Quotes

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?
• A trick... sufficient for us to discern in this tale, on the contrary, so perfect a verisimilitude that it may be said that truth here reveals its fictive arrangement.
• And yet, if language were not addressed to an Other, it could not be understood thanks to an other in psychoanalysis.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• For a purloined letter to exist, we may ask, to whom does a letter belong? We stressed a moment ago the oddity implicit in returning a letter to him who had but recently given wing to its burning pledge.
• For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
• If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
• 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.
• Love letter or conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of summons or letter of distress, we are assured of but one thing: the Queen muse not bring it to the knowledge of her lord and master.
• 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.
• Our inquiry has led us to the point of recognizing that the repetition automatism (Wiederholangszwang) finds its basis in what we have called the insistence of the signifying chain.
• Psychoanalysis announces that you are no longer the center of yourself, since there is another subject within you, the Unconscious. It was, at first, not well-accepted news.
• 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.
• Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.
• 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.
• 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 Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
• The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.
• 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.
• We have elaborated that notion itself as a correlate of the ex-sistence (or: eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious if we are to take Freud's discovery seriously.
• We realize, of course, the importance of these imaginary impregnations (Pragung) in those partializations of the symbolic alternative which give the symbolic chain its appearance.
• What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
• What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
• 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.
• With psychology, even when seen as a science, everyone thought they had the insider's track. Now, with psychoanalysis, we have the feeling of having lost that privilege; that the analyst could be capable of seeing something quite secret in what appears to you to be quite clear.
• Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.
• 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.