These lectures are concerned with the issues of desire and difference, particularly in how they relate to issues of human sexuality and gender in everyday life (i.e. to issues of what we might call psychonormality), although the theoretical framework does originate from a psychoanalytic perspective of human psychopathology.

My starting point is the proposal that human sexuality and human gender are, from a psychological perspective at least, best understood as discourses. That is to say, both essentially involve the construction and exchange of social and cultural meanings. Sexuality is the pre-eminent discourse on human desire, and gender is the pre-eminent discourse on human difference. And, while there may be some overlap of these two realms of discourse, they do need to be separated if we are to make any real progress in understanding them. This basic position is summarized in Table 1 below.

Some of the concepts and theoretical ideas that I want to cover here are quite difficult and challenging. The personal position that I have adopted is that much of the distress and confusion associated with human interpersonal relationships, and also with issues of human identity and human differences, could be far better managed if there was a wider understanding of the discursive context in which the unconscious exchange of meaning takes place.

Sigmund Freud regarded sexuality as the pre-eminent expression of human desire, and psychoanalysis is founded on an understanding of the consequent psychopathology of human sexuality and desire. There is not the time here to provide an outline of Freud’s theories, and I will take them as given. Instead the focus here is on two important developments from psychoanalytic theory, particularly with respect to the way in which the nature of human desire is revealed when it is thwarted and frustrated. This is to be found in the work of Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981), who both offer radical extensions to Freud’s original conception of the unconscious. Both Klein and Lacan are concerned with theorizing the way in which human needs become transformed by unconscious projections into human demands and desires. Klein’s work focusses largely on understanding these processes in the infant (i.e. pre-symbolic). She is concerned with the fundamental issue of how we deal with the frustration of a desired object being unavailable (or with-held). Lacan’s work focusses on the tension between the pre-symbolic and symbolic registers, and with the inevitable disappointment that the desired object must have for us. Later, I will extend this to the inter-play of differences in which human identity/gender inevitably is situated.

These lectures do not provide an exposition of the respective theories of Klein and Lacan, they are designed instead to simply take some crucial insights and ideas from these two theorists as a starting point for developing a discursive account of human desire and difference. I will be making use of Klein’s concept of "unconscious envy", and Lacan’s concepts of "desire", "demand", "lack" and "subjectivity", which are claimed to be universal structures, and therefore relevant to a model of psychonormality.

During Melanie Klein’s early psychoanalytic work, she became acutely aware of the depth of her patient’s resistances. Inspired by her observations of young children, she became convinced that there was a constitutional, instinctive destructive factor at work – unconscious envy, which was operating from very early infancy, and moreover, throughout human development into adulthood. Envy represents an instinctive human response to the frustration of needs and desires. This formed part of her object-relations approach to psychoanalysis (for a fuller account see Klein, 1957; or Hiles, 2001).

Melanie Klein proposed that the first object to be envied was the mother’s breast. This she called primary envy. In object-relation terms, the infant equates the mother to the breast, a "good object", and is not able to relate to the mother as a person in her own right. The infant’s demand to be fed can be met with delay, or inadequate response. Such failed gratification is interpreted as the breast (mother) with-holding, or keeping for itself, the object of desire. In these terms, envy is the angry feeling that another person (i.e. a person who normally acts as the source) possesses, but is with-holding, and keeping for themself, something that one desires. The envious impulse is to attack the "good breast". This can be diabolically destructive and undermining, since it mobilises powerful defences – such as spoiling and devaluation of the good object. Consequently, envy can set out to destroy the very source of goodness that the infant must rely upon for normal maturation and growth.

Envy stems from an intolerance to frustration, and it is one of the most primitive and fundamental of emotions. In early infancy, envious feelings need to be tolerated, such that normal development can proceed through what Klein identifies as two key phases: the paranoid-schizoid position and depressive position. However, if the envious feelings are excessive, this can lead to a weakened ego. The same mechanism of envy is in operation at the core of the human psyche in adulthood, as an unconscious response to thwarted and frustrated desires. In envy, there may be an aim to be as good as the object, but when this is felt to be impossible, the aim can switch to spoiling the goodness of the object, and thus removing the source of envious feelings. Moreover, such primitive envy can be revived in the transference of the therapeutic alliance between counsellor and client (as a negative transference).

