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The Lacanian view of this new possibility relies upon the essential difference between the structure of desire as an ongoing symbolic expression of inescapable lack and that of demand as a belief in completeness, integration, or healing as a solution to lack. Although the two intentions are different in their structure and logic, it is impossible to encounter a pure expression of desire except as it is both expressed and hidden in demand. Desire never appears in a pure declarative form. A request for help, for advice, for affection, for support, for love will necessarily be the vehicle for conveying something beyond that request on the register of unconscious desire. And the occasion for that desire will always occur in the here and now as an expression of an interpersonal request (demand). Thus, if it makes sense to think of desire and demand as in conflict: it is a dialectical conflict whereby only in taking them together can one find something new. The analyst’s role is not to heal or even suture this division, but to listen for it, to make the analysand aware of it, and to indicate that the path through whatever symptomatic impasse has motivated the analysand’s request for analysis is to be found there. It is akin to what Hans Loewald referred to as the “aware appropriation of the interplay and communication between unconscious and conscious modes of mentation and desire,” (1978, p. 50-51). The key that links Loewald’s view with Lacan’s is the phrase modes of mentation . It is not the content that differentiates desire and demand, or even id and ego; it is the mode by which it is represented. Listening for the expression of desire behind the apparent meaning of the demand suggests that the analyst ought not to focus entirely on understanding but should be listening instead to ways of expression (modes of mentation) that run alongside the manifest meaning. The question remains whether anything is gained by viewing the listening process in terms of the dialectic between desire and demand rather than, for example, the more traditional psychoanalytic categories of drive derivatives and defenses. The Lacanian idea of marking the expressions of desire, punctuating the discourse of the analysand in various ways so as to indicate that something else was said beyond the intended discourse, is very sensitive to the particular analyst’s way of listening and intervening. In clinical technique, informed by these ideas, the expression of desire in speech always partakes of the figurative substitutions and subversions of expected meaning that are made possible by the structure of language. Interpreting id as opposed to ego contents is not what is at stake in listening to the expression of desire. It is instead listening for the character of the utterance, for its capacity to evoke the over determined play of meanings, that is a better guide to how the analyst facilitates the subversion of the imaginary certainties. All explanatory interventions, whether they are intended to address defense or drive derivatives, run the risk of grounding the discourse in the certainty of identifications, of an objectification of the subject that blocks the play of meaning that is the calling card of desire.
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