All sorts of things in this world behave like mirrors.

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.

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

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

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!

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.