... up to Freud, the whole study of human affairs began to a greater or lesser extent from a concern about morality, about ethics, in the sense that it is less a question of studying desire than here and now of reducing and disciplining it. Now, it is with the effects of desire in a very broad sense, desire is not one of the ancilliary effects, the effects of desire, that we have to deal in psychoanalysis.
- Jacques Lacan, Seminar V: The Formations of the Unconscious, March 5, 1958 (translation by Cormac Gallagher).