Lacan could therefore be picked up by a Marxist like Althusser not because he offered a theory of adaptation to reality or of the individual's insertion into culture (Althusser added a note to the English translation of his paper on Lacan criticizing it for having implied such a reading), but because the force of the unconscious in Lacan's interpretation of Freud was felt to undermine the mystifications of a bourgeois culture proclaiming its identity, and that of its subjects, to the world. The political use of Lacan's theory therefore stemmed from its assault on what English Marxists would call bourgeois 'individualism'.What the theory offered was a divided subject out of 'sync' with bourgeois myth. Feminists could legitimately object that the notion of psychic fragmentation was of little immediate political advantage to women struggling for the first time to find a voice, and trying to bring together the dissociated components of their life into a political programme. But this is a very different criticism of the political implications of psychoanalysis than the one which accuses it of forcing women into bland conformity with their expected role.

Jacqueline Rose, Femininity and Its Discontents (1983)

A Letter From Freud to the Mother of a homosexual (1935):

Dear Mrs. [Erased]

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact, that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.) It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime and cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve this. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual; in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed. If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me—I don’t expect you will—, he has to come over to Vienna. I have no intention of leaving here. However, don’t neglect to give me your answer.

Sincerely yours with best wishes,
Freud

Le Matin: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis is then, as you note in the title of the final chapter, a paradoxical ethics.

Jacques-Alain Miller: Certainly, it’s the ethics implied by what Freud called the death drive, a concept which, it must be admitted, has always horrified psychoanalysts. Freud’s pupils, with a few exceptions such as Melanie Klein, have rejected it to a man. The death drive is at bottom the Freudian figure that Lacan deciphers through jouissance. Jouissance doesn’t work for the good of the individual. If it is a good, it is one which goes against any well-being. That is why Lacan can say, he who does not give up on his desire does not open up a path to happiness! The ethics which presides in the analytical experience is not for Lacan an ethics that one could decide to embrace, an ethics to which one could commit oneself. How does one realize its ideals? In a kind of way, it is an ethics without an ideal.

Jacques-Alain Miller in an Interview with Le Matin (1986)

Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As A Political Factor (2008)

Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment As A Political Factor (2008)

Derek Hook's demonstration of Lacan's bouquet-mirror illusion.

Where does shame enter here, where can it intervene? In his 1969-70 seminar ‘The Reverse of Psychoanalysis’, reacting to the events of May ʼ68, Lacan made a provocative statement which is often quoted and much decried: ‘What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.’ However, there is a much more important point which is less attended to in Lacan’s critique of protesting students when he says ‘all you are lacking precisely is a bit of shame’. Lacan repeatedly varies this motif, like saying that students ‘fear they might be carried away by buffoonery. Let us start rather from the fact that buffoonery is already there. Perhaps by mixing in a little shame, who knows, we may be able to hold it back.’ And he even concludes the Seminar with: ‘what I put forward, for the majority of you, it is just that: I manage to make you ashamed, not too much but precisely enough.’

Slavoj Zizek, "What Hysterics Dream About" in Zero Point (2025)

Lacan isn’t advocating for a minimum of morality and/or repression that should be maintained to prevent social disintegration – on the contrary, he draws attention to what the Frankfurt School members were in the 1940s already referring to as ‘repressive desublimation’. What we are getting today is a kind of generalized perversion (openly doing what hysterics only dream about), and as Freud knew well, nowhere is the Unconscious more inaccessible, more repressed, than in perversion. The catch is that desire is in itself immanently inconsistent, self-contradictory, traversed by what Freud called ‘primordial repression’, which is why the permissiveness of perversion ends up in a self-destructive deadlock which gives birth to the call for a new Master. And, as the ongoing wave of new populism aptly demonstrates, this new Master’s shamelessness by far exceeds the shamelessness of the old Leftist protesters.

Slavoj Zizek, "What Hysterics Dream About" in Zero Point (2025)

There is an obvious reproach that imposes itself here: Is shaming not one of the basic ideological procedures deployed by those in power to dismiss many radical critical stances? ‘Shame on you if . . . (you criticize Israel, you distrust democracy, you despise other races, you recognize LGBT+ rights or its opposite, sexual binarism)!’ I would respond that such shaming is as a rule directed at some form of the Other (a political opponent), and the way to counteract it is through self-reflection: in the same way that, according to Hegel, the true evil resides in the subject who sees evil everywhere around itself, the one who should truly be ashamed is the one who is constantly shaming others. Not to mention the fact that today’s hegemonic cynical stance less and less relies on shaming others: it is self-consciously shameless, it openly admits horrors it is committing. This is why today’s predominant ideology more and more tries to eviscerate the last remainders of shame and dignity in its subjects – and its desperate efforts to annihilate shame and dignity proves that they remain a force to be reckoned with.

Slavoj Zizek, "What Hysterics Dream About" in Zero Point (2025)

This brings us back to the beginning of this chapter: the aim of psychoanalysis, of psychoanalytic treatment. It is not to make the analysand aware of how he is ultimately a puppet of unconscious desires but to restore him to his full dignity as a subject. It is not to enable him to live a more satisfying sexual life deprived of ruptures and inhibitions but to make him confront the ruptures that define his subjectivity. It is not to soften the rigidity of ethical norms or to endorse ignoring unpleasant facts to enjoy a more happy life. In short, it is not therapy practiced to make us feel and act better.

Slavoj Zizek, "What Hysterics Dream About" in Zero Point (2025)

In our everyday lives, we constantly fall prey to imaginary lures which promise the healing of the original/constitutive wound of symbolization, from Woman with whom full sexual relationship will be possible to the totalitarian political ideal of a fully realized community. In contrast, the fundamental maxim of the ethics of desire is simply desire as such: one has to maintain desire in its dissatisfaction. What we have here is a kind of heroism of the lack: the aim of psychoanalytic cure is to induce the subject to heroically assume his constitutive lack, to endure the splitting which propels desire. A productive way out of this deadlock is provided by the possibility of sublimation: when one picks out an empirical, positive, object and "elevates it to the dignity of the Thing," i.e. turns it into a kind of stand-in for the impossible Thing, one thereby remains faithful to one's desire, without getting drawn into the deadly vortex of the Thing...

Slavoj Zizek, From Desire to Drive: Why Lacan is Not Lacaniano (1996)

Psychoanalysis is a fundamentally incredulous activity and seeks to disrupt even the sturdiest narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. [. . .] For these and other reasons, as I once heard an esteemed analyst say, there is no reason why it has to survive – and indeed, given our current culture’s obsession with measuring every aspect of every second of every day, the future institutional reproduction of psychoanalysis appears less assured than ever. Freud once said that the point of psychoanalysis was to turn ‘neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness’. But what future does ordinary unhappiness have in the happiness industry?

Christian Gelder, Self Unhelped (2024)

Bruce Fink, Miss-ing (2024)

This is what all the great narratives tell us, even if they replace God with notions of fate or the inexorable laws of life. The function of "unchangeable" stories is precisely this: against all our desires to change destiny, they make tangible the impossibility of changing it. And in so doing, no matter what story they are telling, they are also telling our own story, and that is why we read them and love them. We need their severe, "repressive" lesson. Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are "already made" also teach us how to die.

Umberto Eco, "On Some Functions of Literature" (2000)

Joseph Wright of Derby
Landscape with a Rainbow
1794