Desire and Addiction

You are likely familiar with the expression, “I just need to get out of my own way,” as it pops up, for example, in therapeutic contexts. Clients will say something to the effect of, “I know what I need to do, I just need to do it.” The tacit claim beneath that phrase has at least three parts. 1.) There’s a cognitive part of one’s self that understands, logically, what steps must be taken in order to solve a problem. 2.) An action-oriented part of the self is in some way being prevented from acting. 3.) There is some invisible part of the individual that is blocking meaningful action. Hence: if the obstructive part gets out of the way, then the action part will do what the cognitive part knows needs to be done. None of that is simple or straightforward. What, afterall, is this invisible part that is blocking the action part? What would motivate any part to serve a blocking function? Are we so sure we have or are made up of these “parts,” or is that a helpful metaphor that might lead an individual to an insight needed to overcome fear and produce change in their life? 

There is no getting out of the way of oneself. The problem is altogether different and more complicated. It is a problem identified and described at length by Jacques Lacan; namely, the “self” is not substantive at all. It is, rather, an “extimate” creation produced from the outside. An individual comes into existence and begins to construct a sense of self through the way the individual seems to be perceived by caretakers and others in their most intimate circles. Not only are individuals constructed from the outside but so too are individuals caught in a lifelong enigma: Am I what others desire me to be? If so, then is my own desire commensurate with the desires of others? If not, then how am I to be desired by others? Whichever angle we choose from which to approach those questions, we have to deal with desire, understood here as a mysterious, attractive (as in, pulling toward) force. It is desire and not “the self” that demystifies many psychological and psycho-somatic problems.

Desire is a particularly important facet of addiction. In order to understand how this is the case, however, we have to tarry with desire as Lacan presented it. This is no easy task, but it’s worth the effort because understanding the role of desire in addiction can help therapists cut quickly to the forces that keep addicts locked in subservience to alcohol and other drugs. 

Lacan poses desire as an equation:

Demand - Need = Desire

Let’s get oriented in the conceptual landscape where these terms function. Chronologically speaking, regarding the three words of the equation, need comes first. Humans are born and the needs are apparent straight away. We need warmth, touch, food, and safety. But humans are also born into conflict insofar as the world into which we are born is dominated by language (verbal and nonverbal). What language is required to get our needs met? To achieve a need, we must employ language correctly, and, according to Lacan, at the moment a need gets articulated through language (e.g., crying out) it becomes a demand. Pure need is thus relegated to a necessity, but one that must be earned through participation in the symbolic order of discourse. Temporally prior to the need of an individual, language and the Symbolic order exists. Once born and needing, the individual’s need becomes enveloped in the Symbolic order and becomes a demand so that the need may be met by another. 

Desire comes into focus as the difference between Demand and Need. It is not substantive. Rather, it functions as something like a black hole. When need is removed from demand, a void is created. The gravitational pull of the void leads toward desire. Since desire is not itself a thing, one can never actually attain a desire. If desire was attained it would cease to be desire and become a possession. According to Lacan, our drives propel us toward desire, though we never actually intend to reach the destination. Instead, we circle around desire, careful not to get sucked into the void. That which both motivates the movement toward desire and also keeps us at the event horizon of the void, so to speak, is the stand-in for our desire, that which Lacan calls the objet petit a (where “a” is autre, other). What motivates me to cry? The other. That one over there with the milk.

Here we begin to see the problem of focusing on “getting in the way of myself” instead of attending to “desire.” The former speaks of an obstruction whereas the latter speaks of a search and the momentum involved in undertaking the search. If we dedicate time to removing an obstruction, we only delay the search for that thing outside of ourselves that motivates our activity in the world. The former also invites the image of absurd leap out of oneself in order to produce substantive change. Getting out of the way of myself is akin to the turtle shaking off its shell. The latter, instead, renders a movement toward that sates itself with proximity to a suitable object of desire, but, at the same time, also resigns itself to the possibility of a primal lack of fulfillment. That is to say, a focus on desire is also a focus on right and wrong action. Or, if you prefer, action/behavior that produces fulfillment and action/behavior that leaves one wanting. 

