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
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.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that one's thoughts can lead to a disconnect from reality and self-awareness.
In this quote, Jacques Lacan explores the relationship between thought and existence. He proposes that our consciousness and self-perception are shaped by our thoughts, and when we become overwhelmed or controlled by our thoughts, we may lose sight of our true self. The idea that 'I think where I am not' highlights the complexity of the mind, indicating that our thoughts can take us away from present reality and into a realm of distractions and uncertainties about our identity.
In practice
During a philosophical debate about the nature of reality and thought.
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.
The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom
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.
Men create the gods after their own images.
While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.
In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.
Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.
Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.
A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.
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