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.