Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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.

When one loves, it has nothing to do with sex.

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.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

Reading in no way obliges us to understand.

All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological.

Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.

Anxiety, as we know, is always connected with a loss…with a two-sided relation on the point of fading away to be superseded by something else, something which the patient cannot face without vertigo

From an analytic point of view, the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one's desire (Seminar 7, 319)

A secret to which truth has always initiated her lovers, and through which they have learned that it is in hiding that she offers herself to them most truly.

What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it 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.

The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.

It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.

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.

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.

I am where I think not.

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

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.