When Lacan famously pronounced that “man’s project was to escape from his desire,” he was saying on the one hand that people resist their sexuality and find it difficult; but he was also, rather more interestingly, saying something about what happens to our so-called biological needs when they are articulated in language (our other project being to speak)—about what happens to the fraught and fervent emotionality of the baby when the young child learns to talk. That language is as much a way out as a way in.
The unconscious is made up of and made out of words. It is our description of something. Where once there was the apparent intelligibility of instinct—of a biological need with a source, an aim, and an object: an essentialist and coherent narrative of who we are and what we do—there was now the confounding disarray and glamor of desire. Freud had shown us how and why we were frightened of our instincts; Lacan made a crisis out of a drama by showing us what happened to sex, what sexuality was like, when it was taken to be an effect of language. Sexuality became more like a poem than an instruction manual.
Lacan, that is, drew our attention to the fact that psychoanalysis is about what our lives look like and sound like in language. Desire was a different kind of “keyword” than instinct. Once he started talking about desire rather than about instincts—about language rather than needs, about literature rather than ethology—he could start saying things that were philosophical, like “desire is a relation of being to lack”; or, “desire is the desire for nothing nameable”; and this at least brought psychoanalysis back from the sciences to the arts. (Lacan himself thought he was doing science, but his work was always studied in humanities departments, and not in science departments.) We only want what we don’t have, and language pre-empts our wanting, as much as it formulates our wants. The idea that we want only what we lack sets significant limits to wanting, and suggests that somewhere in ourselves we know what we lack, and that we only want what we know (or know about); and language as distortion might underestimate the uses of distortion. But Lacan was at least interested, as psychoanalysts should be, in the difference between making us think and informing us. These were provocations and not proofs, and so they made psychoanalysis part of a larger, and potentially more inclusive, cultural conversation.
It’s worth noting just how much a change of vocabulary can change. The use of “desire,” for many people, made psychoanalysis much more desirable than the use of the word “instinct.” Clearly a lot of cultural work has to be done to keep sex interesting.
Adam Phillips’s most recent books are Attention Seeking, In Writing, and One Way and Another.
