ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic setting is the place where the illusory and indeed all-too-traditional alternatives are suspended. The object of desire—as some psychoanalytic theory suggests, though it is mostly not British and American—may be rather more of a hint, a suggestion, a clue, than psychoanalyst are willing to acknowledge. To desire is to be doubly left out: left out from the presence of the object of desire, and left out of the desiring of one's two objects of desire. Desire in the picture is more like being told a secret about oneself that someone else has made. It could never be a confession, because the confessor always already knows his secrets. For J. Lacan, following S. Freud, one's desire is like someone else's secret; but it is not one's own. Freud tried to invent a person, or a way of being, called a psychoanalyst that would not distract a fellow human being from their own thoughts and desires.
