Attempting to summarize the main principles behind Lacanian philosophy

     With a bit of exaggeration, you could say that many schools of psychoanalysis can also be used as a personal life philosophy, in the way that many use existentialism or stoicism to deal with their life. This especially applies to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I tried to outline what I think would be the main fundamental philosophical assumptions behind Lacanianism:

    1. You will never be satisfied, you will always want more and more ("we desire to desire")

    2. You don't know what you want and after you obtain what you thought you wanted, you may be surprisingly unsatisfied

    3. People's beliefs are often inconsistent with their actions (unconscious desire)*

    4. People can enjoy their own suffering and suffer in their own enjoyment ("jouissance")

    5. Our psychological symptoms are primarily caused by the way we interact with others and society at large, as well as by cultural norms and social constructs ("the big Other") 

    6. The language that we use everyday has a real impact on reality, on ourselves and our interactions ("language speaks the subject")

Other than the first and the sixth one however, 2-5 could apply to other schools of psychoanalysis as well, if not to all of them. The fifth one could apply to object-relations theory too, and the second and third one could apply to pretty much all of psychoanalysis in general as both a philosophical framework and a clinical praxis.

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*: This third one is a bit more debatable as Lacan didn't explicitly state it like that, but in my opinion it could be easily inferred out of some of his works.