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

What this quote means

Lacan argues that psychoanalysis does not grasp sexuality through biological understanding but through its psychological implications.

In this quote, Jacques Lacan asserts that psychoanalysis does not solely aim to understand sexuality based on biological facts or experiences. Instead, it focuses on the deeper psychological realities that govern human sexuality, suggesting that our understanding of sexuality is more complex and intertwined with our thoughts, beliefs, and social contexts than mere biological definitions.

Themes

PsychoanalysisSexualityPsychologyBiologicalUnderstanding

In practice

Example use cases

In a psychology lecture discussing the nature of human emotions.

More from Jacques Lacan

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.
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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.
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The real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
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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.
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The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
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Meaning is produced not only by the relationship between the signifier and the signified but also, crucially, by the position of the signifiers in relation to other signifiers.
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