Jacques Lacan Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

The unconscious is structured like a language.

Jacques Lacan
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
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.

Jacques Lacan
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.

Jacques Lacan
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.

Jacques Lacan
The evil eye is the fascinum, it is that which has the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life. At the moment the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. This anti-life, anti-movement function of the terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly.

Jacques Lacan
The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

Jacques Lacan
The only thing of which one can be guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire.

Jacques Lacan
You can be Lacanians, if you want. As for me, I'm a Freudian.

Jacques Lacan
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.

Jacques Lacan