Demand
demand (demande)
The French terms demander and demande lack the connotations of imperativeness and urgency conveyed by the English word 'demand', and are perhaps closer to the English words 'ask for' and 'request'.
However, all English translations of Lacan use the term 'demand' in order to maintain consistency.
Although the term 'demand' only begins to figure prominently in Lacan's work from 1958 on, related themes are already present in the 1956-7 seminar.
It is in this seminar that Lacan discusses the call (l'appel), the baby's cry to the mother.[1] Lacan argues that this cry (cri) is not merely an instinctual signal but 'is inserted in a synchronic world of cries organised in a symbolic system'.[2] In other words, the infant's screams become organised in a linguistic structure long before the child is capable of articulating recognisable words.
It is the symbolic nature of the infant's screams which forms the kernel of Lacan's concept of demand, which Lacan introduces in 1958 in the context of his distinction between need, demand and desire. Lacan argues that since the infant is incapable of performing the specific actions that would satisfy its biological needs, it must articulate those needs in vocal form (demands) so that another (the mother) will perform the specific action instead. The primary example of such a biological need is hunger, which the child articulates in a scream (a demand) so that the mother will feed it.
However, because the object which satisfies the child's need is provided by another, it takes on the added significance of being a proof of the Other's love.
Accordingly demand too acquires a double function: in addition to articulating a need, it also becomes a demand for love. And just as the symbolic function of the object as a proof of love overshadows its real function as that which satisfies a need, so too the symbolic dimension of demand (as a demand for love) eclipses its real function (as an articulation of need). It is this double function which gives birth to desire, since while the needs which demand articulates may be satisfied, the craving for love is unconditional and insatiable, and hence persists as a leftover even after the needs have been satisfied; this leftover constitutes desire.
Demand is thus intimately linked to the human subject's initial helplessness. By forcing the analysand to express himself entirely in speech, the psychoanalytic situation puts him back in the position of the helpless infant, thus encouraging regression.
Through the mediation of the demand, 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 we just follow on from there.[3]
However, while the speech of the analysand is itself already a demand (for a reply), this demand is underpinned by deeper demands (to be cured, to be revealed to himself, to become an analyst).[4] The question of how the analyst engages with these demands is crucial. Certainly the analyst does not attempt to gratify the analysand's demands, but nor is it simply a question of frustrating them (see frustration.
In 1961, Lacan rethinks the various stages of libidinal organisation as forms of demand. The oral stage is constituted by a demand to be fed, which is a demand made by the subject. In the anal stage, on the other hand, it is not a question of the subject's demand, but the demand of the Other (the parent who disciplines the child in potty-training).[5] In both of these pregenital stages the satisfaction of demand eclipses desire; only in the genital stage does desire come to be fully constituted.[6]
Contents
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The concept of demand is not Freudian. It was developed by Jacques Lacan, who linked it with need and desire (Lacan, 1966, 1991). Demand is identifiable by the five clinical traits that constitute it, by the status that it gives the object, by its function in relation to the Other, and finally by its topological register.
Regarding demand, we can say that 1) it arises only from speech; 2) it is addressed to someone; 3) it is nevertheless only implicit; 4) it is related to a need for love, but also to desire; 5) it does not need to be...
deff
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a demand results when a lack in the Real is phrased 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. "Don't give me what I ask for, that's not it."
ref
demand, 154-6, 209, 235, 269, 271, 273-4,278
