Demand (psychoanalysis) - Language Acquisition

Language Acquisition

For Lacan, 'all speech is demand; it presupposes the Other to whom it is addressed, whose very signifiers it takes over in its formulation': demand is thus the result of the effect 'the acquisition of language ha on...biological needs'. Traditionally, psychoanalysis had recognised that 'acquisition of the faculty of speech...is a decisive step in the formation of the ego', and that 'the child's earliest speech is a charm directed toward forcing the external world and fate to do those things that have been conjured up in words'. Ego psychology accepted that 'this first "I" is an "I" seeking satisfaction, an "I" of wants..."I wanna"'; but perhaps celebrated too easily 'how language becomes a means for control of body impulses'.

Lacan by contrast stressed the more sinister side of man's early submergence in language, pointing out how 'demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the "privilege" of satisfying needs', and indeed how the child's biological needs are themselves altered by 'the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier'. The very act of 'speaking the demand alters it, and the child who receives the demanded object will discover that he no longer wants it. Love...is no longer sufficient, and the child has entered into the world of desire'.