What is your true desire?

Liberating ourselves from the desire of the big Other

Photo taken by author at The Gilbert and George Centre London 2024

Introduction

This essay explores how we navigate our desires in the current social landscape. The stimulation for this piece comes from my coaching experience. In the ‘coaching confessional’ individuals share their intimate personal feelings and thoughts in confidential safety. They often speak about desires, surprising themselves with their own thoughts and reflections.

In recent years I have trained coaches to ask ‘What is your desire?’ because it lands so powerfully with people. It resonates because our desires, what we want for ourselves, and what we think will make us happy, have become increasingly important to our current social imaginary. Collectively, our idea that we can find happiness through free choice and by working hard to optimise ourselves has become evermore powerful. To find this elusive happiness means to follow our true desires. What is striking is that although this fundamental question resonates very strongly, it seems we have done little work on thinking about what shapes our desires, where they come from, and how others influence our desires. This essay explores these questions.

Why Desire has Become Central?  

Desire has moved from being one of many influences on us to becoming a very central influence. This follows a larger drift towards individualism, consumerism, and a growing focus on personal identity. Who we desire to be, what we desire to become, and how we desire that others see us, has become central to our very personhood, to the question of ‘who are you?’.

People strive to find the elusive state of happiness that society constantly encourages us to seek. To be our best selves, to follow our passion, to choose the right job or career or the perfect partner who will make us happy, we first have to understand what we really desire for ourselves. Unless we identify our true desire, we may spend a lifetime chasing false hopes and dreams.

This question of desire has become amplified and distorted by rampant individualism and the happiness fetish that has been rocket-boosted by relentless marketing. Our desires are the target and the essential element of consumer capitalism.

My last essay on the Wounded and Celebrated-Self, explains the rise of therapy culture and how the Wounded and Celebrated-Selves emerged as dominant social identities. To identify with the Wounded-Self is to realise that your desires are unfulfilled. To follow the logic of the Celebrated-Self, one is constantly trying to decipher and fulfil our desires.

Surface levels of understanding our desires lead us into an abyss. We have to deepen our exploration of the question ‘What is our true desire?’. Different ways of looking at the question take it beyond an individual quest. Desire is relational. Psychoanalysis teaches us that our desire is vital to what it means to be human in our modern times and that it is influenced by conscious, unconscious, and societal forces.

Exploring desire is vital, not only to help individuals transcend consumerist and narcissistic cultures but also to discover less destructive and more positive ways to live well with each other and with the environment.

Exploring Desire

To understand desire, I turn to psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan. Engaging with the unconscious seems vital to get beyond the superficial ideas propagated by our consumer society that desires can be fulfilled by short-term pleasure hits. I take from psychoanalysis selectively, and make my own sense of it, as Lacan and other psychoanalytical approaches can be overly complicated to the point of distraction, and yet within them, nuggets of wisdom help us understand the human condition.