The Graph of Desire is a schema, or model, that Jacques Lacan began developing in his seminar on The Formations of the Unconscious (1957-58). It achieved its definitive form in his essay "Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious" (1960/2004). Its four successive stages represent the constitution of the human subject and his desire. Nevertheless, Lacan never intended it to describe the genetic stages of a biological development. Rather, it represents the "logical moments" of the birth of a speaking subject.

Lacan starts with what he calls the "quilting point" (where an upholsterer attaches a button to a sofa or mattress to prevent the batting from moving around) a kind of looping by which the signifying chain of the parental Other's "discourse"—not to be understood here as merely verbal, of course—intersects with the baby's expressions of need (See Figure 1).

This...