Desire
The term 'desire' (French: désir) is located at the center of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The concept of desire is the central concern of [[psychoanalytic [theory]].
Contents
Human Existence
Desire is the heart of human existence. Lacan, following Spinoza, argues that "desire" is the essence of man."[1] Desire is fundamental to every aspect of the psychic life of the individual and to the social system in which the individual finds him or herself embedded.
Desire, Need and Demand
Lacan distinguishes between three related concepts:
Lacan has linked the concept of 'desire' with 'need' (besoin) and 'demand' (demande) in the following way.
The human infant is born with fundamental biological needs that require (constant or periodic) satisfaction.
(The human infant, being born into a state of helplessness, is unable to satisfy its own needs, and thus depends on the Other to help it satisfy them.)
(The infant, unable to satisfy its own needs, depends on the Other to help it satisfy them.)
Need is a biological instinct. Need emerges according to the requirements of the organism and abates completely (even if only temporarily) when satisfied.
The human infant is born into a state of helplessness.
The infant must depend on the Other to help it satisfy its own needs.
The human infant has certain biological needs which are satisfied by certain objects.
The infant, in order to get help from the Other, must articulate (express) its needs (vocally) in (the form of a) demand.
The infant, in order to satisfy its own needs, must engage in the dialectic of exchange with others.
The demand serves to bring the Other to help satisfy the needs of the infant.
The demands of the infant is for the Other to help satisfy its needs
The function of demand is to serve as an articulation of need.
Demand is also a demand for love (beyond the satisfaction of need).
The presence of the Other becomes important in itself.
The presence of the Other symbolizes the Other's love.
The needs which are articulated in demands are satisfied.
Even after the needs which are articulated in demands are satisfied, demand (as the demand for love) remains unsatisfied.
This leftover is desire.
Desire is what remains of demand after the needs which are articulated in that demand are satisfied.
However, whereas the Other can provide the objects which the subject requires to satisfy his needs, the Other cannot provide that unconditional love which the subject craves.
The Other can help to satisfy the needs of the infant.
The Other cannot provide that unconditional love which the infant craves.
The biological needs of the individual is that they have become inseparable from, and importantly subordinated to, the vicissitudes of its demand for the recognition and love of other people.
The Other can satisfy the needs that are articulated in the demands of the infant.
The Other cannot satisfy the infant's demand for love.
"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."[2]
Desire is the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand.
"Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need."[3]
A need (that is satisfied) ceases to motivate the infant until another need arises.
Desire can never be satisfied.
(There is no adequation between the need and the demand that conveys it.)
The distance between need and demand constitutes desire.
Desire is constant in its pressure, and eternal.
The realization of desire does not consist in being 'fulfilled', but in the reproduction of desire as such.
Animal and Human Desire
Lacan's distinction between need and desire lifts the concept of desire completely out of the realm of biology.
Desire is human when it is directed toward another desire or to an object that is "'perfectly useless from the biological point of view."[4]
Desire of the Other
Lacan asserted that desire is the desire of the Other.
ONE
Desire is the desire for the Other's desire, that is, the desire to be the object of the Other's desire.
Desire is a desire for 'recognition' (by another).
The Oedipus complex illustrates the desire of the subject to be the phallus for the mother.
TWO
"The object of man's desire ... is essentially an object desired by someone else."[6]
The object is desirable (not due to any intrinsic quality but) because others desire it.
The object is desirable (not due to any intrinsic quality but) because it is desired by others.
It is qua Other that the subject desires.[7]
It is human to desire what others desire because they desire it.
THREE Desire is desire for the Other.
The fundamental desire is the incestuous desire for the mother, the primordial Other.[8]
FOUR
Desire is always "the desire for something else," because it is impossible to desire what one already has.[9]
The object of desire is continually deferred, which is why desire is metonymy.[10]
FIVE Desire emerges originally in the field of the Other, that is, in the unconscious.
Desire is a social product. Desire is not the private affair it appears to be, but is always constituted in a dialectical relationship with the perceived desires of others.
