Desire and Drive: A Study on the Practice of the Lacanian Theory

This essay is an attempt to draw attention to the Lacanian dictum that “desire comes from the Other, and jouissance is on the side of das Ding.” Put otherwise, categorically speaking, drive belongs to the real, while desire, to the symbolic. Many unnecessarily complicated problems are derived from a misunderstanding of this apparently simple, but essentially elaborate distinction, a categorical distinction. To begin with, it notes the way in which Freudian theory of drive has undergone vicissitudes, starting from the dualistic sexual drive and ego drive, interchangeably called self-preservative drive, and reaching another dualism, life drive (Eros) and death drive (Thanatos). In his words, “The aim of [Eros] is to establish even greater unities and to preserve them thus ―in short, to bind together; the aim of [Thanatos] is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things.”Meanwhile, the theory of desire is approached from the Lacanian maxim that “man's desire is the Other's desire,” which is in line with Alexander Kojeve's concept of anthropogentic desire mediated by the desire of the Other, as distinguished from an animal desire, which is immediate and object-oriented. As a phenomenon happening in the symbolic order, desire has to do with a dialectical and metonymical displacement on the word-to-word basis. Viewed from the analytic standpoint, “castration means that jouissance must be refused, so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire.” This means a transformation of drive into desire. This is made possible by the famous Lacanian objet a that mediates between the incompatible domains of desire and jouissance, for it is the object-cause of desire and around it does the drive circulate. To desire is a kind of compromise formation, a metonymic displacement, a defense against intractable drive, an encounter with which is usually experienced as overwhelming, excessive, and even abhorred. Thus, one of the goals of analysis is to get the analysand to “stop giving up on his desire,” to untie the knots in his desire, and to constitute a ‘decided’ or ‘determined’ desire.