Envy differs from jealously which involves the frustration of seeing someone else receiving what one desires for oneself. In contrast, envy always implies the subject’s relation to only one other person, and adult experiences of envy can go back to the earliest exclusive relation with the mother. An envious person may feel sickened at the sight of enjoyment, since they may feel easy only in the misery of others. Also, envy often serves to stir up envy and jealousy in others. A consequence of excessive envy is an early onset of guilt – a guilt felt as persecution, and the object arousing the guilt as persecutor. Indeed the deepest sources of guilt are always linked with the envy of the feeding breast, and with guilty feelings of having spoilt its goodness by envious attacks. Defences against envy quickly lead to psychopathology, because they will only serve to compound the destructive operation of envy. Unresolved primary envy can lead to psychotic symptoms in later life. Envy is commonly accompanied by self-pity, self-destructiveness, etc. Withdrawal of the good object, when not dealt with in rage and outward destructiveness, will turn inwards, such that the ego can implode and destroy itself.

The importance of Klein’s theory is that it shows how closely desire and human destructiveness, and self-destructiveness are linked.

Jacques Lacan offers a post-structuralist view of human desire and human subjectivity that is challenging in both its obscurity and its implications (see Sarup, 1992). Furthermore, it seems to arrive at a position not that different from that of Melanie Klein, although does considerably extend it.

Lacan, in his declared aim of "a return to Freud", takes up Freud’s important distinction between need, instinct and desire. Lacan stresses that a need is a basic biological state that is capable of being satisfied by some appropriate physical goal, whereas an instinct is a drive to action, created by the anxiety or tension arising out of the underlying need. In turn, desire is the projection of these instinctive drives onto an object that holds out the promise that they will be met, such that the object comes to symbolize, or to mean, the gratification of the underlying need. We can illustrate these distinctions by referring to the situation that Klein chooses for her focus. The infant experiences hunger as a physical need, whereas the nuzzling into the mother’s breast and sucking are instinctive actions. This is transformed into desire as the breast takes on the meaning "milk". Indeed, the breast becomes pleasurable in its own right, such that seeking out and finding the breast becomes pleasurable in itself. Once the breast becomes the signifier of milk, its place in a chain of signifiers becomes established, and the meaning can be endlessly deferred.

Lacan further proposes that desire implies a demand made on the need-satisfying object, a demand that positions the "other" in a crucial way, (this is implied in Klein’s theory, but it is Lacan who crucially makes this explicit). It is this notion of a demand that distinguishes desire from instinct. A demand has two necessary components:- the object demanded, and the "other" to whom the demand is addressed. The demand is a directed action, and implies a relationship to the "other" such that an expectation that the instinctual desire will be always met. Moreover, Lacan stresses that the demand can never be fully satisfied, even when the desired object is offered, because the demand will always seek something else. Demand is transferred onto the next object that can be asked for, which will, in some way, prove the unconditional love of the "other", i.e. some "proof of love."

For Lacan, desire is regarded as the directing force of the psychical apparatus. It is in such demands and desires, and in the deepening relationship to the "other", that Lacan proposes that human subjectivity becomes constituted. These ideas can be illustrated by the way Lacan theorizes the human infant’s helplessness, for example in a cry for hunger. The infant’s cry is not seen as merely an instinctual action, but as a demand for the (m)other to feed it. The cry is not simply an instinctual action that will produce gratification, but is instrumental in calling on the (m)other to act. The demand therefore acquires a double function:- it articulates a need, but also demands "proof of love". It is this double function which gives rise to desire.

It is important to place Lacan’s notion of desire in the context of his distinction between three realms: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. The consequence of the child’s entry into the Symbolic (language) is that the engagement with meaning will involve an endless process of deferral. Meaning (and therefore desire) is dependent upon an inter-play of oppositions, or polarities, i.e. a chain of signifiers. Furthermore, once human needs become transformed in this way into demands and desires, they easily become altered by the processes of displacement, sublimation and fetish-isation into objects of desire that may have little or no resemblance to the needs from which they originated.

Lacan stresses that desire is always unfulfilled, "it is always a desire for something else." We do not desire what we already have, we always desire something we do not have. Desire is therefore constituted in its opposition to a lack. The object of desire connotes its own absence, or lack. Thus, we arrive at a most profound insight, that whatever we desire must also threaten us by its absence. This idea is not very different to the concept of unconscious envy in Klein’s work, which prefigures the later conflicts of the Symbolic realm. Human consciousness and unconsciousness is realised in a complex range of discourses that reveal the basic tension that lies at the core of human nature, and indeed at the heart of human culture.

