41+ Jacques Lacan Quotes On Psychoanalysis, Symbolic And Language

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made significant contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy. He is best known for his reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's theories, which he developed into a complex system of thought that has been highly influential in continental philosophy, critical theory, and literary theory. Lacan's work has been influential in the fields of feminist theory, film theory, and literary criticism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jacques Lacan on love, psychoanalysis, symbolic.

Top 10 Jacques Lacan Quotes

1. Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.
2. What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
3. 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.
4. The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.
5. What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table?
6. The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.
7. For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.
8. If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• The I is always in the field of the Other.
• The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.
• The unconscious is structured like a language.
• All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.
• Love makes the Real of desire accessible without its tragic dimension
• The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.
• Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.
• The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
• The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
• I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being.

Jacques Lacan Quotes About Symbolic

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

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

The real is what resists symbolization absolutely. — 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

Jacques Lacan Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Jacques Lacan

1. Jacques Lacan's work emphasizes the importance of language and discourse in understanding the unconscious mind, and how language shapes our experience of reality.
2. He argued that the unconscious is structured like a language and that language is the primary way we make sense of our experience.
3. His theories offer insight into the complexities of human behavior, and suggest that our conscious and unconscious minds are inextricably linked.