Lacan Quotes

“In Lacanian analysis, interpretation is used sparingly, and not in reference to the analyst’s theoretical constructs,”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The Other – the set of rules and hypotheses into which the individual is born and which includes and is contained within language – creates the Subject and its ego; as language, it is the raw material from which the signifying chain was produced; its first embodiment – the mother – is the object of primary identification of the child.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The knowledge the patient seeks is already known to him/her: it exists in his/her unconscious, in the signifying chain containing the master signifiers. This is the ‘knowledge’ that slips out in dreams, slips of the tongue, self-defeating acts – and, of course, the symptoms that might have prompted the Subject to come to the couch in the first place.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“Some of these analysts could be named ‘Modern Lacanians’, in parallel to what has happened in the Freudian sphere.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“such a practice suggests a lack of recognition on the part of the analyst that a construct is only that – a fiction of the analyst’s imagination.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“at best, the contemporary analyst leaves his patient at the point of purely imaginary identification – of which the hysteric remains captive, because her fantasy implies ensnarement in it’.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“our greatest fear is probably that our desire will be replaced with the bland nothingness of nirvana; and yet, nirvana is exactly what is craved by those for whom the tension between desire and anxiety has become all too much;”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“perhaps the only real solution is to recognise one’s desire so as not to be enslaved by it.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“the power of the analyst wanes, and finally, the analyst is discarded, like an empty shell. This contrasts strongly with the view of other schools of analysis that the end of an analysis should be closely controlled and managed by the analyst.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“this desire of the analyst is even more important than transference phenomena, for this is the motor force that will keep the analysis going and prevent it becoming stalled:”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“In other words, the analyst has to put to one side his/her ego, and listen impassively, like a ‘pure mirror of absolute smoothness’, so as to allow the patient to project upon him/her the successive images of the myriad interlocutors the patient has had in his/her life; the ‘others’ in this sentence refers to these interlocutors (often the mother, father, siblings, spouses).”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“However, the constant and ever-changing manifestations of transference in an analysis had to be noted with great precision by the analyst, and ‘played’ with extreme subtlety by the analyst, who should be as opaque and reflective as possible – an empty mirror.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“this practice, which he felt engaged the ego of the patient – the very part responsible for blocking out truth – to the further obscuring of the Subject.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“Desire is what sustains the analysis, and it is the analyst’s job to sustain desire. Desire is also, together with its twin, anxiety, one of the principal structuring forces of the Subject; it is a condition in the Subject that the ego is often oblivious to, and one of the aims of analysis is to allow the Subject to bring its authentic desires into the light of consciousness.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The role of the analyst is threefold: to be the ‘pure mirror’, to be the Other, and to sustain desire.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“the analysand makes the hypothesis that the analyst knows things about him/her that she/he (the Subject) doesn’t. This hypothesis is important because in making it, the analysand recognises that there is something to know – something to which she/he is oblivious, which is the first truth in analysis.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The first transference in psychoanalysis must mimic that of the primary identification, so that the analyst embodies the Other – the gatekeeper of the meanings of the signifiers used by the analysand.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“the job of inserting it into the chain is the patient’s sole and sovereign right.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The truth can only be arrived at by means of the master signifiers, the ‘negative side’ of which must be drawn out of the unconscious. The true signifying chain – not the one spun by the ‘de-negatives’ of the master signifiers – has to be built of the Subject’s own volition; ‘telling’ it to him/her will only lead to a fresh repression of it, or of enough elements of it as will render it meaningless.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“The ego is the lie the patient tells him/herself. It is a fictional creation of the Subject founded upon the love of its image, and the discourse of the Other. It is in the maintenance of this fiction that a signifying chain must be repressed into the unconscious. The analytical process should not aim at ‘strengthening’ the ego but quite the reverse: ‘The imaginary of the ego must give way … to the subject in the authenticity of his desire”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“It sounds like we could either cope with the problem or deal with it; I think it would be better to deal with it’;”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“the difference between trying to pare off the visible manifestation of the problem or tackling its roots so that it won’t grow back.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“the patient has already accepted that the symptom is but a creation of his/her deep personality structure and is willing to try to discover that.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“This implies getting past the obscuring edifice of the ego, which is the fiction the Subject has constructed out of its desires and fears. He suggests that the revelation of the authentic desire of the Subject in its own words is one of the aims of analysis: ‘The function of the signifier as such in desire’s quest is … the key to what we need to know in order to terminate our analyses – and no artifice can make up for it if we are to achieve this end.’5 But when talking about the aims of analysis directly, he becomes circumspect, preferring not to commit himself to any easy pronouncements”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide

“In the formulation of various of his theoretical precepts, he speaks about the need to ‘accompany the subject towards … the point at which the objective “me” and the subjective “I” can be reunited’.”
― Lionel Bailly, Lacan: A Beginner's Guide