Introduction
I have started this series on Love Desire and Relationships by emphasizing the importance of tending to our “First Love.” I said in my previous post named “Our First Love”that this should be the love of our own Selves. This is the notion of developing a healthy degree of Narcissism in life in order to find love, keep it, and attain a measure of happiness.
I then went on to point out the importance of proximity, intimacy, and touch in Human relationships. I intended to emphasize the centrality of Attachments in people’s lives and how they are now affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing. In that article, I broached the subject of the importance of differentiating three concepts in our relationships to understand ourselves and others in our Love lives: Need, Demand, and Desire.
The Centrality of Human Desire in our Love lives
In this post, I will then start by examining the complex issue of Human Desire and its conundrums. Once again, to analyse this matter to any significant extent would take an entire book, but here you need to at least become acquainted with the basic dynamics of Desire to begin to understand yourself and others in Love life. One very important thing to understand from the very beginning is the fact that all of us Humans are creatures of Desire. (See Spinoza)
Both male and female, men and women, are subject to the vicissitudes and the contingencies of Desire. And Desire by nature is erratic, unpredictable, and oftentimes downright weird.
Understanding gender differences in Desire modalities
However, there are significant gender differences in regards as to how Desire plays out in the mind of men and how it works in the mind of women.
Keep this always in mind: Regardless of what you may have been shown by Hollywood, told by the mainstream media, or of what Radical Feminism preaches day in and day out, there is no “sameness” or any form of “equality” in this area. Men and Women–even though they share the commonalities of their humanity–are radically different.
Men and women are different in their biological make ups, in their brain and hormonal structures, in the way they love, the way they think, the way they experience emotions–and the way desire.
Saying that men and women are different is just that.
It does not mean that men are better than women (or vice-versa). But, if in your relational life, if you follow the Feminist dictum and disavow these psychological gender differences and proceed to dismiss these differences as “the creation of the Patriarchy,” you will never be able to relate well or understand yourself or others around you.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that when we talk about Men and Women here, we are over-generalizing. And whenever we generalize, in certain circumstances, we fall into the error of making gross mistakes. Not all men are the same or desire the same way nor the same things, and not all women are the same either in this respect either. In fact, Desire is the most specific, unique, and idiosyncratic of all human psychological traits.
DESIRE IS YOUR OWN SINGULARITY. NOBODY DESIRES IN THE SAME WAY YOU DO.
Lacan and his infamous “The Woman does not exist.”
According to Lacan–when it comes to women, and from a desire standpoint, there is no gender Universal, nothing that as a rule applies to ALL Women. (I would argue that the same can be said about men, but here I am following Lacanian thinking). That is why Lacan said that “The Woman” (with a capital W) does not exist.” This is NOT INTENDED TO MEAN THAT WOMEN DO NOT EXIST. And certainly this is not to be taken as ANYTHING PEJORATIVE AGAINST WOMEN. On the contrary, Lacan was not a misogynist–and he loved women.
Lacan did not say women with their particularities do not exist, but rather that “there is no Universal for women.” (In Philosophy, Universals are written in capital letters, hence the Woman). There is nothing that can be said psychologically about women–or the Other Sex–that apply to ALL of them.
When it comes to desire modalities, women are ALL different from one another and therefore they respond to the logic of the “one-by-one:” the “Case by Case.”
The mounting complexity of gender issues in the XXI century
Lacan also pointed out that besides biological sex, and gender identification (gender “self-attribution” is calling yourself “a man,” “a woman,” or anything else in between you desire to identify with), there is what he called “subjective positioning.” This is the Subjective Unconscious stance in matters of Desire that each individual takes in love and erotic/sexual matters–whether he/she knows it or not.
So individuals–both male and female–can “position” themselves from the Masculine Position (what he calls the “Phallic Position”) or they can identify with the Other position–that of the NOT-ALL (which is what is associated with a Feminine Position in sexuality and love affairs).
Lacan was a XX century psychoanalysis theoretician writing about the formulas of sexuation in the 1970s. Things in the world have changed massively in the last half-century since these formulas were posited. However, this Lacanian formula still applies today whether the biological sex of the subject is male or female. In today’s world–in which “Gender Issues” are such a hot and controversial topic–up to 15 different “genders” have been identified for those who espouse those gender ideologies. That is the reason that more letters keep being added year after year to the LGBTQ…..acronym.
From a Lacanian perspective, ALL of those other “genders”would fall under the rubric of the subjective positioning of the NOT-ALL stance. From that subjective (feminine) position, the possibilities of keeping adding other letters is, by definition, endless…
Human Desire is the Desire of the Other
The first thing you need to be aware of is that Desire, as Lacan put it, is “The Desire of the Other.”
This enigmatic phrase can be understood in many different ways, and that is the beauty of Lacan’s teachings, the multivocity (the multiplicity of meanings) of his enigmatic phrases. Thus, Lacanian memes lend themselves to manifold and disparate interpretations.
This phrase can be minimally interpreted as the following:
The centrality of what we Humans desire is that object (person) that is perceived to be desired by another person/s.
This is the basis of the concept of “Popularity.” We say that someone is “popular” because many others find him/her attractive and interesting, i.e., because he/she is the object of the desire of many others. The more people desire him/her, the more popular.
