Psychoanalysis 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 LacanRead
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.
Interpretation
Obsession can stem from various aspects of life and can trap individuals in repetitive cycles of thought or behavior.
In this quote, Jacques Lacan discusses the nature of obsession, emphasizing that it is not limited to sexual desires or specific objects of fixation, but rather it represents a broader psychological state. He illustrates how being obsessively caught in a pattern or mechanism can create an endless cycle that is difficult to escape, highlighting the importance of understanding the complexities of human thought and behavior.
In practice
In a psychology class discussion about the nature of obsessions.
Psychoanalysis 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.
But what Freud showed us… was that nothing can be grasped, destroyed, or burnt, except in a symbolic way, as one says, in effigie, in absentia.
The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
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.
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
Everyone in the street where I grew up was given the same message: You can be anything; you can do anything. That wasn't extraordinary; that was ordinary for us. My folks didn't believe in black exceptionalism. There's nothing exceptional about 'You can have that, too' - except when it comes to justice. You can't have that.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
We all dream; we do not understand our dreams, yet we act as if nothing strange goes on in our sleep minds, strange at least by comparison with the logical, purposeful doings of our minds when we are awake.
As long as there are those who are willing to shed blood and take innocent life in the name of religion, the name of God, the world will never know a true and lasting peace.
Perhaps someone will have seen mine, the one I’m waiting for, just as I saw him, in a ditch when his hands were making their last appeal and his eyes no longer could see. Someone who will never know what that man was to me; someone whose name I’ll never know.
The first thing to realize in meditation is that there is no authority, that the mind must be completely free to examine, to observe, to learn. And so there is no following, no accepting, no obedience.
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