...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 LacanPsychoanalysis 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 LacanSymptoms, those you believe you recognize, seem to you irrational because you take them in an isolated manner, and you want to interpret them directly.
Jacques LacanThe 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 LacanWe 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 LacanThe 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