ABSTRACT

In their groundbreaking volume The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define psychoanalytic desire as appearing “in the rift which separates need and demand; it cannot be reduced to need since, by definition, it is not a relation to a real object independent of the subject but a relation to phantasy (. . .)” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 483). Thus, in the language of psychoanalysis, there is a distinction between fulfilling a need (such as hunger, sleep, etc.) in contradistinction to the fulfilling of a desire. Again, according to Laplanche and Pontalis: “wishes, on the other hand, are indissolubly bound to ‘memory-traces’, and they are fulfilled through the hallucinatory reproduction of the perceptions which have become the signs of this satisfaction” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1974, 482).