Aquí va una entrevista a Jacques Lacan que me topé en Internet y acá mis citas favoritas:
The goal is to show him, by way of his own narrative, that the symptom – or let’s call it the illness – has no relationship to anything, and lacks any kind of meaning. Even if it is apparently real, it does not exist.
My books are called incomprehensible. But for whom? I did not write them for everyone, thinking that just anyone could understand them. On the contrary, I have never made the least effort to cater to my readers’ tastes, no matter who they are. I had things to say, and I said them. For me, it is enough to have an audience who reads my work. If they do not understand, well, let’s be patient. [...] I am also convinced that within ten years at the utmost, people reading my work will find it entirely transparent, like a good glass of beer. Perhaps then they’ll say ‘This Lacan, he’s so banal!’
[About understanding psychoanalysis as substitute for confession:] But what confession? You confess precisely zero to the psychoanalyst. You give yourself over to telling him simply whatever comes into your head. Words, that is. Psychoanalysis’s discovery is man-as-speaking-animal. It is up to the analyst to order the words he hears, giving them sense and meaning.
The analyst poses no questions and adds no ideas of his own. [...] But ultimately the subject analysing himself always goes where the analyst leads him.
I call a ‘symptom’ everything that comes from the real. And the real is everything that isn’t right, does not work, and is opposed to man’s life and his engagement with his personality. The real always returns to the same place. And it is there that you will always find it, in the same trappings.
For me the only true, serious science worth following is science fiction. [...] In addition to Freud’s three impossible positions – government, education, and psychoanalysis – I would add a fourth, science. But the experts are not expert enough to know that their position is untenable.
Personally, I would find the idea of an all-encompassing plague, produced by man, rather marvellous. [...] the real will win out, as always. And we’ll be as fucked as we ever were.
There are individuals, and that is all. When I hear people talking about the guy in the street, studies of public opinion, mass phenomena, and so on, I think of all the patients that I’ve seen on the couch in forty years of listening. None of them in any measure resembled the others, none of them had the same phobias and anxieties, the same way of talking, the same fear of not understanding. Who is the average Joe: me, you, my concierge, the president of the Republic?
The only real that we can conceive, that we can have access to, is precisely that, the need for a reason: to give some meaning to things, as we said earlier. Otherwise, man would not have anxiety, Freud would not have become famous, and I would be teaching in some grammar school.
Psychoanalysis is a serious matter that concerns, I repeat, a strictly personal relation between two individuals, the subject and the analyst. There is no collective psychoanalysis, just as there are no mass anxieties or neuroses.
The invading sex-mania is just an advertising phenomenon. [...] It is part of fashion, of this fake liberalisation that so-called permissive society gives us, like some gift from on high. But it is of no use at the level of psychoanalysis.