A Preliminary Analysis of the Psychology of Imagery Largely based on our discussion in week 1, but with some Lacanian ideas added for good measure!

In week 1, I asked you to distinguish between wish, fantasy, desire, and need – we could have added demand or ‘drive’. Broadly speaking, these were the conclusions reached:- There seemed to be a range which ran from those items which were fully dependent on language to those which were ‘physiological’ – prior to language. Wishes were things that could always be expressed in language, while ‘basic’ needs were physiological. (Our definitions had to allow for our capacity to misrepresent the psychological status of our condition to one another through language – either deliberately, or through mis-recognition.) With both the wish and the need there was the sense that, in general, these could be publicly expressed. Fantasies, on the other hand, seemed to be much more like desires, in that one was usually circumspect about revealing them to others. Fantasies seemed to be always tied to specular (visual) forms of representation, while desires seemed more ‘physiological’.

At least two things were in play. One dimension of analysis focussed on a split between the public and the private, while the other drew attention to what could be expressed in language, and what was ‘beyond’ language; Lacan links the two. Like many theorists, Lacan changed his ideas and the emphasis he gave to some terms throughout his authorship, What follows is adapted from a readily available introductory text which probably cuts too many corners to be worth buying. However, some of its own ways of expressing lacanian ideas do serve our purposes and have been adapted here. The book in question is Leader, D. & Groves, J. (2000) Introducing Lacan Duxford: Icon Books.

Lacan’s analysis introduces a fifth term to our initial one: demand. Although we are used to ascribing needs to children from the moment of their birth, later this gives way to social contexts in which the child is expected to recognise its own needs and express these to others through language; they become demands.

According to Lacan, as soon as language is used in this way, the child enters another ‘register’ – a separate system of inter-relationship – the system of arbitrary symbols which we call language. If the child starts out by needing water, it ends by demanding ‘water’; the object of need has become displaced by its representation within the practices of language. Within this system, what matters to the child is whether or not it receives water – the relationship to an object of need is eclipsed by the conventions of utterance – and of the signs of love and caring.

Having inserted demand in place of need (or ‘drive’), language looks set to dominate the whole of our range, but it does so in various ways. In the case of need, the object is ‘lost’. Once ‘eclipsed’ by the inter-subjectivity of language – the satisfaction of the child’s need becomes contingent on a) the intelligibility of its demand, and b) the readiness of the mother or carer to respond.

Lacan indicates that demand is, ultimately, in all its forms of expression, a demand for love – one which can never be satisfied – since demand is a state of continuous request, beyond any temporary satisfaction.

Desire is similarly transformed in lacanian analysis. While the language of demand eclipses the object of need, desire takes up this loss of the object, e.g. water. Desire introduces ‘an absolute condition in opposition to the absolutely unconditional nature of demand’ (Leader & Groves: 81). Within desire, satisfaction is contingent on one or more prior conditions, e.g. ‘I only want to start a family in my own home.’

Lacan’s analysis of desire is more convincing if one considers the extremes. If I am a prisoner and dying of thirst, I need water, and I will express this as a demand, and do whatever is needed, no matter how brutal my guards are, etc. Further, any form of water will be attractive; I may even be tempted to drink my own urine. But with desire, on the other hand, I may be unwilling to satisfy my thirst unless I know that the water has been filtered three times, etc.

While demand always has a symbolically identified object, Lacan argues that desire has nothing as its object – nothing in the sense of a ‘lack taken as an object’ (Leader & Groves: 83). This sounds odd, but consider the typical teenage anorexic. Effectively, her desire results in a refusal to eat: desire has replaced demand by an absence. Typically, the demand is the mother’s: that her child should eat; the child, meanwhile, stages her refusal symbolically: she desires ‘nothing’.

And now consider again the earlier example: ‘I only want to start a family in my own home ….’ Within a relationship this might well be expressed (and ‘understood’ by the speaker) as the prior condition of a desire that is, in fact, not admitted or even acknowledged as relevant – the woman’s desire for there to be no children in this relationship.

It follows that for Lacan, it is important to distinguish between a wish and a desire. A wish is something that you want consciously, but Lacan argues that desire is barred from consciousness, only making itself manifest by the kinds of details and conditions previously explored.

Evidence for a desire has to be sought indirectly, by searching ‘in between the lines’. This aspect of desire features in detective stories, and in romantic tales featuring separation and loss. The criminal leaves traces at the scene(s) of the crime that are an essential feature of how her/his passion must be expressed: equally, the lover is thrown into a reverie of happier times by some inconsequential aspect of the present which always accompanied their love-making, etc.

We have said little about fantasy, the main topic of the second PowerPoint, but to close, consider this quote. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realises the subject’s desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realises, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the co-ordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy we learn how to desire (Zizek, S. (1992) Looking Awry: an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture Cam., Mass.: MIT Press, p. 6). The second PowerPoint will follow Zizek’s analysis of fantasy in narrative figuration. (D.M.B )