“What is meaning in the views of some great thinkers? As early as Hobbes, it was postulated that signification cannot be divorced ultimately from human intentions. Human beings have to make sure that words mean what they intend them to mean.”


“The structuralist looks for relations into which the sign enters which can be known to both parties and then treats these relations as explaining the meaning of the sign. There is neither any scope for a reader’s interpretation nor recognition of the agency of an author.”


“Lacan has isolated the concept of meaning as the true aim of a psychoanalytic quest.”



“Psychical reality is not a part of the ‘body’. The body is indeed constituted of instincts which are distinguished from the Freudian drives.”



“According to Freud, all events involving ‘instinctual development’ are meaningful events.”



“Lacan gives the example (Lacan, III, p.188) of a navigator who notes down the latitude and longitude of the position of a certain object seen from the ship. The latitude and longitude and the name of the object signify nothing; have no meaning for him ... The fact that he notes it down is the subjectivity Lacan is trying to distinguish from the objective details of the place where he sees the object.”


“A paranoiac suffers from a particular type of delusion. “He is certain of something, which… regards him”. It is not that he believes in his hallucinations, which are mostly auditory, but he is certain that they have a specific meaning for him. It is not important for him that the hallucinations should be taken for real. Lacan says, “the madman doesn’t believe in the reality of his hallucinations”. He lays emphasis on the fact that the hallucinations occur to him. “Reality isn’t at issue for him, certainty is”. The certainty that the hallucination concerns something regarding him constitutes “the elementary phenomenon or, as a more developed phenomenon, delusional belief.”