Subject's Desire

Although it was introduced into French by Ignace Meyerson's inaccurate translation of the Freudian term Wunsch (wish), desire went on to become a major Lacanian concept. For Lacan as well as for Freud, desire is the subject's yearning for a fundamentally lost object. Thus for Freud, any search for an object is, in fact, an attempt to refind it. For Lacan, however, the object of desire is located prior to desire and functions as its cause. Lacan subverted the Freudian aphorism that "a dream is the fulfillment of a wish" (Freud,...