It is not without effect that, even in a public speech, one directs one's attention at subjects, touching them at what Freud calls the navel- the nav… - Jacques Lacan

Pleasure limits the scope of human possiblity-the pleasure principle is a principle of homeostasis. Desire, on the other hand, finds its boundary, its strict relation, its limit, and it is in the relation to this limit that it is sustained as such, crossing the threshold imposed by the pleasure principle.

The important thing is not that the unconscious determines neurosis- of that one Freud can quite happily, like Pontius Pilot, wash his hands. Sooner or later, something would have been found, humeral determinate, for example- for Freud, it would be quite immaterial. For what the unconscious does it to show us the gap through which neurosis recreates a harmony with a real- a real that may not be determined.

The man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.