In Lacanianism, demand () is the way in which instinctive needs are alienated through language and signification.A. Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (1979) p. 165 The concept of demand was developed by Lacan—outside of Freudian theory—in conjunction with need and desire in order to account for the role of speech in human aspirations, and forms part of the Lacanian opposition to the approach to language acquisition favored by ego psychology.David Macey, "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (London 1994) p. xxviii
Language acquisition
For Lacan, demand is the result of language acquisition on physical needs – the individual's wants are automatically filtered through the alien system of external signifiers.Alan Sheridan, "Translator's Note", Lacan, Four p. 278
Where traditionally psychoanalysis had recognised that learning to speak was a major step in the ego's acquisition of power over the world,Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (London 1946) p. 46 and celebrated its capacity for increasing instinctual control,Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years (New York 1987) p. 133-4 and p. 115 Lacan by contrast stressed the more sinister side of man's early submergence in language.
He argued that "demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs", and that indeed 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".Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1997) p. 286 and p. 264 Thus even in speaking one's demands, the latter are altered; and even when they are met, the child finds that it no longer wants what it thought it wanted.Stuart Schneiderman, Returning to Freud (New York 1980) p. 5
Desire
In Lacanian thought, a demand results when a lack in the Real is transformed into the Symbolic medium of language. Demands faithfully express unconscious signifying formations, but always leave behind a residue or kernel of desire, representing a lost surplus of jouissance for the subject, (because the Real is never totally symbolizable).
As a result, for Lacan, "desire is situated in dependence on demand – which, by being articulated in signifiers, leaves a metonymic remainder which runs under it".Lacan, Four p. 154 The frustration inherent in demand – whatever is actually asked for is 'not it' – is what gives rise to desire.Philip Hill, Lacan for Beginners (London 1997) p. 66
The Other's demands
The demands of human society are initially mediated via the Mother;Lacan, Ecrits p. 321 with the discourse of whom the infant comes to identify, subsuming its own non-verbal self-expression.
The result in the neurotic may be a dominance of parental demand, and of the social objects valued by such demands – jobs, degrees, marriage, success, money and the like.Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton 1997) p. 189 and p. 87 Lacan considered indeed 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".
Transference
Lacan considered that the transference appears in the forms of demands from the patientLacan, Four p. 235 – demands which he stressed the analyst must resist.Lacan, Ecrits p. 276
Through such demands, he states,
François Roustang however has challenged the Lacanian view, arguing that the patient's demand, rather than undermining the analysis, may be a positive attempt to get the analyst to shift their therapeutic stance.Jan Campbell, Psychoanalysis and the Time of Life (2006) p. 84
See also
References