Abstract

Jacques Lacan used authors and philosophical concepts in a very original manner in order to make clearer some aspects of psychoanalytical theory. The aim of this essay is to show how Heideggerian ontology is important in order to understand the way in which desire, which is basically lack, wait and vow according to Lacan, is transferred through generational chains. In other words, also using Marcel Mauss’s theses on the gift, this essay contributes to the topical discussion about the economic debt interpreted in the light of the Lacanian notion of symbolic debt. In the end, debt and gift are the key words to understand the human condition.