Drive-Desire is used interchangeably with libidinality for the purposes of this website. One way to think of desire is as that which is banished from awareness through repression and thereafter exerts a force upon us (“that which persists, insists”). Something has been lost, but you are still affected by its enigmatic absence. We are driven (drive) to find something (desire) that is not available to us representationally.
So, desire is not a simple wish or preference. Wishes and preferences can be known to us whereas desire is always unknown but active. Desire emerges from sensual experiences in infancy when caregivers interacted intimately with us, all the while conveying enigmatic messages that even they were not conscious of. As such, desire is rooted in our biological experience and our social experience, occupying a third reality that it not identical with either our biology or our sociological history. This third reality, drive-desire, drives the activity of our mental life in a disguised way. Unlike the logical, linear way we try to organize our thoughts, desire works against the orderliness of our mental judgments. These desires constantly return to speech (Freud’s famous “return of the repressed”) but not necessarily to awareness, appearing in disguised and veiled formations.
Desire is a subversive, kinetic force that fundamentally contradicts the static narratives of our mental life. Psychoanalysis is the discipline that addresses the conflict between these narrative identities and the “kinesis of desire” that is always otherwise than what can be narrated.
Desire can also be thought of as the spiritual energy of the sexual body. It serves as the primary intervention against the narratological imperative—the compulsive need to build stories that cover the inherent emptiness described in the section above on the unconscious. Healing, therefore, is not about creating better stories, but about a libidinal remobilization that loosens our attachment to habitual mental scripts and constructions. By returning to the desirous momentum of libidinality, the subject moves out of the stultifying prison of repetition compulsion and into the wisdom of our hearts.