24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
[[Jacques Lacan]] introduces the concept of [[demand]] in 1958 in the context of his distinction between [[need]], [[demand]] and [[desire]].
[[Demand]] arises only from [[speech]].
[[Demand]] is addressed to someone.
[[Demand]] is only implicit.
[[Demand]] is related to a need for love, but also to desire.
[[Demand]] does not need to be sustained by any real object.
In the 1956-7 seminar, [[Object Relations]] [[Lacan]] addresses the [[call]] (''l'appel'' or ''cri'') of an [[infant]] to the [[mother]].<ref>[[Jacques Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. [[Object Relations]]. ''La relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes.'' p.182</ref>
[[Lacan]] argues that this cry is not merely an instinctual signal but "is inserted in a synchronic world of cries organised in a symbolic system."<ref>[[Jacques Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. [[Object Relations]]. ''La relation d'objet et les structures freudiennes.'' p.188</ref>
The screams of the infant become organized in a linguistic structure long before the child is capable of articulating recognisable words.
The concept of [[demand]] is concerned with the [[symbolic function]] of the screams of the infant.
The [[infant]] is unable to perform the [[action]]s that would satisfy its [[biology|biological]] [[need]]s.
The [[demand]] for [[love]] persists as a [[leftover]] even after the [[biology|biological]] [[need]]s have been [[satisfaction|satisfied]].
This [[leftover]] constitutes [[desire]].
Demand is thus intimately linked to the human subject's initial [[helplessness]].
The [[analysand]] articulates him or herself entirely in [[speech]].
The [[analysand]] occupies the position of [[helplessness]], that of the helpless infant.
The psychoanalytic situation thus encourags [[regression]].
Through the mediation of the demand, the whole past opens up right down to early infancy.
The [[speech]] or [[discourse]] of the [[analysand]] is itself already a [[demand]].<ref>E, 254</ref>
The [[analyst]] must engage with the [[demands]] of the [[analysand]]. He or she must not gratify the [[demand]]s of the [[analysand]], nor can he or she [[frustration|frustrate]] them.
In 1961, Lacan rethinks the various stages of libidinal organisation as forms of demand.
The [[oral phase]] of [[development]] is constituted by a [[demand]] (made by the subject) to be fed.
The [[anal phase]] is constituted by a [[demand]] of the [[Other]].<ref>S8, 238-46, 269</ref>
At the anal stage, need reigns supreme; but while demand sets out to restrain need, desire wants to expel it. The one is entrusted with satisfying it, while the other is determined to control it. In the end, this control is legitimated only by turning need into a gift expected by an other, who is always primordially the mother. The oblation of this exonerating gift is metonymic. In order to evacuate the gift of symbolic desire, the one who gives it (child, student, or citizen, for example) could well adopt the slogan "everything for the other" in reference to the one who expects it (the mother, the teacher, or an authority figure)—this is true enough in the voting booth, at any rate. Such a gift is not produced by the one who gives it: someone else is the producer, someone who is able to wait for it only as long as the giver is suffering. It is not that the gift is necessarily painful in itself; the reaction of the one who receives it is the determining factor in that respect. So that her expectations will not be in vain, the mother eroticizes her relation with the child. She makes the child a sexual partner, involved in a fantasy in which he becomes the imaginary phallic object. In the end, the child will have been forced to do the only thing it was able to do. This was how the sadomasochistic economy was described by Freud, who took the symbolic equivalence of penis, feces, and child as his starting point.
In these [[pregenital phase]]s, the [[satisfaction]] of [[demand]] eclipses [[desire]].
[[Desire]] is fully constituted only in the [[genital phase]].<ref>S8, 270</ref>
At the genital stage, demand seeks out a real partner. A repressed demand returns in the field of sexuality, and it will be satisfied only by a real engagement—one the subject wants to wait for, since he or she intends to bring it about. Thus the demand is based on the primacy of a sexual desire that is certainly sustained by a need, but that emphasizes a real lack in the other. Far from realizing desire, this lack constantly renews it. "The subject does not know what he desires most," either from the other or in terms of his own lack. From then on, the "something else" that originates from this lack of knowledge is related to a desire that is deceived. It is deceived if it believes itself to be lacking only the other, the missing half that is but a shadow from the past.
[[Demand]] arises when a [[lack]] in the [[Real]] becomes articulates in the [[symbolic]] medium of [[language]].
[[Demand]], like [[parapraxes]] or [[slips of the tongue]], express [[unconscious]] signifying formations.
[[Desire]] is leftover from the [[demand]].
The [[Real]] cannot be symbolized.
The leftover represents a [[loss|lost]] [[surplus]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' for the [[subject]].
"Don't give me what I ask for, that's not it."
The object of demand is a fantasy object, what is lacking in the unconscious Other.The function of the object is to make the demand of the subject and the demand of the Other coincide.[[analystDemand]] must engage with , although it is tied to both the symbolic and the real, is primarily [[demandsimaginary]] , and thus most closely related to the body.in relation to oral, anal, and genital regions of the body that serve as the sources of demand.The [[analysandsymbolic function]]. He or she must not gratify of the [[demandobject]]s as a proof of the [[analysandlove]], nor can he or she overshadows its real function as that which satisfies a [[frustration|frustrateneed]] them.
==References==
<references/>
<ref>demand, 154-6, 209, 235, 269, 271, 273-4,278</ref>
<ref>'''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis'''. Ed. J.-A. Miller. Trans. A. Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.</ref>
<ref>Lacan, Jacques. (1966 [2002]).Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.</ref>
<ref>Lacan, Jacques. (1991). Le Séminaire-livre VIII, le transfert (1960-61). Paris: Seuil.</ref>
{{Les termes}}
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]