This is particularly important, if the person who desires this “attractive person” is someone with admire and identify with. This mechanism of desiring through identification with our significant others (friends, lovers, etc.) is structural in Feminine Desire.
This is the main form in which women who position themselves from a feminine position of desire, desire their objects (men in the case of heterosexual women, or other women in the case of bisexual or homosexual women). This structural phenomenon creates the mesmerizing, powerful–and so often fatal–effect of “the Other Woman” in women’s relational lives.
This reality of the dynamics of Desire is at the basis of the psychological phenomenon of frequent cheating that makes our love lives in the present so miserable. If you ever wondered why these things happen to you, now you know: This unconscious psychological mechanism of Desire is the reason why so many women find themselves the victims of cheating by their boyfriends who hook up with their “best” female “friends.”
If human desire is the Desire of the Other, then Human Desire is not the desire of an Object (person), but a desire to be desired by Others. So, from this realization we infer that what Humans desire the most in life is to BE DESIRED BY OTHERS.
We Humans desire the Lack in the Other, i.e., their DESIRE.
Our Desire resides in the Discourse of the Other
Lacan says that the Unconscious is the “Discourse (the unconscious narrative) of the Other.” So, from the Lacanian perspective, the Unconscious is the recording of everything that we have heard and seen since we have been born till now. This recordings become internalized in Self-talk. Lacan calls this Self-talk our internal unconscious”Discourse.”
In current computer language, the Unconscious is our basic OS (Operating System). This operating system is the emotional and sexual programming we have been subjected to while growing up. And like it is the case in computers, the programming is based on Language. So, following this reasoning–Other=Unconscious Discourse–then Desire is the Desire of our own Unconscious. This “Unconscious” that we carry with us like “an Other” that inhabits us for the rest of our lives wherever we go until we die.
Because Desire comes from our Unconscious, and the Unconscious is the Language programming we acquired (unconsciously) from our parents and our environment growing up when we learned to speak, it follows that the Unconscious Desire we all have inside of us is always borrowed. It is “borrowed” from the Desire of those people in our childhood with whom we identified.
In other words, we acquired our earliest desires growing up by admiring others that we loved and admired. Then those desires got mixed up with our newfound ways of extracting pleasure from our own bodies–and the bodies of others in our early sexual play and experiences (the fusion of our separate sexual drives). As a result of this synthesis, by the time we are 7, most of our basic desires (including gender self-identification and sexual orientation tendencies) have become FIXED. After these drives are “fixed,” they constitute a mass of unconscious childhood wishes that in adulthood constitute what Lacan calls our”Unconscious Desire.” So, as Freud had indicated before, unconscious desires have always an infantile root.
The Origin of Desire in our sexual fixations of childhood
Later on, these sexual “fixations” will be reactivated with the push of sexual hormones in puberty, adolescence, and beyond. But, overall, these sexual FIXATIONS (regular ways of being turned on and of obtaining sexual pleasure) establish a particular PATTERN OF DESIRE for each individual. This pattern will repeat itself–over and over again–in our future love lives like a broken record.
This is the reason behind some women that come to my office complaining of their “poor luck” in their love life. They complain that they “have been married three times to a guy who turned out to be an alcoholic.” In fact, they do not realize that all they did was to marry the same person in three different bodies three times over. Not infrequently in this series, the initial love object was one of the parents who was an alcoholic.
If the relational pattern in our childhoods is a healthy one, then most likely we will have a degree of success in our relational love life later on. But, if it was dysfunctional–we acquired a dysfunctional neurotic script (or phantasm)–we will continue to repeat indefinitely the same failures in every relationship we establish as adults.
This tendency to repeat in spite of ourselves in psychoanalysis is called “a Repetition Compulsion.” A “repetition compulsion” acts as “demonic force” inside of us that works against us as hidden saboteur. If we do not get therapy or analysis, this silent force continues to wreak havoc with our love lives from behind the curtains of our consciences, making our love lives–and those of others we engage with–miserable.
Why should we do analysis or psychotherapy
We should do psychotherapy then to become conscious of our unconscious scripts in order to know ourselves and modify these scripts if they are working against us rather than for us.
That is the reason to follow in life the Socratic Dictum: “A Life unexamined is not worth living” and its corollary “First and Foremost Know Yourself.”
That is in essence of what Freud discovered: The importance of Self-Knowledge. That is what a psychoanalysis is about: It is a journey of self-discovery.
Psychoanalysis is the ultimate means to getting to know yourself and the way you desire. It is essential to know this central core aspect of your Being because the main problem for most people–although it may seem hard to believe–is to know what they Desire and what they really WANT in life.
Well, in the next post, I will continue to examine how Desire interacts with Love and how it can either aid or interfere in your quest for a more fulfilling and harmonic love life. This is a critical knowledge to acquire as, in the final analysis, a large portion or what we called “Happiness” is based on the possibility of being able to actualize and fulfill our deepest desires. However, we can never fulfill what we ignore or don’t know in the first place.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts or answer your questions on this topic,
See you in my next post,
Dr T
The important of self knowledge is a journey to self-discovery.
Great article
Thanks