Talk:Need

Need (French: besoin) refers, in psychoanalytic discourse, to a vital requirement grounded in the organism (for example, hunger, thirst, warmth, sleep) and oriented toward a determinate satisfaction. While the term overlaps with everyday usage, psychoanalysis typically treats “need” as theoretically significant at the point where bodily exigency is mediated by caregiving, language, and the Other—so that what is requested and what is satisfied do not coincide in any simple way.

In Lacanian theory, “need” is best known through Lacan’s distinction between Need, Demand (demande), and Desire (désir). Needs must be addressed to the Other to be met and therefore take the form of demand; but demand always exceeds need because it also calls for recognition and Love. The excess that cannot be satisfied by any object adequate to need is what Lacan conceptualizes as desire.

Terminology and translation

Need, besoin, and adjacent terms

The French besoin is usually translated simply as “need,” but psychoanalytic writing often distinguishes need from nearby terms such as “want,” “wish,” and “request.” In everyday speech these words can blur (e.g., “I need you”), whereas in psychoanalytic usage “need” is frequently reserved for what is (at least conceptually) satisfiable by a specific object, while “desire” names what persists beyond satisfaction and is shaped by the subject’s relation to lack and to the Other.

Lacan’s use of “need” is deliberately contrastive: it preserves the register of organic requirement in order to show how, for a speaking being, organic life is never encountered as a self-contained “nature,” but is continually taken up into signification, ritual, prohibition, and the other’s response. Consequently, Lacanian texts often speak of need as a limit concept—something that marks what psychoanalysis cannot be reduced to (a technology of providing satisfactions), and what psychoanalysis must nonetheless keep in view (the body and its exigencies).

Freud’s Trieb and Instinkt: instinct, drive, and translation pitfalls

Discussion of need in psychoanalysis is frequently entangled with translation issues in Freud’s metapsychology. Freud’s term Trieb is now commonly translated as “drive,” while Instinkt is “Instinct.” However, the English “Standard Edition” (SE) famously renders Trieb as “instinct,” a decision noted and debated in subsequent scholarship.

This matters because Lacan’s distinction between need and drive can be obscured if Freud’s Trieb is read as a fixed biological program (“instinct”) rather than as a psychical insistence that is both bodily rooted and symbolically mediated. Freud defines Trieb as a “concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic,” a measure of the “demand made upon the mind for work.” That definition already complicates any straightforward equation of drive with biological need. Lacan’s later work radicalizes the point by describing drive satisfaction as structured by signifiers and by partial objects rather than by the completion of an organic requirement.

Freud and broader psychoanalytic background

Need, the “experience of satisfaction,” and wish

Although Freud does not establish “need” as a single technical term comparable to Lacan’s triad, need-like concepts are foundational in Freud’s account of psychic life. In his early “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), Freud theorizes an “experience of satisfaction” in which an internal tension (e.g., hunger) is relieved through an intervention from outside (caregiving), leaving memory traces that later organize the emergence of wish and hallucinated satisfaction. This early model already links bodily requirement, the presence of an Other, and the formation of psychic representation.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud treats dream fulfillment as the satisfaction of a wish rather than a need; nevertheless, the analytic problem is posed against a background in which bodily demands and their psychical representatives can be displaced, distorted, and re-encoded in dream-work. The point is not that needs disappear, but that the mind does not relate to satisfaction in a transparent manner: satisfactions are mediated by memory, fantasy, and the symbolic coordinates of the subject’s life.

Pleasure principle, reality principle, and adaptation

Freud’s account of the pleasure principle and the reality principle also frames need in a distinctive way. The pleasure principle describes a tendency to reduce unpleasure and seek immediate relief, while the reality principle modifies this tendency by postponing satisfaction and tolerating tension in the service of adaptation to external conditions. Needs can be used as a commonsense anchor here—hunger compels action—but psychoanalysis insists that the routes by which satisfaction is pursued (or refused) are shaped by conflict, repression, and compromise formations, not merely by biological regulation.

Freud’s later speculations in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” complicate the simple model of tension-reduction, introducing repetition and the possibility that psychic life is driven by forces not reducible to the pursuit of equilibrium. This provides one bridge to Lacan’s later insistence that the subject’s relation to satisfaction cannot be understood solely as need satisfaction.

Self-preservation, sexuality, and anaclisis

Freud’s early theorization often distinguishes self-preservative functions from sexual drives, even as he shows their entanglement. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud proposes that sexuality initially “leans on” (Anlehnung) functions of self-preservation (feeding is the paradigmatic case) before acquiring more autonomous aims and objects. Feeding thus becomes a scene in which bodily need, relational dependency, and emerging libidinal organization are intertwined—an early precedent for later psychoanalytic claims that “need” cannot be treated as purely biological once it is embedded in a human scene.

Later “needs” vocabularies: object relations and self psychology

Post-Freudian schools sometimes foreground “needs” more explicitly than Freud’s metapsychology. In Object relations theory, early psychic life is often described in terms of dependency on a caregiving environment, and clinical difficulties are frequently traced to failures of provision, holding, and reliability. Donald Winnicott distinguishes an infant’s “needs” from later “wishes,” arguing that early environmental failures may require defensive adaptation (e.g., the False self) and may disturb the capacity to play and symbolize.

