The dialectic of desire

Abstract

The primal representation and interpretation of lack as constitutive of the human subject has implications for how we view language and desire, as well as the subject, in psychoanalysis. Object relations like all human subjectivity are formed discursively in an intersubjective encounter structured around the expression and interpretation of lack. That the lack in question is simple hunger does not stop the parent from giving it the significance of a social link, putting words to it, and treating the child's expression of need, the cry, as an expression of longing and desire. Desire as the distinctly human experience rests upon the symbolic function, the representation of the missing thing, a function that not only structures its expression but is, indeed, the condition for that desire to come into being. Consider the clinical subject with the familiar subversive effects that are observed in psychoanalytic work: the forgetting, the slips, the misprisions.