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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.
Jacques Lacan
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Interpretation

What this quote means

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.

Themes

ObsessionMechanismPsychologyTrapThought

In practice

Example use cases

In a psychology class discussion about the nature of obsessions.

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