All quotes from Lacan’s Écrits refer to the French pagination.

Desire ¦ Ego ¦ Love ¦ Psychoanalysis ¦ Practice & Technique ¦ Signifier ¦ Speech ¦ Unconscious

¦ Understanding

Quotes on Desire

The domain of the Freudian experience is established within a very different register of relations. Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.
This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil. The libido, but now no longer as used theoretically as a quantitative quantity, is the name of what animates the deep-seated conflict at the heart of human action….
…. 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. Being attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack, in the experience of desire.

– Lacan, Seminar II, p.223 – 224 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, WW Norton:1991).

Desire is always what is inscribed as a repercussion of the articulation of language at the level of the Other

– Lacan, My Teaching, p.38 (translated by David Macey, London:Verso, 2008)

If you have taken the time to construct desire properly, that is, on a language basis, relating it to what is its fundamental linguistic basis, which is what we call metonymy, you’ll progress much more rigorously into the field to be explored: namely, the field of psychoanalysis. You may well even notice the true sinew of something in psychoanalytic theory that is still so opaque, so obtuse and so obstructed

– Lacan, My Teaching, p.40 (translated by David Macey, London:Verso, 2008)

Castration means that that jouissance has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire

Ecrits, 827

 

 

Quotes on the Ego

 

The notion of the ego today draws its self-evidential character from a certain prestige given to consciousness in so far as it is a unique, individual, irreducible experience. The intuition of the ego retains, in so far as it is centred on the experience of consciousness, a captivating character, which one must rid oneself of in order to accede to our conception of the subject. I try to lead you away from its attraction with the aim of allowing you to grasp at last where, according to Freud, the reality of the subject is. In the unconscious, excluded from the system of the ego, the subject speaks.

Seminar II, p.58 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, WW Norton:1991).

 

Quotes on Love

 

There is no support for love… as I have told you: to give one’s love, is very precisely and essentially to give as such nothing of what one has, because it is precisely in so far as one does not have it that there is a question of love

Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, 7th May, 1958 

 

Quotes on Psychoanalysis

I will explain to you how incomplete any instruction in psychoanalysis must necessarily be and what difficulties stand in the way of your forming a judgement of your own upon it. I will show you how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are inevitably bound to make you opponents of psychoanalysis, and how much you would have to overcome in yourselves in order to get the better of this instinctive opposition…

In psychoanalysis, alas, everything is different”

– Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1915

 

Psychoanalysis is neither a Weltanschauung, nor a philosophy that claims to provide the key to the universe. It is governed by a particular aim, which is historically defined by the elaboration of the notion of the subject. It poses this notion in a new way, by leading the subject back to his signifying dependence”

– Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

What does analysis uncover – if it isn’t the fundamental, radical discordance of forms of conduct essential to man in relation to everything which he experiences? The dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of anything which progresses through adaptation, through approximation, through being perfected. It is something which proceeds by leaps, in jumps. It is always the strictly inadequate application of certain complete symbolic relations, and that implies several tonalities, immixtions, for instance of the imaginary in the symbolic, or inversely

Seminar II, p.86 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, WW Norton:1991)

Analysis can have as its goal only the advent of true speech and the subject’s realisation of his history in its relation to a future. Maintaining this dialectic is directly opposed to any objectifying orientation of analysis, and highlighting this necessity is of capital importance if we are to see through the aberrations of the new trends in psychoanalysis

Écrits, 302

Even if the sum total of analytic experience allows us to isolate some general forms, an analysis proceeds only from the particular to the particular.

Écrits, 386

The analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it. There only may the signification of a limitless love emerge, because it is outside the limits of the law

Seminar XI, p.276 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Karnac: 2004)

What is realised in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming

Écrits, 300

 

Quotes on Psychoanalytic Practice & Technique

 

You will observe in the training we give to our students that this is always a good place to stop them. It’s always at the point where they have understood, where they have rushed in to fill the case in with understanding, that they have missed the interpretation that it’s appropriate to make or not to make. This is generally naively expressed in the expression – This is what the subject meant. How do you know? What is certain is that he didn’t say it. And in most cases, on hearing what he did say, it appears that at the very least a question mark could have been raised which alone would have been sufficient for the valid interpretation, or at least for the beginnings of it

Seminar III, p.22 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Routledge, 1993)

 

