[1] The concept of demand was developed by Lacan—outside of Freudian theory—in conjunction with need and desire in order to account for the role of speech in human aspirations,[2] and forms part of the Lacanian opposition to the approach to language acquisition favored by ego psychology.
[3] For Lacan, demand is the result of language acquisition on physical needs – the individual's wants are automatically filtered through the alien system of external signifiers.
[4] Where traditionally psychoanalysis had recognised that learning to speak was a major step in the ego's acquisition of power over the world,[5] and celebrated its capacity for increasing instinctual control,[6] Lacan by contrast stressed the more sinister side of man's early submergence in language.
He argued that "demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the 'privilege' of satisfying needs", and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by "the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier".
Demands faithfully express unconscious signifying formations, but always leave behind a residue or kernel of desire, representing a lost surplus of jouissance for the subject, (because the Real is never totally symbolizable).