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.

The sentence completes its signification only with its last term.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

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.

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

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.

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.