Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.
At first, the baby appears only to need mild, attention to its hygiene, and rest. Psychoanalysis has made much of the breast, because it is a perfect object for the newborn baby: it is food, drink, warmth, comfort, and love. The newborn, drunk on mild, hardly knows it’s been born. Psychoanalysts point to that state of contentment as something that can never be found again, they point to the breast as a lost perfect object, although not in the same way that the Phallus is a lost perfect object. But that perfect state cannot persist, because the child is growing, and as it does so, its needs become more complex. After a while, it needs to use its developing muscles, and it needs stimulation. Those needs can be met quite easily: a safe room with space to crawl about, furniture to hold onto so that it may pull itself onto its feet, a television and a couple of of toys should suffice … but they don’t.
Studies … of institutionalised babies showed that even when adequately cared for, they failed to thrive: they became listless and depressed … Lacan – and perhaps everyone else – would say that from day one, the child also needs love, but this begs the question why; love is, anyway, a lot of different things, that is so essential to the formation of the child’s mental health? The answer may lie in Lacan’s Mirror Stage, in which the mother’s loving gaze is the child’s first mirror and crucial to the formation of the infant’s sense of identity.
… the failure of this first mirror can lead to a deep fault in the foundation of the baby’s sense of identity, which is the ability to conceive of itself as an object, and a beloved object. Without the means of forming the proto-concept of ‘self’ at the right moment in infancy, there may be severe delays in cognitive development or even a complete failure to develop the concept of ‘subject’ and by extension ‘object’ and all the conceptualisations that follow, resulting in severe autism. All this would imply that ‘love’ is a primary need – perhaps the primary need – with respect to the construction of the human Subject. 113-114
But it is in the dimension of love that demand can never ‘match’ the need, and therefore the dimension in which desire flourishes.
One can only demand love obliquely, because in its very nature, it eludes language. It is not that the child does not try to ask for it, indeed, once a child is able to speak, most of its demands are expressions of its need for love. If you think about it, outside circumstances of extreme economic hardship (in the developing world or in war), it is rare for a child to have to demand something fundamental to its physical survival. Most of the time, what it asks for is ‘extra’: every day and at every opportunity, ‘plain past not filled’ or ‘chocolate cake’ or ‘not the yoghurt with bits in but that one’. It is in the inessential ‘extra’ that is coded the demand for love: in Lacan’s words, ‘the demand cancels the particularity of whatever is given by changing it into a proof of love’.
But why cannot love be demanded directly? Lacan would say that it is because love consists in ‘giving what one doesn’t have’ (Ecrits) – in other words, it can only be seen in the effort put in by the giver of love. Thus, the child ‘deduces’ the mother’s love by the effort and will she puts into satisfying the inessential part of the demand; her love is read in her proofs that her greatest desire is to be with and satisfying to the child. In this relationship, therefore, the child sees the mother’s love as depending upon the existence of a need (Lacan calls it a lack-in-being) and a desire in her – a desire the child thinks it fulfills. 115