Jacques Lacan quotes

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, influential in the development of psychoanalytic theory. His reinterpretations of Freud, especially his concepts of the mirror stage and the symbolic order, have had a lasting impact on philosophy, literature, and psychology. He continues to inspire and provoke debate in academic and clinical circles worldwide. Here are 32 of his quotes:

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)
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe? View quote
Jacques Lacan
Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it. View quote
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom. View quote
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
The real is what resists symbolization absolutely. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
I am there where it is spoken that the universe is a defect in the purity of non-being. View quote
Jacques Lacan
For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
Pleasure limits the scope of human possiblity-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one's cards face up on the table? View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. (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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
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. View quote
Jacques Lacan
There is something in you I like more than yourself. Therefore I must destroy you. View quote
Jacques Lacan