“… Analysts’ practice makes them fascinated by highly seductive imaginary forms, by the imaginary meaning of the subjective world, whereas what one needs to know – this is what interested Freud – is what organises this world and enables it to be displaced”

Seminar III, p.173 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Routledge, 1993)

 

Quotes on the Signifier

If what Freud discovered, and rediscovers ever more abruptly, has a meaning, it is that the signifier’s displacement determines subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex; and that everything pertaining to the psychological pregiven follows willy-nilly the signifier’s train, like weapons and baggage

Écrits, 30

Psychoanalytic experience has rediscovered in man the imperative of the Word as the law that has shaped him in its image. It exploits the poetic function of language to give his desire its symbolic mediation. May this experience finally enable you to understand that the whole reality of its effects lies in the gift of speech; for it is through this gift that all reality has come to man and through its ongoing action that he sustains reality

Écrits, 322

This passion of the signifier thus becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but in man and through man that it speaks; in that his nature becomes woven by effects in which the structure of the language of which he becomes the material can be refound; and in that the relation of speech thus resonates in him, beyond anything that could have been conceived of by the psychology of ideas

Écrits, 689

The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not. That effect- the subject – is the intermediary effect between what characterises a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact that each of them, each of them is an element

Seminar XX, p.50

Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote), interfereing in the cuts offered it by actual discourse and the cogitation it informs

Écrits, 799

The cut made by the signifying chain is the only cut that verifies the structure of the subject as a discontinuity in the real. If linguistics enables us to see the signifier as the determinant of the signified, analysis reveals the truth of this relationship by making holes in meaning the determinants of its discourse

Écrits, 801

There are in the unconscious signifying chains which subsist as such, and which from there structure, act on the organism, influence what appears from the outside as a symptom, and this is the whole basis of analytic experience

Seminar V, The Formations of the Unconscious, 21st May, 1958.

Freud describes a dream as a certain knot, an associative network of analysed verbal forms that intersect as such, not because of what they signify, but thanks to a sort of homonymy. It is when you come across a single word at the intersection of three of the ideas that come to the subject that you notice that the important thing is that word and not something else. It is when you have found the word that concentrates around it the greatest number of threads in the mycellum that you know it is the hidden centre of gravity of the desire in question. That, in a word, is the point I was talking about just now, the nodal point where discourse forms a hole

– Lacan, My Teaching, p.28 (translated by David Macey, London:Verso, 2008)

The transparency of the classical subject divides, undergoing, as it does, the effects of fading that specify the Freudian subject due to its occultation [eclipse] by an ever purer signifier

Écrits, 800-801

The subject is manufactured by a certain number of articulations that have taken place, and falls from the signifying chain in the way that ripe fruit falls. As soon as he comes into the world he falls from a signifying chain, which may well be complicated or at least elaborate, and what we call the desire of his parents is subjacent to that very chain

– Lacan, My Teaching, p.44 (translated by David Macey, London:Verso, 2008)

 

 

Quotes on Speech

 

Even if it communicates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication; even if it denies the obvious, it affirms that speech constitutes truth; even if it is destined to deceive, it relies on faith in testimony. Thus the psychoanalyst knows better than anyone else that the point is to figure out to which ‘part’ of this discourse the significant term is relegated, and this is how he proceeds in the best of cases: he takes the description of an everyday event as a fable addressed as a word to the wise, a long prosopopeia as a direction interjection, and, contrariwise, a simle slip of the tongue as a highly complext statement, and even the rest of a silence as the whole lyrical development it stands for

Écrits, 251-252

 

 

Quotes on the Unconscious

 

The unconscious is that part of concrete discourse qua transindividual, which is not at the subject’s disposal in reestablishing the continuity of his conscious discourse

Écrits, 258

[On his famous maxim, ‘The unconscious is structured like a language’]

You see that by still preserving this ‘like’ [comme], I am staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to say – and I come back to this all the time – that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like letters

Seminar XX, p.48 (Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, W.W. Norton, 1999)

Quotes on Understanding

How many times have I said to those under my supervision, when they say to me – I had the impression he meant this or that – that one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject. To interpret and to imagine one understands are not at all the same things. It is precisely the opposite. I would go so far as to say that it is on the basis of a kind of refusal of understanding that we push open the door to analytic understanding

Seminar I, 24th February, 1954, p.73