In Self psychology, Heinz Kohut formulates “selfobject needs” (e.g., mirroring, idealization) as developmental requirements for cohesion of the self; clinical work often focuses on how such needs are recognized, transformed, and internalized. Lacanian theory does not necessarily deny these phenomena, but it tends to resist making “need fulfillment” the guiding ethical horizon of analysis, emphasizing instead the structure of desire and the subject’s relation to the Other and to jouissance.

Lacan’s distinction: need, demand, desire

The triad and its stakes

Beginning in the late 1950s, Lacan develops a technical distinction between need (besoin), demand (demande), and desire (désir). This distinction is articulated across several venues, notably in the period of Seminar V and in the essay “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” The triad is not merely classificatory; it aims to show how the human relation to satisfaction is transformed by the fact that the subject is constituted in the field of the Other and speaks.

A frequently cited formula condenses the point: “'Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second.’” Here, need is associated with “appetite for satisfaction,” demand with the demand for love, and desire with the structural difference produced when the two are not superimposable.

Need (besoin)

In Lacan’s account, need names an organic tension oriented toward a specific satisfaction: hunger is relieved by eating, thirst by drinking. Need is therefore intermittent and (in principle) exhaustible: once the appropriate satisfaction is obtained, the tension diminishes until it returns. Lacan sometimes aligns need with what readers may call “biological” or “natural” requirements in order to distinguish it from the psychoanalytic register of drive and the symbolic register of desire.

Yet Lacan also uses “need” to mark a conceptual limit rather than an empirical origin. The human subject, on Lacan’s view, does not first exist as a self-contained organism with “pure” needs and only later add language. Instead, the infant’s needs are immediately implicated in a scene of address and response: they are met (or not) by an Other whose presence and signifiers structure the infant’s experience. Need is thus theorized as what would be satisfiable if satisfaction could remain purely biological—precisely the hypothesis Lacan questions as soon as the subject enters language.

Demand (demande) and the demand for love

Lacan’s central move is to argue that needs must be articulated to be satisfied. The infant cannot secure satisfaction without addressing someone; need therefore becomes expressed, signified, and taken up as demand. Demand is not only a request for an object (food, comfort) but an address to the Other that presupposes recognition and response within a symbolic code.

For Lacan, every demand carries an additional dimension beyond the object: a demand for love (or recognition) from the Other. This does not mean that every request “really” seeks affection in a psychological sense; it means that, structurally, demand is bound to the Other’s response as such. The Other can provide the object that satisfies the need, but the Other cannot guarantee unconditional love, since the Other is not complete or all-powerful; the Other too is marked by lack and division.

This structural limit is decisive: it explains why demand may persist even when the object is provided, why satisfactions may not “take,” and why the subject may cling to dissatisfaction as a mode of relation to the Other.

Desire as remainder

Desire emerges, in Lacan’s account, from the gap between what demand can obtain (objects adequate to need) and what demand implicitly asks (love, recognition, the sign of the Other’s desire). Desire is not an intensified need; it is not simply what remains unmet. It is a structural remainder produced by the fact that the subject is constituted in language and speaks to the Other.

Lacanian commentators emphasize that this remainder is not a “surplus quantity” of energy but a structural effect of signification: once need is spoken, it is never simply identical with itself. Bruce Fink, for example, stresses that demand installs the subject in a field where satisfaction is symbolically mediated and where the Other’s response becomes determinant; desire is then located in what cannot be reduced to the satisfaction of demands or to the completion of needs.

This account also differentiates desire from the drives. Drives are partial and repetitive; they circle around partial objects (e.g., gaze, voice) and are not oriented toward the extinction of organic tension. Desire, by contrast, names the subject’s relation to lack and to the objet petit a as object-cause, rather than a terminal object of consumption.

The “pre-linguistic need” as hypothesis, not origin

A common misunderstanding treats Lacan’s triad as a chronological story: first there is a subject of pure need; then language arrives; then demand and desire appear. Lacan’s own insistence is that the issue is one of structure rather than developmental sequence. The distinction between need and its articulation as demand becomes intelligible only once articulation occurs; “pure need” is therefore a theoretical hypothesis rather than an empirically isolable state.

Even paradigmatic needs like hunger do not appear in experience as “mere biology,” because their satisfaction is mediated by the Other (timing, prohibition, gift, the signifier). The concept of a pre-linguistic need thus serves Lacan as a limiting fiction that highlights the divergence between human desire and natural categories, not as a claim that biology is irrelevant or that infants are not dependent on care.

Clinical and technical implications

Need, demand, and transference

Clinically, the triad provides a way to hear the analysand’s speech without treating it as a transparent inventory of needs. What is presented as a “need” may function as a Demand addressed to the analyst in the field of transference—that is, as a request that positions the analyst as the one who could supply, guarantee, or recognize. The analytic question then concerns what is being sought in and through the demand, and how that seeking is structured by the subject’s relation to the Other.

