Theory’s excerpts

"Psychoanalysis reminds people that the subject has to do with speech. Psychoanalysis evaluates the power of speech, proposes an alternative to the anguish of scientific determinism… It locates the place of the necessary, and maintains the place of the contingent."

"Mental Health exists, but has little to do with mental, and very little to do with health. It has to do with the Other (values, laws, language, culture, family, parents, teachers, bosses…) and silence. Mental health is what ensures the Other’s silence, just as health is the silence of physical organs”. “The application of Psychoanalysis aims at decoding productions of culture."
*the words in parenthesis are mine to explain the concept

"Jouissance": Symptom’s satisfaction

"...certain people derive a great deal of pleasure from torturing themselves, from subjecting themselves to painful experiences ... satisfaction in dissatisfaction. It qualifies the kind of "kick" someone may get out of punishment; self-punishment doing something that is so painful it becomes pleasurable."

"The moment at which someone seeks therapy can be understood as one in which a break down occurs in that person’s favorite or habitual way of obtaining jouissance (satisfaction). The juissance –providing symptom is not working anymore or has been jeopardized."

Lacan proposes a different term than "patient": "analisand" which implies that it is the person in therapy who does the work of analysing, not the analyst …the promise of a new approach to things, a new way of dealing with people, a new way of operating in the world"

The technique of applied psychoanalysis

"The analyst requests that the analisand says whatever comes to mind without censoring and paying attention to dreams, fantasies, daydreams, fleeting thoughts, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, and the like..."

"What the therapist offers at the outset is a different substitute satisfaction: the strange sort of satisfaction that comes from the transference relationship and from deciphering the unconscious” (Ibid) Later on, association and interpretation will take place and self-knowledge and desire will occur."