Jacques Lacan Quotes & Sayings

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.”