Desire and its Interpretation

Desire and its Interpretation by Jacques Lacan reveals that desire is not a biological function. It is not correlated with a natural object, and its object is fantasised. Hence, desire is extravagant and cannot be grasped by those who attempt to master it. It plays tricks on them, and if unrecognised, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret, to read the message regarding desire that is harboured within the symptom.

Although desire unsettles us, it also inspires the invention of artifices that serve as a compass. While an animal species has a single natural compass, human beings possess multiple: signifying montages and discourses. These tell us what to do, how to think, enjoy, and reproduce. Yet, each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals.

Until recently, despite their variety, all our compasses pointed toward the Father, considered an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated with increasing equality, capitalism's growth, and technology's domination, marking the end of the Father Age.

Another discourse is rising, championing innovation over tradition, networks over hierarchies, the future's draw over the past's weight, and femininity over virility. Where a fixed order once existed, transformational flows now endlessly push back limits.

Freud, an offspring of the Father Age, worked extensively to preserve it, with the Catholic Church finally recognising this. Lacan followed Freud's path but posited that the father is a symptom, demonstrating this through Hamlet as an example.

The focal point of Lacan's work—his formalisation of the Oedipus complex and emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father—was merely his starting point. Seminar VI revises this: the Oedipus complex isn't the sole solution to desire but merely a normalised form and a pathogenic one. It doesn't exhaustively explain desire's course. The seminar ends with a eulogy of perversion, indicating rebellion against identifications that ensure the persistence of social routines.

This Seminar predicted "the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion." We've reached this point. Lacan speaks about us.