While a common broad aim in most forms of psychotherapy is to increase happiness psychoanalysis confronts us with how and why happiness may not be attainable.
It acknowledges the inherent tragedy in The Human Condition and helps us situate our activities in light of this fact these two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive perhaps you can work on improving the quality of your life while also facing this reality the challenge is that therapy often focuses on strengthening the ego which can numb us to the tragic dimension of ourselves that psychoanalysis points toward, ignoring it means also likely ignoring those pervasive contradictions within our personal political and religious identities that underlies our discontents like the self-proclaimed social Progressive displaying blatant and racism the religious leader who preaches peace but who is violent to those they have power over the superstitious atheist or the loving parent who abuses their child these contradictions follow us everywhere I say all this by way of an introduction to a more comprehensive examination of the graph of desire in today’s video the graph portrays desires Origins movements Transformations and failures having done an initial exploration of this graph when considering the distinctions between need, demand and desire.
We begin with the symbol Delta representing a mythological pre-symbolic subject of need that we never reach in actuality think of it as the Garden of Eden before the fall the state of nature before Society imposes its chains Allah Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Freud’s notion of an oceanic feeling of Oneness that we imagine to be the experience of infants although these situations are portrayed as if they are some kind of distant memory the original state itself is actually a retroactive Construction in light of our current Brokenness as such We Are Forever longing for something impossible to return to condemned to a Nostalgia for what we have never been this mythological subject of need undergoes symbolic structuring and having always already passed through the chain of signifiers signifiers are characterized by their capacity for movement in exchange first signifiers operate through metonymy wherein signifiers become contingently linked together with each other through the subject’s history and the sequence of utterances.
