40 phrases by Lacan to meet this genius of psychoanalysis

Each one attains the truth that he is able to bear.

The traditional moralist, whoever he may be, invincibly relapses into the routine of persuading us that pleasure is a good, that the path to good is laid out for us by pleasure.

The only thing we talk about is our own symptom.

Desire is the essence of reality.

The pleasure principle resides in doing nothing, in doing as little as possible.

Love is impotent, even if it is reciprocal, because it ignores that it is only the desire to be.

To love is, above all, to want to be loved.

Nothing satisfies the desire for everything.

We are beings capable of desiring, but always incomplete, hence our journey.

The structure of the unconscious is similar to a language.

You will never watch me from where I see you.

I propose that the only thing one can be guilty of, at least from an analytic perspective, is having given in to one’s desire.

You may know what he said, but never what another heard.

The thing dies in the word.

Anxiety as we know it always has a connection with a loss. With a relationship that has two faces and can disappear simply by being replaced by something else. Something that no patient can face without feeling dizzy.

If you think you already understand, you are probably wrong.

When the loved one goes too far in betraying himself and perseveres in deceiving himself, love fails to follow him.

I wait. But I don’t expect anything.

Interpretation here becomes a requirement of weakness, which we must help.

The attraction to usefulness is so irresistible that we can observe people willing to do anything for the pleasure of comforting those who have the idea that they cannot live without their help.

You can love someone not only for what you have, but literally for what you lack.

It is common for the obvious to go unnoticed, precisely the obvious.

All desire is born in absence.

To love is to give what you don’t have to someone you don’t have.

If there is an object of your desire, it is none other than yourself.

I ask you to reject what I offer you, because that is not it.

Being a psychoanalyst is simply opening your eyes to the evidence that nothing is crazier than human reality.

The self is always in the field of the other.

The art and the word usually exist to hide the lack.

You can love someone not just for what you have, but literally for what you lack.

Knowledge has as its first virtue its ability to face what is not evident.

It is the truth of what this desire was in its history that the subject screams through its symptom.

The sexual relationship does not exist.

Only those who give in to their desire feel guilty.

All kinds of things in this world behave like mirrors.

From a wound, what matters is the scar.

I think where I’m not, so I’m where I don’t think.

The psychoanalyst undoubtedly directs the cure. The first principle of this cure is that you must not direct the patient.

Whoever wants to be a Lacanian, so be it. I am Freudian.

All art is characterized by a certain way of organizing around a void.