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Psychoanalysis can help us to deal with social problems in several ways. First, it can help identify significant causes of a given problem often overlooked by other analyses — most notably, the unconscious motives of the primary perpetrators of the problem. Second, it can reveal major impediments to solving a given problem that are also generally overlooked, e.g., the unconscious meaning or psychological function that either the problem or a possible solution may have for those who are trying to solve the problem. Third, in performing either of the first two functions, psychoanalysis can promote selfunderstanding and understanding of others and thus increase tolerance and objectivity in arenas where passions often run high and people are sharply divided — e.g., in issues such as premarital sex and pregnancy, abortion, drugs, guns, crime, and violence.
Lacan's formulation of psychoanalytic theory is an especially appropriate tool for social analysis of this sort because of the integral relation it articulates between subjectivity and society. One index of this intimate link between the psychological and the social in Lacan's theory is his definition of discourses as simultaneously specific structures of subjectivity and specific types of social bonds. Another index, the one I want to explore, is Lacan's notion of the Other, a subject's internalized ultimate authority (parents, peers, society, government, nature, God, etc.), which, in its various forms, plays fundamental roles in the construction and operation of subjectivity.
An immediate indication of the pivotal role played by the Other in subjectivity is found in Lacan's dictum that human desire is always desire of the Other. All desire, as distinct from biological need,