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.

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.

Love letter or conspiratorial letter, letter of betrayal or letter of mission, letter of summons or letter of distress, we are assured of but one thing: the Queen muse not bring it to the knowledge...

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

Yet, analytical truth is not as mysterious, or as secret, so as to not allow us to see that people with a talent for directing consciences see truth rise spontaneously.

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...

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...

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!

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

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.

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...

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and...

Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.

What could be more convincing, moreover, than the gesture of laying one’s cards face up on the table?

Which is why we cannot say of the purloined letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be in a particular place but that unlike them it will be and not be where...

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

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...

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

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.

Symptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.

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...

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...

Writings scatter to the winds blank checks in an insane charge. And were they not such flying leaves, there would be no purloined letters.

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.

…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...

The narration, in fact, doubles the drama with a commentary without which no mise en scene would be possible.

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...

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

For the signifier is a unit in its very uniqueness, being by nature symbol only of an absence.

If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.