Earlier, I defined gender as a discourse of differences, and as such it is a discourse amongst several that highlight human differences (e.g. race, class, age, disability, etc). Gender transcends physical and anatomical differences. Moreover, it tries to reduce human diversity to what is little more than an over-restrictive dichotomy. Without wanting to deny that actual differences do exist between people, we need to accept that in the case of gender, these differences are more or less arbitrary. They act as floating signifiers (Hall, 1997), where it is the meaning given to the differences that matters. We will have the need to call upon the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, together with a brief mention of queer theory, in understanding these issues.

This lecture offers a perspective within which a whole range of issues might be discussed. For example, any informed discussion of gender, must take seriously such issues as: How can we reconcile physical and anatomical differences, with human sexuality, with feelings of maleness/femaleness? Is there any necessary relationship between biological bipolarity and psychological diversity? Why is abnormality politicised? How do we sort our diversity/disorder/dysfunction? Why should certain types of identities/relationships/practices be privileged over others? I do not intend to directly address these questions in my lecture, but they can be raised in discussion.

Gender is marked in every human culture, and is very likely a crucial component of human identity. It is possibly one of the first discourses of difference that the young child discovers. In turn, it offers a crucial way for the growing individual to express their identity. Nevertheless, gender offers a gross over-simplification of human differences, it is by no means the only component of identity, and nor is it uncomplicated in its expression. As stressed by Lacan, gender, and such concepts as masculinity and femininity, have no biological basis, but are symbolic positions, but, nevertheless, still crucial in the formation of human subjectivity (see Lacan, 1977; Minsky, 1996).

It helps to begin by thinking of gender as consisting of two components: (i) a body, and (ii) a meaning that is given to that body by the culture, highlighting its difference with other bodies. It should be fairly clear that the body itself plays a relatively small part in all this, and largely remains covered, out of sight, and unseen. Furthermore, the meanings attached to the body are more or less arbitrary. It needs to be emphasized that this claim, of gender differences being more or less arbitrary, does not deny in any way how powerfully gender can act as a code for enforcing a range of related socio-cultural codes, discourses and practices, e.g. dress codes, grooming codes, interpersonal interaction, social relations, social distance, public space, speaking rights, courtesy, and politeness, etc, etc. As is so often the case, it is the arbitrary codes and practices of our culture that need to be enforced, or "policed", in a fairly powerful and uncompromising way.

Theorising gender as a code, stresses that it is basically a discourse, or set of rules which generate a normative function in regulating behaviour and experience. Human identity then becomes implicated in what Michel Foucault calls the ethical subject, involving decisions about the manner of how one ought to conduct oneself, acting in reference to the prescriptive elements that make up the code (Foucault, 1984). Although Foucault is concerned with human sexuality, his ideas equally apply to gender. He points out that codes/rules, while being prescriptive, can be implemented by the individual in ways that they themselves choose (determination of the ethical substance), or, by taking up a position in relation to these codes/rules (mode of subjection), or, by establishing a range of related practices (elaboration).

Gender identity, from this perspective of human subjectivity, is seen as a product of the discourses, positions and normative choices with which we must engage. Out of this activity, our identity is fashioned. And, within these gender codes/rules, there is implicated our relation to the "other". We feel similar to this "other", different from that "other". Furthermore, this must be achieved without ever having direct access to what any other person is thinking or feeling. This problem of intersubjectivity lies at the foundation of the issues raised in understanding human identity (see Hiles, 1997). Paradoxically, we construct a self in the relation to other selves, without ever being able to access, or contact, these other selves directly.

Gender is complicated by sexuality, although possibly this is more so in some cultures than in others. The complication arises probably because both gender and sexuality start with a physical body, both implicate the "other" in some way, and both are heavily "policed" by codes and rules for normative conduct. Inevitably the discourses of difference and desire overlap, and complicate each with the other. Nowhere does this seem more explicit than in the issue of transexuality – a psychological condition that is commonly treated within the biomedical model, but is better understood within the context of discourses of difference, as well as discourses of desire and dissatisfaction with the physical self. All too often, this can easily lapse into the discourses of spectacle, campness, "queerness", and the bizarre.

