

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 — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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

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! — Jacques Lacan

Reading in no way obliges us to understand. — Jacques Lacan

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

The I is always in the field of the Other. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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

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? — Jacques Lacan

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) — Jacques Lacan

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

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

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

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

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. — Jacques Lacan

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. — Jacques Lacan

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely. — Jacques Lacan

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

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

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

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. — Jacques Lacan

The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience. — Jacques Lacan