Unpacking the Dialectic of Demand and the Hysteric's Desire

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It's quite out of vogue nowadays to speak of hysterics. The language of contemporary mental health eschews it, and anyway it tends to offend the sensibilities, not least of all for a history of sexism that haunts the word at every turn.

Like some vast image out of spiritus mundi stretching impossibly from ancient Greece, when wombs went “wandering,” right up through the Victorian age, hysteria can seem the watchword for every misogynistic dismissal, every pathologising judgment passed against women. And for many, the figure who appears seated on the central throne (like, if I may say, flowers in a vase) is Freud himself, a metonymy, in the minds of its critics, for psychoanalysis as a whole.

There may, however, be good reason to persist in speaking of hysterics. For one thing, it has never been the position within psychoanalysis that hysteria is solely the purview of women. From the very outset, Freud spoke of male hysterics as well as female ones. For another, hysteria continues, alive and well today, though perhaps rarely acknowledged or approached as such.

Much is lost by treating the word and the concept as anathema because the hysteric still has much that she or he might teach us—as Freud learned from his hysteric patients—about the complexities of human desire.

"The Dream of the Butcher’s Beautiful Wife" and "The 'Still Waters Run Deep' Dreams"

In this post, I'll be dealing with two questions as they are developed in chapters 20-21 in Jacques Lacan's Seminar 5: Formations of the Unconscious (all page numbers refer to the English edition of this text).

First is the question of how the subject initially comes to be differentiated from the Other. Lacan maps this out as a product of what he calls the dialectic of demand and desire. In short, signification transforms need such that desire is situated somewhere beyond demand. Desire in the human subject is determined by the dialectic of demand. And it’s in this process that the signification of the phallus takes on its meaning.

The second is the question of the way this operation is reflected in the structure of the hysteric, in particular, because hysteria is a structure in which, as Lacan says, the dialectic of desire and demand is particularly straightforward.

I’m going to say something about both of these as they are developed in these two sessions of Lacan's seminar of 1957-58.

Part 1—Reciprocal Circuits

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To begin with, intersubjectivity can only be established through the speech of the big Other, because the locus of speech is first in the Other. Speech gains its status first as the Other’s speech since it’s in the Other’s speech that the subject’s first thoughts are formed. Desire is thus “obliged to be mediated by speech” (335).

All of this is in the dimension of the Symbolic, which is one of two planes on which the subject is alienated.

To sketch this briefly: the infant cries, the mother or primary caregiver has to decipher or answer that cry, but inasmuch as the infant wants something in particular (say it’s hungry as opposed to cold) it behooves it to differentiate its crying, to use it in order to communicate something as best it can. The cry is, first, a demand (for a need to be fulfilled), but there’s also another demand that answers it, which is the Other’s demand (the parent will come to say to the child not just “what do you want?” but also “use your words”), and that demand of the parent’s is already expressed in the Other's language.

So there’s a reciprocity built into the Symbolic dimension of demand. To communicate by speaking, is always-already something formed in the framework of the Other’s speech. But there’s also necessarily a residue and a place opened up beyond demand because the nature of articulation changes, diverts, and transposes some component of need.

Then there’s a second dimension that’s operating simultaneously, which is that of the Imaginary. Lacan doesn’t develop this much in these chapters, beyond saying that on the imaginary plane there is “only a weak border between the subject and the other, an ambiguous border in the sense that it can be crossed” (335).

Loosely, we can understand the reference here to be to the mirror stage and the image of the infant’s “disorganised” body that arrives alongside that of the caregiver’s body of supporting it.

What’s important is that the subject’s differentiation from the Other is not simply self-evident but must be accomplished somehow, and that it’s established only with difficulty. Specifically, it’s the discordance between the two dimensions of alienation—the one on the Symbolic plane and the other in the Imaginary—that, Lacan says, “opens up an initial possibility for the subject to differentiate himself as such” (336).

So this ability for the subject to differentiate itself is possible, first, because there is a space, a gap, between these two orders. Both of them are simultaneously at play, and it's in the ‘field of play’ that’s opened between them that the subject is formed as one differentiated from the Other.

When Lacan speaks of the dialectic of demand and desire he’s talking about this in terms of a very early, pre-Oedipal formation. But he also says that “the profound reworking of initial desires by demand is permanently palpable,” in particular with regards to the anal object.

The anal object supports the “dialectic of the primitive gift, essentially tied in the subject to the fact of satisfying or not satisfying an educative demand, that is, the demand to accept or not to accept to let go of a certain symbolic object” (336).

It’s in the letting go or not letting go of the symbolic object in response to the Other’s demand that we find something that stays with the subject, a permanent remnant. And maybe also (Lacan doesn’t specify this here, but it seems implicit) a jouissance that repeats.

What he does say is that “in demand, identification is with the object of a sentiment” (335), and that the fate (of assimilation, incorporation or rejection) of the symbolic object is also shared in some part by the Other with whom the subject is caught in the relation of demand.

Crucial to the operation of demand is the question of whether the Other is present or absent (i.e. giving their presence or withholding their presence, giving their absence or withholding their absence). It’s from this observation that Lacan presents the famous formula that every demand is, at its root, a demand for love:

a demand for what is nothing, no particular satisfaction, a demand for what the subject brings purely and simply by responding to the demand (361).

So what we see with regards to demand is that the Other and the symbolic object are caught up with each other in these operations of giving or withholding which can appear as representatives of love.

But this still leaves the question of that which ends up beyond demand—the residue produced by the nature of articulation in which something of need is diverted or lost. For the subject’s distinction and differentiation from the Other to be established, two things are necessary: both the gap between the Symbolic and the Imaginary that was mentioned earlier, and also the recognition of something (desire) that’s beyond what the Other demands of the subject.

Desire borrows from the raw material of need, but in doing so, also “abolishes the dimension of the Other” insofar as, with desire, “the Other doesn’t have to respond yes or no”—the matter isn’t resolved by an other’s presence or absence, which is why Lacan calls desire an “absolute condition” (361).

[Desire is] the margin or result of the subtraction […] of the requirements of need from the demand for love. Conversely, desire presents itself as what, in the demand for love, rebels against being reduced to a need, because in reality it satisfies nothing other than itself (362).

As Lacan formulates it here, the signifier related to this beyond—this dimension of what the Other desires and what, for the subject, rebels against being reduced to a need—is the phallus. The phallus is

the signifier that is the mark of what the Other desires insofar as it itself, as a real, human Other, is, in its economy of being, marked by the signifier (345).

So to paraphrase, it’s because there is a reciprocity in the dialectic of demand, whereby some part of need is diverted and lost through the operation of speech, and wherein the “beyond” of desire is opened, both in the subject and in the Other, that the signification of the phallus emerges.

Or, to say it differently, the signification of the phallus is an effect, produced by the cause of reciprocity in the dialectic of demand, which opens the “beyond” of desire (for the subject as well as in the field of the Other).

Castration, then, is “a particular relationship to the signifier phallus” (345).

Part 2—A Tale of Two Butchers

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