In defiance to the problem of intersubjectivity, the (preoperative) transexual feels certain that they are in the "wrong" body. This experience is considerably accentuated by the notion that there are only two types of body, male or female, along with two types of sexuality, and two types of gender. Placed in the context of the various discourses of difference and desire that the culture offers with respect to possessing this body or that body, there is little surprise that confusion of identity will reign.

Two distinct, but inter-relating, themes seem to be at play here: (i) confusion and dissatisfaction with self, and (ii) powerful identification with the ‘other’.

The body, and our needs, are not arbitrary, but practically every nuance of meaning attached to them is arbitrary. Given that gender and sexuality in this way are overlayed by so many cultural discourses, many of which are simply historical and often trivial, it is hardly surprising that they generate so much confusion and dissatisfaction. While confusion and dissatisfaction with self are fairly common experiences, and indeed may be necessary for personal growth, the profound experience of the transexual is quite extreme, involving projection of dissatisfaction specifically onto the body. It is possible to see the transexual’s dissatisfaction with their gender/sex as part of a wider range of ways in which people try to construct their identity through changes in appearance involving either exaggeration, or, more radically, alteration into ‘someone’ different (e.g. using plastic surgery, major surgery, cosmetics, dress, grooming, name change, acquisition of material possessions, and even amputation, etc, etc).

Another theme that is at play here is that of similar/different, which always implies a reference to, in some sense, the "other". In an area such as transexuality, this usually involves a notion of feeling like this other, and different from that other, so much so that a powerful identification is set up that becomes focussed on the body. But since we can never know what another person is feeling, this crucially confronts the issue of intersubjectivity – i.e. the problem of the impossibility of directly shared experience with another. Transexual experience seems to contradict this basic existential given of being human.

The point that I am trying to make here is simply that issues surrounding transexuality will be poorly understood without the development of a proper appreciation of the mechanisms of desire and dissatisfaction that operate in the individual, and a fuller understanding of the discourses that operate in human intersubjectivity. These topics are ignored by the medical model, and they have as yet received scant attention in psychological research.

The word queer is usually associated with homosexuality, but it applies to much more than that. Terms such as queer, or camp, are concerned with identity politics. They problematize the arbitrary and the ideological, they invite us to move beyond issues of authority, codes and simple "otherness". This raises, but does not necessarily resolve, issues relating to individual vs. group, acceptance vs. rejection, conform vs. subvert, performative expression vs. knowing acceptance, etc.

Clearly, there is a very wide range of ways in which we construct and express our identity as human beings:- appearance, dress code, tattooing/piercing, adornment, material trappings, affiliations, relationships, choice of partners, social class, gender roles, sexuality, behavioural and social/cultural practices, creativity, etc, etc. Most of these constructions overlap and reinforce each other, but they also can create tensions and conflicts, send mixed meanings, and can be deliberately used in seemingly contradictory ways. There may well be groups with different transgression rights, resulting in considerable inequality in the tolerance that society offers to transgression of its codes, e.g. women dressing as men goes unchallenged, in ways that men dressing as women attracts a quite different response. What does seem clear is that human diversity just does not fit easily into bipolar oppositions.

Any necessity in such identity claims is further brought into question by the consideration of queer theory – which points out that the notion of human identity as fixed, or fitting certain pre-ordained categories, or consisting of highly correlated groups of characteristics, must be actively challenged. What seems to be clear is that it is simply wrong to group people on the basis of only one shared characteristic, such as masculinity or femininity. Identity is not something that determines who we are, but rather, identities are constructed from many elements, which includes a range of codes to be followed normatively, to be transgressed, and possibly subverted, with the individual able to exercise choice in subtle ways. As several cultures acknowledge, a third gender can be legitimated, and the number of genders, and the number of sexualities need not be limited to only two. These points are summarized by Gauntlett (2002, p.135) as follows:

I have tried in these lectures to stress the importance that meaning plays in the ways that desire and difference operate in human life. In effect, each of us is situated in these two crucial realms of discourse. I have attempted to point out some of the complications to which this inevitably leads: unconscious envy in response to frustration, the inevitable disappointment as well as the unconscious threat that everything we desire throws up, together with the confusions of identity arising out of the cultural pressures we experience in our day-to-day lives.

"For most people, being either male or female is not an issue, it just happens naturally, it is dictated by their sex at birth".

                (Quoted from: More Sexes Please – Heart of the Matter, BBC1, 37 mins)