por Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, considered one of the most important figures in the history of psychoanalysis. In fact, he is also known as the “French Freud”.
As will be seen from his quotes, which are taken from his writings, Lacan’s teachings are quite difficult to understand, even for mental health professionals.
The best phrases of Jacques Lacan
We have made a compilation of Jacques Lacan quotes about the unconscious, language, sexuality, desire, anxiety, love, among other topics. With them you can begin to learn his teachings and concepts about psychoanalysis.
The unconscious is structured like a language.
Everything found in our unconscious is previously coded according to the cultural environment we inhabit.
To love means to give something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.
When we love someone, we always try to transform the other person so that they are fully compatible with us.
Many things in this world behave like mirrors.
Our behavior and personality can be reflected in our interaction with many of the elements we use on a daily basis.
Castration means that jouissance must be denied in order to achieve it on the inverse scale of the Law of desire.
Repressing our most primal impulses is a form of castration.
It is common for the obvious to go unnoticed precisely because it is obvious.
Many times we ignore the real reasons for something just because they are so obvious.
When we are faced with something impossible, we only have one way left, to do it.
We must always face everything that is in front of our path.
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.
Each person is different from another, that is why all of them should be analyzed as unique cases.
Reading in no way forces us to understand.
The fact that we read some material does not mean that we have to understand it completely.
The principle of pleasure lies in doing nothing, in doing as little as possible.
For Lacan, pleasure is understood as the prevention of suffering by reducing the level of tension and frustration, and avoiding the decrease in the level of energy.
When one loves, it has nothing to do with sexuality.
Love is a feeling that goes beyond our sexual desires.
Nothing completely satisfies desire.
We will never stop wanting things, nor trying to satisfy that need.
The analyst is not the one who knows, the only one who knows is the patient.
The professional only knows fragments of the situation that was described by the patient, the patient is the one who knows the full picture of the situation.
People go around in a circle because of our structure, the structure of the human being is toroidal.
We always come back to the same problems.
What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?
As much as we are with many people, if none of them makes us feel as we want, we are not going to feel better.
Even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (sleeping with another man) is true, his jealousy is still pathological.
Being suspicious of the person we love is a disease, whether we are right or not.
You are not you, you are what my desire invents of you.
We see in people what we want to see, and we feel attracted to people that we assign certain virtues that we like.
From a wound, what matters is the scar.
What really matters about the bad times we have gone through are the lessons they have left us.
The time for understanding can be reduced to the instant of a look, but that look can include in its instant all the time necessary to understand.
The comprehension process of a person can occur in an instant, since we can process a large amount of information immediately.
I always tell the truth. Not the whole truth, it is impossible to tell it completely because words fail.
Words often fail to express the full meaning of what we want to say.
Anxiety is always related to loss… with a bilateral relationship about to end to be replaced by something else, and that the patient cannot face without vertigo.
Big changes generate a lot of insecurity and put us in a state of excitement.
What is understood from my history is not the past or the present, but the past future of what I will have been, what I am in the process of becoming.
Our personality constantly changes and we are never the same person we were in the past, nor in the present; rather, we are what we are about to become at each moment.
Lack generates desire.
When we do not have something, the desire to obtain it is generated in us.
The only thing you can feel guilty about is having given ground in relation to your desire.
We must never allow our innermost desires to rule the way we act. We must do things reasoning first.
It is only true to the extent that it is truly followed.
We make true everything in which we faithfully believe.
Love is always reciprocal.
When we love someone, it is because we perceive something about that person that makes us fall in love.
Jouissance does not appear simply as the satisfaction of a need, but as the satisfaction of an impulse.
For Lacan, when we enjoy doing something it is because we satisfy a temptation, not because we do something that we really need.
The only thing we all talk about is our symptoms.
People generally talk about our shortcomings, difficulties and our perception of the world.
Desire takes place in the repercussion that arises from articulating language at the level of the other.
When you talk to another person and you can easily interpret the things they say, a certain attraction is generated between the interlocutors.
The person who is born must take care of language first, this is a fact. He is even trapped in it before his birth.
Our way of thinking is structured by the language we speak, and we get it from the place where we are born.
The madman is not only the beggar who thinks he is a king, he is also the king who thinks he is a king.
We must never believe that we are better than other people, we must always behave with humility and empathy.
You can know what the other person has said, but never what they have heard.
Human beings interpret things in different ways. Therefore, we will never know how the other person has interpreted a message.
There is something in you that I like more than yourself, that’s why I must kill you.
Inevitably, people try to change what the person we are with is and make them what we want them to be.
Truth can only be explained in terms of fiction.
For Lacan, we are incapable of recognizing the truth and neither of expressing it with our language, our perception being a fiction built through symbolism.
The reason we seek poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.
Poetry explains things in a way that is pleasing to the ear, and often in less depth than philosophy does.
To know that there is a part of our functions that is beyond the reach of consciousness, we did not have to wait for Freud to know it.
Human beings were always clear that some of their functions arose from another plane, different from the conscious one.
Desire is always desire.
Our longings always remain with us; no matter how much we fulfill them, a new one will always come to replace it.
Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; we must continue from there.
The investigations carried out by Freud modified certain beliefs that were held before him, and this changed the focus of the investigation of the human being.
The truth is the error that escapes deception, and to which we arrived from a misunderstanding.
For Lacan, reaching the truth is something very complex to achieve.
The obsession is not necessarily sexual; being obsessed means being trapped in a demanding mechanism that demands more and more.
We should never obsess over anything, we should always be aware of how far we can give ourselves in the task of achieving something.
Analytical truth is not so secret or so mysterious that it does not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see the truth arise spontaneously.
Our analysis capacity allows us to identify when they try to manipulate us.
All art is characterized by a type of organization around a void.
For Lacan, art is a symbolic element that tries to organize chaos and truth even when it is unknown.
Life has only one meaning, being able to bet it and bet your life has something to do with it.
We should always live our life to the fullest, doing everything we want.
If psychoanalysis clarifies certain features of sexuality, it is not by pointing them out in their own reality.
Psychoanalysis helps to decipher some sexual behaviors from a psychological, not a physical, approach.
The unconscious is exactly the hypothesis that we do not dream only when we sleep.
Human beings are capable of wishing for things, or dreaming, while awake; and this is achieved in the unconscious.
The symptoms, those that you think you recognize, seem irrational to you because you see them in isolation and you want to interpret them directly.
In order to interpret what we feel, we must see what happens to us as a whole, not as events isolated from each other.
The Self is always in the field of The Other.
What we are depends on the other people around us.
The unconscious does not understand the contradiction; For this reason, the analyst must ensure that his foundation is not contradictory.
An analyst should never contradict the patient’s unconscious drives.
Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, which is why we run the risk of using it for what it was not created for, and thus degenerating it.
Never use psychoanalysis for anything other than what it was created for.
It is up to the analyst to take the place of the patient.
Every analyst must accompany the patient in his process, without interrupting or guiding him.
What could be more convincing than the gesture of placing our cards face up on the table?
To show complete sincerity we must show ourselves as we are, without hiding anything.
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