Desire and the Loss of Object

The first paper in this symposium sketched the broad outlines of our problem and introduced the question concerning the relationship between desire and its possible-or impossible-object. I propose to examine this question in greater depth and from another point of view.

One might begin simply by examining the relation between the infant and its mother's body. In fact, Lacan speaks of the body of the mother in only a few places in the seminars on “Ethics of Psychoanalysis” (1959-60). He does so in the context of one of his discussions of “the thing” (Das Ding) and again in a discussion of the problem of sublimation. In both of these instances his reference to the maternal body is in fact a reference to Melanie Klein and the similarities between what Melanie Klein calls the maternal body and Lacan calls the thing: “The Kleinian articulation consists in this: to have put in the central place of Das Ding the mythic body of the mother1; or, again, “where I speak of the thing the Kleinian doctrine essentially puts the body of the mother” (seminar of 1/27/60, p. 3). It was in the “Ethics of Psychoanalysis” that Lacan first began to elaborate the notion of Das Ding as his version of what is more usually referred to as the lost object in Freud. There is, then, a rough parallelism between the maternal body (Klein), the thing (Lacan), and the lost object (Freud). What I propose to do in this paper, after Lacan, is to situate the lost object within the Freudian texts and to explain something of the relation between the lost object and desire. This is at once one of the most central, most difficult, and most fully elaborated points in Lacan's teaching. I will try to shed some light on a single point: According to Lacan there is no object of desire in reality: that “object” is “lost,” and because it is, reality is significant for human beings.

In the early seminars in “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis” Lacan repeatedly draws his auditors' attention to the Project for a Scientific Psych