desire

Desire refers to the psychological aspects of sexuality, particularly fantasies, operating both consciously and unconsciously. It is distinct from both the biological aspects of sexuality-the body and its sensations, its ability to reproduce, and sexual acts-and the social and political aspects, including sexual identity and sexual relationships.

Although we experience pleasure and pain through our bodies, arguably much of this is in fact a result of the psychological aspects of fantasy and desire. Psychoanalytic theory has explored these issues in particular, and in recent years the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan challenged Sigmund Freud's theory of biological ‘drives’, arguing instead that sexuality and desire are primarily sites for the production-and transgression-of meaning, and that desire is a result of cultural meanings and representations as much as any physiological expression. In particular, he sees desire as a metonym; that is, a word used in a transferred sense-‘metonymy’ being a figure of speech, and an important concept in semiology , in which the name of one thing is substituted for another to which it is related, for example an effect for a cause, or as in the substitution of ‘the bottle’ for ‘drink’. See also need.