Quotes from Bruce Fink

The neurotic's desire is not his or her "own" in the first place, for it has never been subjectified. Subjectfication is the goal of analysis: subjectification of the cause-that is, of the Other's desire as cause.

For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.

It is when patients begin to throw such things into question-when the what, why, and who of their utterances become problematic to them-that they are genuinely engaged in analysis.

Desire is an end in itself: it seeks only more desire, not fixation on a specific object.29

Lacan even goes so far as to classify ignorance as a passion greater than love or hate: a passion not to know.

This fixation of desire upon beauty in fantasy leads to a kind of living death or, as Lacan calls it, a "zone of encroachment of death upon life" (p. 331/285). This is perhaps "the place of desire insofar as it is a desire for nothing

We are told here that we should make an irrevocable decision, come hell or high water, to stay with someone, not for the happiness or satisfactions it will bring, but just because (pp. 332–3/308).

It seems that it is incredibly easy to end up on the slippery slope where something about ourselves, our faithfulness in this case, becomes more important than our partner. The Otherness of the other again drops out of the picture, and we wind up dealing with the One (an idea, ideal, or signifier), not the Other. Libido becomes inextricably bound up with the symbolic, steering clear of the real.

Neurotics are only too eager to figure out what other people want from them so they can fulfill or thwart those other people's desires.

Note how stereotypical the traits are that he assigns to her – she could be almost any woman celebrated in courtly love poetry.

Some argue that it is the very attempt to institutionalize love that destroys it. The more love is rendered obligatory, a duty, whether religious, moral, or otherwise, the more it shrivels up and dies like a plant cultivated under the wrong conditions. "If we really love each other, why do we need a stupid piece of paper?" they ask.

One might say that, for Stendhal, it is the uncertainty of the metaphor of love – of whether the beloved will become in her turn a lover – that keeps the lover interested. If he becomes certain of her love for him, he might well become blasé. Without doubt, without constant vacillation and uncertainty orchestrated by the woman's sudden moods and fits of bad temper, the lover would become complacent and lose his passion.

Whenever we force ourselves to conform to our ideals at the expense of our own satisfaction, we assure the Other's jouissance.

Therapists tend to have very little appreciation for the fact that other people function in radically different ways from themselves, even when both patient and therapist are neurotic!

given the amount of material Freud provides in the case study, but one point which seems amply clear is that all of the Rat Man's problems are intimately related to his father.

where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love" (p. 183).

Insofar as interpretation hits the real, it does not so much hit the truth as create it. For truth exists only within language (it is a property of statements), and thus there is no truth of that which cannot yet be said. Truth is not so much "found" or "uncovered" by interpretation, as created by it.

This is an obsessive configuration insofar as the obsessive's desire is always for something impossible: to attain an unattainable status (e.g., perfection, omniscience, or immortality), to complete an uncompletable project, or to possess what he cannot possess. In saying that the obsessive is characterized by an impossible desire, Lacan goes so far as to add that his desire is for impossibility itself.

Fantasy provides the pleasure peculiar to desire. -Lacan, Ecrits, 773

Ultimately, as Lacan puts it, all speech constitutes a demand for love. Whenever we speak, we are unconditionally asking to be heard (Lacan, 2015, p. 356), we are asking for our request to be recognized, we are asking to be responded to, we are asking to be loved.

Isn't it in his or her nonmastery or incompleteness that we see a possible place for ourselves in his or her affections – that is, that we glimpse the possibility that we may be able to do something for that person, be something to that person? In this sense, we perhaps love not what they have, but what they do not have; moreover, we show our love by giving what we ourselves do not have.

Patients do not spontaneously home in on the subjects that are most important, psychoanalytically speaking; they spontaneously avoid them, for the most part. Even if they recognize that sexuality should be dwelt upon, for example, they nevertheless tend to avoid associating to the elements in dreams and fantasies that are the most sexually charged.

Desire is a remedy for anxiety," as Lacan says in Seminar VIII, 430).

Desire springs from lack.