In the world of addiction, there is a temptation to highlight the substance that disables the true intentions and satisfaction of an individual’s authentic self. We ask about one’s “Drug of choice,” for example. But the substance itself is not as interesting as the mechanism that reaches for, say, alcohol. The machinery is that which must be deconstructed, and that is why the phrase “I just need to get out of my own way” is not enough. One is never in one’s own way. Instead, one mistakes substances as, at best, the medium that grants access to desire or, at worst, the very thing one desires. In reality, alcohol and other drugs are most often fuel for a drive that believes itself to be guiding the individual toward desire but is, to the contrary, always off course. Alcohol, in other words, will only lead to alcohol, not to that which one desires. As such, learning what desire is all about is the prerequisite for leaving alcohol by the wayside. 

Desire, in addition to being equivalent to Demand - Need, is a force that Lacan says we must obey. Because one must obey desire, there is no option of not desiring. The distress caused by alcohol and other drugs comes from the ridiculousness of attempting to betray one’s desire through allegiance to a substance that is masquerading as a desired object (or experience, or person, or feeling). The drive fueled by alcohol will only ensure that desire is never reached. 

In fact, one cannot reach desire. Instead, desire will absorb you. Problems arise when we interfere in the absorption, which is to say that problems arise the minute we are born (or probably the moment we are conceived). Obstructions abound from Day 1, and the chief obstruction is the medium of language that converts needs to demands. Language and the things of which language speaks will always be incommensurate with each other. Through using language we already find ourselves apart from the thing of which we speak. More importantly, through using language we find ourselves already apart from our needs. (This is why a demand will never fulfill a need once and for all.)  And, worse than that, we cannot speak our desire into being. We can only, at best, orient ourselves toward desire with language and then work to let go of the stand-ins that spring up as ventriloquists of desire so as to be absorbed fully by the void. (This is not the space to elaborate, but: the void could well be death.) 

The same conundrum shows up in Lacan’s famous expression: “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Tucked into that pronouncement is a paradigm shift for conceptualizing desire. Recalling that the “self” is really a negative space that comes into view through individuals’ best guesses about what others want them to be, the notion of “giving” love to another is ridiculous. Not only, according to Lacan, do we have nothing to give; we are also fully constructed around a fantasy of what we presume the other desires. The inequality between what we imagine the other desires and what the other actually desires ensures that whatever love (that which sets desire into motion) we intend to give will not be that which one actually wants. As with Magritte’s paintings, we find ourselves perpetually in a situation where we, for example, go to look at our reflection in the mirror only to find the visage of ourselves, seen from behind, in the act of looking. The “reflection” we seek is desire, the difference we sense is substantively there but we never “see” it. 

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La reproduction interdite (Not to Be Reproduced), 1937 by Rene Magritte.

The endeavor of loving and desiring is not futile and doomed to end in frustration. We recall that Magritte is not showing us an actual scene. He has painted a canvas. Our perception turns the image into a frustrating missed encounter with that which we would hope to see in the mirror. The situation is the same with love. If we think a romantic relationship is itself love, we are wrong. Rather, the relationship is the “painting” and our perception is the generator of meaning. We need not perceive a missing reflection (i.e., the absence or presence of love). We can recognize, instead, the relationship as the passageway that permits each partner to sense love and desire beyond the “stand-in” of the person we claim to love. I don’t strive to see a reflection in the Magritte painting. I derive enjoyment from seeing a person in the act of looking where I had anticipated him to perceive his own likeness. Likewise, I don’t “desire” my wife. I derive enjoyment, happiness, titillation, etc., from engaging in the passageway to desire with my wife.

This is the problem with alcohol and other drugs. Let’s say we long for meaningful connection with another human being. Such connection, however, is blocked by inhibition. People believe that alcohol functions to dis-inhibit oneself, thereby unlocking the door that typically blocks one from connection. But this is not what happens for the alcoholic. For him, alcohol distorts one’s understanding of the other’s desire. He/She/We fantasize(s) that the other desires us to be dis-inhibited, but by using alcohol to produce disinhibition we merely present the fantasy we have of the other’s desire to the other. If the other accepts what is offered, then they have accepted a fantasy. The inhibited self, which has been discarded as incommensurate with the fantasy of what the other wants, can thus never be chosen. Not only will it never be chosen, which is to say the alcoholic will never be chosen by those he “connects” with by disinhibiting himself with alcohol. The alcoholic will never even be seen at all since alcohol will mask the self attempting to be disinhibited. The alcoholic using alcohol to “connect” will thus merely give something he doesn’t have (i.e., a disinhibited self) to someone who doesn’t want it, where “it” is the absent self that has been discarded through the act of drinking. 