The most important point to emerge from Lacan’s phrase [that "the object of man’s desire […] is essentially an object desired by someone else" (qtd. in Evans 38)] is that desire is a social product. Desire is not the private affair it appears to be but is always constituted in a dialectical relationship with the perceived desires of other subjects."[11]
The statement provides the basis for our consideration of desire in Lacan’s conception of subjectivity, and points to the fundamentally social character of desire.
OBJET A The objet petit a is represented by a variety of partial objects in diffent partial drives.
The objet petit a is not the object towards which desire tends, but the cause of desire.
Desire is not a relation to an object, but a relation to a lack.
LAW
The prohibition of jouissance (or 'enjoyment')
the prohibition on fulfillment of desire which provides the most stimulus for its reproduction.
The law (or prohibition) "creates desire in the first place by creating interdiction. Desire is essentially the desire to transgress, and for there to be transgression it is first necessary for there to be prohibition."[12]
The law gives rise to desire as that which circulates endlessly around a prohibited core (of jouissance).
(The prohibition establishes desire as the ultimate motivational force in subjectivity.)
TREATMENT The aim of psychoanalytic treatment is to lead the analysand to recognize the truth about his or her desire.
It is only possible to recognize one's desire when it is articulate in speech.
"It is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire, whatever it is, is recognised in the full sense of the term."[13]
In psychoanalysis, "what's important is to teach the subject to name, to articulate, to bring this desire into existence."[14]
There is a limit to how far desire can be articulated in speech because of a fundamental “incompatibility between desire and speech.”[15]
(This incompatibility which explains the irreducibility of the unconscious (i.e. the fact that the unconscious is not that which is not known, but that which cannot be known).)
The analysand does not simply give expression to a pre-existing desire.
The analysand, by articulating desire in speech, brings that desire into existence.
"That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire; that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn't a question of recognising something which would be entirely given. ... In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world."[16]
"Although the truth about desire is present to some degree in all speech, speech can never articulate the whole truth about desire; whenever speech attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover, a surplus, which exceeds speech."[17]
innate incapacity of language fully to articulate desire
LAW
Desire is created at the moment the infant becomes a subject.
Desire is created at the moment of the infant's accession to the symbolic order.
it is endemic to (inseparable from) the symbolic order and thus inhabits all signification, providing the subject with its primary motivation and frustration.
Desire is fundamentally metonymic and inheres in signification as such.
Desire is inscribed in the signifying chain in its essential metonymy.
"Man’s desire is a metonymy. [...] Desire is a metonymy."[18]
The perpetual reference of one signifer to another in an eternal deferral of meaning (as content, as 'consisting' in any one sign, as present in any way) is a formulation of the ceaseless movement of desire.
Impossible Desire
any attempt to satisfy desire is always undercut by a residue that remains unattainable.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the term desire designates the impossible relation that a subject has with objet petit a.
According to Lacan, desire proper (in contrast with demand) can never be fulfilled.
The core around which desire circulates is prohibited.
The prohibition is simply the articulation of a pre-existing impossibility.
Desire is by its very nature insatiable.
The important aspect of the paternal interdiction that inaugurates the infant’s traumatic accession to the symbolic order is that what the word-of-the-father interdicts is in fact an impossibility.
The infant’s sought-after direct identification with the mother is impossible.
The paternal interdiction only formalises this impossibility as a prohibition, covering it over with the compensation of symbolisation.
Likewise, the prohibitive aspect of the law is merely a socially institutionalised form of the fundamental impossibility at the heart of desire.
In the name of the social good a society may prohibit certain kinds or objects of desire, but the reality is that no object can ever fulfil desire.
Desire and the Death Drive
Lacan posits a distinction between desire and drive.
It is important to distinguish between desire and the drives.
The drives are the particular (partial) manifestations of a single force called desire.
Unsorted
it is at base a quest for presence, the possibility of which is precluded by the mechanism of signification
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.275
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.287
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.311
- ↑ Kojeve. 1947. p.6
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.235
- ↑ Lacan. 1951b. p.12
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.312
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.67
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.167
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.175
- ↑ Evans 39
- ↑ Evans 99
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.183
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1988. p.228
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.275
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 1988. p.228-9
- ↑ Evans 36
- ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.175
