Jacques Lacan citations

“Notre exposé choisissait les quatre concepts : l'inconscient, la répétition, le transfert, la pulsion (…) Permanente donc restait la question qui fait notre projet radical : celle qui va de : la psychanalyse est-elle une science? à qu'est-ce qu'une science qui inclut la psychanalyse?”

“Comme l'a dit un jour Picasso, au grand scandale des gens qui l'entouraient - Je ne cherche pas, je trouve.”

“S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.”

“La psychanalyse peut accompagner le patient jusqu'à la limite extatique du Tu es cela, où se révèle à lui le chiffre de sa destinée mortelle.”

“Qu'y renonce donc plutôt celui qui ne peut rejoindre à son horizon la subjectivité de son époque.”

“La vérité a structure de fiction.”

“Être psychanalyste, c'est simplement ouvrir les yeux sur cette évidence qu'il n'y a rien de plus cafouilleux que la réalité humaine.”

“La seule chose dont on puisse être coupable, c’est d’avoir cédé sur son désir.”

“Tout art se caracterise par un certain mode d'organisation autour de ce vide.”

“Aimer, c'est donner ce qu'on n'a pas à quelqu'un qui n'en veut pas.”

“Je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas”

“L'inconscient est structuré comme un langage.”

“Les non dupes errent.”

“Le désir de l’homme est le désir de l’ Autre”

“Si vous avez compris, vous avez sûrement tort.”

“La vie n'est pas une tragédie, c'est une comédie!”

“La mort est du domaine de la foi. Vous avez bien raison de croire que vous allez mourir bien sûr; ça vous soutient. Si vous n’y croyiez pas, est-ce que vous pourriez supporter la vie que vous avez? Si on n’était pas solidement appuyé sur cette certitude que ça finira, est-ce que vous pourriez supporter cette histoire? Néanmoins ce n’est qu’un acte de foi; le comble du comble, c’est que vous n’en êtes pas sûr!”

“In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good,a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

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

“What concerns us is the that envelops these messages, the network in which, on occasion, something is caught. Perhaps the voice of the gods makes itself heard, but it is a long time since men lent their ears to them in their original state—it is well known that the ears are made not to hear with.”

“The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.”

“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.”

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

“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you”

“Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon-discontinuity, in which something is manifested as a vacillation.”

“The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humeral determinate, for example- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does it to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real- a real that may not be determined.”

“The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.”

“It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the navel of the dreams, he writes, to designate their ultimately unknown centre- which is simply, like the anatomical navel that represents it, that gap of which I have already spoken.”

“There are thoughts in this field of the beyond of consciousness, and it is impossible to represent these thoughts other than in the same homology of determination in which the subject of the I think finds himself in relation to the articulation of the I doubt.”

“The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law- but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin.”

“Nature provides-I must use the word- signifies, and these signifies organize human relation in a creative way, providing them with structures and shaping them.”

“It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”