It’s amusing to zoom in on the way language functions in this formulation. “In-hibit” means “to hold in” or “to keep back.” It is a “negative” phrase insofar as the substance of the inhibited thing is denied and kept from view. The word helps us glimpse the holding back, not the thing being held back. In the scenario about the alcoholic above, alcohol seeks to negate the negation of “in-hibition.” What is produced is a double negative: “dis-inhibition.” At no point has anything positive been produced. There is no connection to be had because the entire operation revolves around negating a negative attribute. Alcohol simulates connection but actually keeps true or meaningful connection at bay. Alcohol does not dis-inhibit. It actually redoubles the inhibition by keeping back the very thing one imagined one was originally unable to produce (i.e., connection). Look at how writing about this also seems to push meaning farther away such that continuing to read brings you no closer to the substance we seek. This is alcohol’s off-track escapade to the alcoholic. For sure, it drives. But where it drives you is nowhere you want to go, or at least nowhere near your destination/desire.   

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When we encounter Lacan’s ideas, we experience what some people call “counterintuitive” thinking. For example, for Lacan, our desire is not something we actually want to reach. And, psychotics are actually the ones who are not “duped” by discourse and language. With desire, the issue is the “split” that constitutes the subject such that desire is always something we can’t name or understand completely. Fantasies take the place of desire, and desire itself always remains out of reach. Our drives propel us toward the fantasy with no intention of reaching desire, and thus we find ourselves endlessly re-iterating our fantasies in different forms in the hope of achieving something we don’t actually want. In the case of psychotics, they have gained a visceral awareness of the arbitrary nature of “normality.” They cannot accede to the “sense” of what we call “normal psychological functioning,” that to which we need to submit if we want to have any purchase in the day to day reality of “normal” life. Instead, they see and experience endless shifting between signifiers and signifieds, unable to understand how a person could think any such relationship is stable. 

But “counterintuitive” thinking is often simply a matter of perspective. Consider this demonstration of three-dimensional shapes viewed within various two-dimensional frames. In the video, we are not seeing multiple different shapes. Rather, we are seeing one shape from different perspectives. Lacan asks us to look at Desire, Psychosis, the Subject, the Object, the Other, and many more things from angles typically occluded by dominant discourse. We can play around with this perspectival shift by translating the equation “Demand - Need = Desire” into a diagram, one viewed first from an imagined bird’s-eye, 2-D viewpoint, and then from an on-the-ground, 3-D viewpoint.

Beginning with the first diagram, we find need comprehended by demand. In a sense, pure need becomes swallowed by demand, which is to say language, once the subject enters into the symbolic register soon after birth. In the second diagram, we find desire, but we do not find it as a substantive something; rather, we see it as something like a hole, one into which we (think we) want to dive. This whole is equivalent to the difference produced once need is subtracted from demand. The “hole” is both something and not. Consider the example of the baby that cries because it needs something. The mother, accustomed to feeding the baby, offers a breast and begins feeding the baby. The baby’s cry, however, was signifying a need other than hunger (e.g., it signified the need of being held). The baby (Subject) both gets a need met and doesn’t. It receives food, which is a need, but it does not get the primary need (e.g., being held) because it has not gained fluency in the interplay of signifiers and signifieds. We can imagine questions arising for the baby: Is this my need? Do I know my own needs? Is the breast equivalent to being held and I just don’t understand that yet? With these questions, the need has been subtracted, or voided, from demand. Desire results, but the baby doesn’t really know what desire is. If it is anything, it is equal to a lack of comprehension (i.e., not seeing one’s face in the reflection of the mirror). Throughout life, the Subject who was that baby will project fantasies upon that lack in an effort to reach desire. This will never happen, but various drives will ensure that the Subject never gives up the search. Lacan says that the most a Subject can do is “to not give ground to desire,” which means, phrased positively, to allow for desire to attract us while we throw up as few obstacles as possible so as not to impede the attraction. Societal demands, however, or at least symbols one perceives to be demands, will thwart the Subject repeatedly.

