Lacan for Beginners

Desire

Demand is ultimately a demand for love, and, for this reason, unsatisfiable. If someone asks you if you love them and you say yes, that will not stop them from asking you again and again and again. The impossibility of really proving one's love once and for all is well known. Hence demand is a continuing spiral. But Lacan adds something more. To need and demand, he adds the register of desire. Desire takes up what has been eclipsed at the level of need (the dimension represented by the mythical water) introduces an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand.

We can see this in cases where human desire literally has an absolute condition, in fetishism. -> I can only reach sexual enjoyment when a particular object or trait is present in my partner, like a ribbon or a certain pair of boots. Enjoyment is determined strictly by the presence of this element.

Lack

Although the example of fetishism is an extreme one, Lacan shows that it is at the horizon of all desire for the man. A man's choice of partner will always contain some reference to inhuman details: the color of the partners hair, her eyes etc There is nothin human about such abstract features. Desire is thus linked to conditions in contrast to the register of demand.

Part of the work of analysis is to try to tease out the subject's desire from his incessant demands. The neurotic is someone who privileges demand, who hides his desire beneath the imposing presence of demand.

If demand is demand for an object, desire has nothing as its object: nothing in the sense of "lack taken as an object". Some clinical structures show the difference clearly. The anorexic, for example, in refusing to eat gives a place to desire beyond demand. To the mother's demand for the child to eat, the latter offers a symbolic refusal, maintaining a desire centering on the "nothing" which is eaten. Into the relation with the mother, a lack is thereby introduced, something which marks out clearly the tension between demand and desire.

Desire and Wish

Desire itself will emerge in little details, and hence Lacan's insistence on hunting it down, on searching for desire in between the lines, where it is least obvious. The emphasis on detail here is fully Freudian. After all, Freud had shown that when an unconscious current is repressed, since it cannot enter consciousness, it displaces itself on to tiny details and it is only in following these derivatives that we will mobilize the rest of the complex in question.

It's important to distinguish what Lacan calls desire from what we would ordinarily call a wish. A wish is something you want consciously. But desire is fundamentally barred from consciousness. Freud had made the distinction earlier in his work on dreams. A dream may represent some obvious wish. Your are freezing and starving in the middle of the North-Pole. You fall asleep and dream of a fine four-poster bed and a bowl of caviar. It would seem that the dream fulfills a wish, to find food and shelter. But this wish is only an alibi: what really matters is why, in your dream, the supposed fulfillment has taken the form of a four-poster bad and a bowl of caviar. Why not just a normal bed and a bowl of soup? Desire is simply equivalent to the process of distortion which has turned the wish for shelter and food into this particular image, these particular details. If you dream of passing an exam in a certain place the night before sitting a real exam, desire is more likely to be found not in the idea of passing the exam (a wish) than in the detail of the place in question (why this place than rather another).

Distortion and Desire

Desire is thus a very peculiar thing. Lacan elaborates a theory of desire as something very strange, very odd: it has nothing to do with wishes, but consists of linguistic mechanisms which twist and distort certain elements into others. A slip of the tongue would provide another example. You say one thing instead of something else and you don not know why. Desire is present because one element has been distorted and modified by another one. We can deduce the presence of desire in clinical work by paying attentino to these processes as they repeat themselves and to the points of rupture, distortion and opacity in a patient's associations.