Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jacques Lacan

Quote by Jacques Lacan

“The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.”

Quote by Jacques Lacan

Work

Écrits: a selection

This book is a curated selection of essays and texts, showcasing the author's diverse range of thoughts and ideas across different subjects and themes. more

Author

Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst born on April 13, 1901, and died on September 9, 1981. He had a profound impact on the field of psychoanalysis, particularly within the structuralist and post-structuralist movements. Lacan's theories have had a wide-ranging influence on psychology, literature, and the arts. more

You May Also Like

“We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."”

“LSD was not a pharmacological agent generating exotic experiences by its interaction with the neurophysiological processes in the brain. This remarkable substance was clearly an unspecific catalyst of the deep dynamics of the human psyche. The experiences induced by it were not neurochemical artifacts, symptoms of a toxic psychosis as mainstream psychiatrists called it, but genuine manifestations of the human psyche itself.”

“What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.”

“The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism.”