Addiction, again, offers multiple glimpses of this process in action. Consider again the alcoholic. In particular, a Subject who, when intoxicated, tends to “black out.” (Keep in mind the blacked out hole in the diagram of desire.) The next day, he is told that he was enraged, that he broke furniture, that he yelled at the dog about something having to do with God and promises. What’s more, this is his pattern. He frequently enters this blacked-out state. But both the Subject and his loved ones who tell him about his behaviors have difficulty understanding where this all comes from. When sober, the Subject is a friendly, if meek, individual who seldom asserts his wants and needs. I frequently hear, “It’s like he’s a completely different person.” From the Subject I hear, “I don’t know who that person is, but he isn’t me.” 

Of course, it is one and the same Subject. The two personas are indicative of the imbalance of positive and negative forces that shape the Subject. 1 + 1 = 3. 

Performance of Self in Everyday Life + Hulked-Out Rager = Symbolic-Subject + Real-Subject + Desire. 

In scenarios such as these, desire shows itself through the form, not the content, of the Subject’s language while blacked-out. This form is first of all marked by an internal difference, that difference between the affective force of the rage and the Subject’s meek presentation when “sober.” What appears first to the family, and then to the Subject himself when he hears of his drunkenness? Precisely the way in which it is NOT like him, the Uncanny Self. A non-thing has appeared, and that tips us off that desire is close. Second, the form is marked by what I think of as firehose speech. Opposed to the laminar flow of speech within the transactions of everyday life, this speech explodes with such force that it would appear to be an attempt at extinguishing a raging fire. And there is something like a fire present at all times in one’s life, the fire of desire. For this Subject, however, he only lets himself interact with it directly when intoxicated and, in a sense, turned off. Alcohol enables rebellion against the dominant discourse of the Symbolic Order (what Lacan calls the Name of the Father, which is a “quilting point” that produces what Deleuze refers to as the “sense” of discourse). When acceding to the Symbolic Order, the Subject is Symbolic-Subject. The drive to no longer participate in that discourse—to become Real-Subject—is in fact a motive force propelling alcohol abuse. The alcohol itself, however, is a fantasy, one that the Subject “knows,” unconsciously, can move him closer to Desire. The fantasy is in part authentic. Alcohol can move him closer, but, at the same time, the fantasy stands in for Desire and actually bars the Subject from Desire. When conscious and sober, the Subject does not permit himself to rebel against the Symbolic Order, likely because he believes the Other desires him to be submissive. (This is the whole problem with being-in-language and entranced by the Discourse of the Other.) But the attraction of Desire will not relent and so the Subject cedes to the part or version of himself that will speak the Truth and thus obtain, he thinks, what he desires. Alcohol (as fantasy) is the medium required to accomplish the secession. But desire will not be reached, and the coup of self, if we can call it that, will fail, precisely because the form and content of the speech and its object of desire does not “make sense” to anyone, not even to the Subject or the dog. This is how we know alcohol is or provides only a fantasy. Alcohol seems to offer access to what the Subject desires, but it only perpetuates a misunderstanding that further frustrates the Subject and moves him away from desire. The drive propelling the return to the fantasy is only capable of this trajectory: propel toward desire, miss it, and return. Then, repeat.

What does the Subject desire? What is being sought while blacked out? The answer to that question is variable and unique to each Subject. The only way the Subject can get closer to knowing what that desire is will be to translate the form and content of the blacked-out speech into the speech of the Symbolic-Subject in daily life. This is another way of saying that the client needs to enact the coup of self without the fantasy of alcohol. The problem that clinicians and the Subject himself will no doubt encounter is that the Subject doesn’t actually want to know what that desire is. (Recall the mantra “I don’t want to know” that Lacan puts in place of the Aristotelian “I want to know” that founds the classical Subject.) As such, at least initially, therapy will resemble the Magritte painting: the Subject will go to therapy to look himself in the mirror only to find himself looking at himself looking toward a mirror. But slowly over time, if the Subject speaks freely (a la parrhesia), the desiring Subject will produce stones that the clinician and Subject can cobble together to form a path away from the painting and toward desire, one that no longer requires alcohol.