Between the sexual and the sublime, the desire: on repetition, perfectibility and representation in Freud

Abstract

Considered by Freud in 1900 as the only driving force of the psychic apparatus, the desire becomes a central concept in his metapsychological project. By the definition of the dream as a “(disguised) fulfillment of a (repressed) desire”, it becomes evident that a desire must first be repressed to, through a disguise, be realized oneirically. This implies a complexity within Freud’s concept of desire, which we aimed to investigate. We were able to define desire in Freud as a concept marked by the negative: it is impossible, indestructible and infinite, forming a sempiternal circuit in which the individual seeks to recover with perfection a certain set of representations. This perfection being unachievable, one seems doomed to acquiesce to a series of substitutes only similar to the original sought. We note, however, that through sublimation one seems capable of achieving a certain perfection, although restricted to the field of representation.