Quotes by Jacques Lacan

About Jacques Lacan:

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced many leading French intellectuals in the 1960s and the 1970s, especially those associated with poststructuralism. His ideas had a significant impact on critical theory, literary theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.
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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.

Jacques Lacan

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.

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 anterio...

Jacques Lacan

Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel.

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 i...

Jacques Lacan

Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it.

Jacques Lacan

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.

Jacques Lacan

As is known, it is in the realm of experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we may grasp along what imaginary lines the human organism, in the most intimate recesses of its being, manifests its capture in a symbolic dimension.

Jacques Lacan

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

Jacques Lacan

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

Jacques Lacan

The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!

Jacques Lacan

S'il n y a pas de rapport sexuel c'est que l'Autre est d'une autre race.

Jacques Lacan

I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

Jacques Lacan

What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe?

Jacques Lacan

A geometry implies the heterogeneity of locus, namely that there is a locus of the Other. Regarding this locus of the Other, of one sex as Other, as absolute Other, what does the most recent development in topology allow us to posit?

Jacques Lacan

Aside from that reservation, a fictive tale even has the advantage of manifesting symbolic necessity more purely to the extent that we may believe its conception arbitrary.

Jacques Lacan

In other words, 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

Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis is a terribly efficient instrument, and because it is more and more a prestigious instrument, we run the risk of using it with a purpose for which it was not made for, and in this way we may degrade it.

Jacques Lacan

Since Freud, the center of man is not where we thought it was; one has to go on from there.

Jacques Lacan

Author Bio

  • NameJacques Lacan
  • DescriptionFrench psychoanalyst and psychiatrist
  • BornApril 13, 1901
  • DiedSeptember 9, 1981
  • CountryFrance
  • ProfessionPsychiatrist; Psychoanalyst; Author; Translator