Demand (psychoanalysis)

'In Lacan, demand appears to be a generic term designating the symbolic, significant site in which the primordial desire is gradually alienated'.^[1] 'The concept of demand is not Freudian. It was developed by Jacques Lacan, who linked it with need and desire...arises only from speech'.^[2]

Demand forms part of Lacan's 'return to the theory of desire outlined by Kojeve',^[3] and was used by him against the approach to language acquisition favored by ego psychology.

Language acquisition

For Lacan, 'all speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation': demand is thus the result of the effect 'the acquisition of language ha[s] on...biological needs'.^[4] Traditionally, psychoanalysis had recognised that 'acquisition of the faculty of speech...is a decisive step in the formation of the ego', and that 'the child's earliest speech is a charm directed toward forcing the external world and fate to do those things that have been conjured up in words'.^[5] Ego psychology accepted that 'this first "I" is an "I" seeking satisfaction, an "I" of wants..."I wanna"'; but perhaps celebrated too easily 'how language becomes a means for control of body impulses'.^[6]

Lacan by contrast stressed the more sinister side of man's early submergence in language, pointing out how 'demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the "privilege" of satisfying needs', and indeed how the child's biological needs are themselves altered by 'the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier'.^[7] The very act of 'speaking the demand alters it, and the child who receives the demanded object will discover that he no longer wants it. Love...is no longer sufficient, and the child has entered into the world of desire'.^[8]

Desire

In Lacanian thought, a demand results when a lack in the Real is transformed into the Symbolic medium of language. Whether or not demands achieve their apparent aims, they are always successful in the sense that all parapraxes or slips of the tongue are successful - they faithfully express unconscious signifying formations. But because the Real is never totally symbolizable, a residue or kernel of desire is left behind by every demand, representing a lost surplus of jouissance for the subject. For Lacan, 'desire is situated in dependence on demand - which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it'.^[9] Inherently 'frustrated demand is what gives birth to desire'^[10]: "Don't give me what I ask for, that's not it."

The Other's demands

Lacan describes 'the Mother [as] the real Other of demand';^[11] and for post-Lacanians, 'demand cannot be conceived independently of the infant's identification with the discourse that the mother expresses in response to the baby's cries, smiles, gurgling, and gestures....The child is also divided from its own real demand by identifying with whatever part of that demand the mother expresses'.^[12]

The result in the neurotic may be a dominance of 'the Parental Other, the Other of (or as) demand'; as well as of the objects 'demanded by the Other: grades, diplomas, success, marriage, children - all the things usually associated with anxiety in neurosis'.^[13] Lacan considered that for the neurotic 'the demand of the Other assumes the function of an object in his phantasy...this prevalence given by the neurotic to demand'.^[14]

Transference

Lacan considered that 'the transference...is formulated at first, in the discourse of the patient, as demand'.^[15] Through such demands, 'the whole past opens up right down to early infancy. The subject has never done anything other than demand, he could not have survived otherwise, and...regression shows nothing other than a return to the present of signifiers used in demands'.^[16] He also stressed 'the terrible temptation that must face the analyst to respond however little to demand', even if only 'in the form of the demand to cure'.^[17]

Francois Roustang however 'challenges this Lacanian practice...and suggests that the demand of transference love is not necessarily a demand for the end of the analysis, but a demand for the analyst to move his or her position'.^[18]

See also

• Four discourses
• Julia Kristeva
• Semiotics
• D. W. Winnicott

References

1. ^ A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (1979) p. 165
2. ^ Gabriel Balbo, "Demand"
3. ^ David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London 1994) p. xxviii
4. ^ Alan Sheridan, "Translator's Note", Lacan, Four p. 278
5. ^ Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 46
6. ^ Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years (New York 1987) p. 133-4 and p. 115
7. ^ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 286 and p. 264
8. ^ Stuart Schneiderman, Returning to Freud (New York 1980) p. 5
9. ^ Lacan, Four p. 154
10. ^ Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London 1997) p. 66
11. ^ Lacan, Ecrits p. 321
12. ^ Gabriel Balbo "Demand"
13. ^ Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton 1997) p. 189 and p. 87
14. ^ Lacan, Ecrits p. 321
15. ^ Lacan, Four p. 235
16. ^ Lacan, Ecrits p. 254-5
17. ^ Lacan, Ecrits p. 276
18. ^ Jan Campbell, Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life (2006) p. 84