This does not entail ignoring bodily realities. Rather, it distinguishes two planes: the plane on which an organic requirement may be acknowledged and practically addressed, and the plane on which the subject’s demand is interpreted as speech within the analytic situation. The point is descriptive: to clarify why supplying what is asked for does not necessarily resolve the complaint, and why demands may proliferate or transform when their underlying function is relational rather than object-directed.

Interpretation, gratification, and analytic ethics

Lacan links the handling of demand to the ethics of psychoanalysis. In Seminar VII, he criticizes approaches that treat analysis as a program of adaptation or “good” satisfaction, arguing instead that analysis concerns the subject’s relation to desire and to what cannot be harmonized into a simple economy of needs. In this light, a central clinical question becomes how the analyst responds to demand without converting analysis into a relationship of supply and dependence.

Lacan’s broader clinical writing (including “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”) develops the idea that analytic work is not defined by providing satisfactions but by interpreting speech and shifting the subject’s relation to their own demand and desire. In Lacanian commentary, this is often discussed in terms of the analyst’s position, the limits of reassurance, and the emergence of the desire of the analyst as a technical operator rather than a personal preference.

Conceptual relations and common confusions

Need vs drive

Need is often contrasted with drive (Trieb). Need aims at a determinate satisfaction that (at least ideally) removes organic tension. Drive, in Freud’s definition, is already not simply an external stimulus or a biological reflex but an internal pressure that demands psychical work and can take diverse “vicissitudes.” Lacan intensifies this distinction by presenting drive as a repetitive circuit structured by the symbolic, oriented toward partial satisfaction rather than the extinction of need.

Need vs request vs demand

A “request” in everyday terms can be understood as a pragmatic ask for something needed. Lacan’s Demand is broader and more structural: it is the articulation of a need within language as an address to the Other, and it therefore includes an appeal for recognition. This is why, in Lacanian terms, demand can persist even after the object has been delivered: the satisfaction of need does not settle the question posed to the Other.

Need vs desire

Need and Desire are frequently conflated in ordinary speech, but Lacan distinguishes them sharply. Need is, in principle, satisfiable; desire is not. Desire is not “what is missing” in a quantitative sense; it is the structural effect produced by the gap between the satisfiable component of demand (need) and the unsatisfiable dimension of demand (love/recognition). In this sense, desire is organized around lack and around the Other’s desire, rather than around an object that would terminate it.

Summary contrasts (Lacanian usage)

• Need (besoin): organic requirement oriented toward determinate satisfaction; intermittent and terminable in principle.
• Demand (demande): need articulated in language and addressed to the Other; exceeds need by including a demand for love/recognition.
• Desire (désir): structural remainder produced by the gap between demand and need; not reducible to satisfiable objects; linked to lack and to the Other’s desire.
• Drive (Trieb): repetitive circuit of partial satisfaction; “frontier” concept in Freud; structurally elaborated in Lacan via partial objects and jouissance.

Reception and critical discussion

Biology and “reduction”

Lacan’s association of need with the biological has been interpreted in different ways. Some readers take it to imply that Lacanian psychoanalysis discounts bodily dependency or early deprivation, whereas Lacanian commentators typically argue that the category of need is retained precisely to acknowledge the body—while insisting that human satisfaction is always mediated by the symbolic and by the Other’s response. From more relational or developmental perspectives, the sharpness of the triad can appear to underemphasize the clinical weight of environmental provision and failure, themes central to Winnicottian and other object-relations approaches that use a “needs” vocabulary to describe early psychic organization.

Translation and conceptual drift

Debates about translating Freud’s Trieb (instinct vs drive) and about how to render Lacan’s besoin/demande/désir continue to shape reception. If “drive” is heard as a biological instinct, then “need” and “drive” can appear interchangeable; if drive is heard as a psychical insistence structured by representation and repetition, then Lacan’s differentiation becomes clearer. Translation thus affects not only vocabulary but also conceptual architecture.

Developmental vs structural readings

Another recurrent point concerns whether Lacan’s account is developmental or structural. Lacan often illustrates the triad with infant-caregiver scenes (feeding, crying, soothing), which invites developmental interpretation. Yet his claim that “pure need” is a hypothesis retroactively posited from within language indicates a structural thesis: the subject’s relation to satisfaction is transformed from the start by the symbolic order, so that need cannot function as an uncontaminated origin.

See also

Biology Development Pleasure principle

Demand Desire Wish

Drive Trieb Instinct

Love Other Transference

Nature Jouissance Objet petit a

Further reading

• Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man’s Soul. New York: Knopf, 1983.
• Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
• Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1966.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In Standard Edition, Vols. 4–5, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911). In Standard Edition, Vol. 12, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915). In Standard Edition, Vol. 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). In Standard Edition, Vol. 18, ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955.
• Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self. New York: International Universities Press, 1971.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (1958). In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” In Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: The Formations of the Unconscious (1957–1958), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
• Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.
• Laplanche, Jean; Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press / Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1973.
• Winnicott, D. W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press, 1965.