Desiring something is often confused with wanting something and we must understand that they are two concepts with different meanings. To understand both concepts within the field of psychology, in the following PsicologíaOnline article, we will explain in detail which is the difference between wanting and wanting something.
Index
- The nature of desire
- The impulses that sustain us
- What we want
- When wishes come true
The nature of desire.
With recent advances in neurobiology, it seems that the empire of emotion is undermining the reign of reason. By searching the conscious mind we underline the importance of analysis and reason, while by plunging into the unconscious mind we come across passions and perceptions. From Plato we have inherited the strange idea that the reason is the civilized part of the brain, and that we would be happy as long as reason dominated primitive passions.
The unconscious is impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable. He has his leaks and needs supervision. But it can be brilliant and, in turn, infuriating. The
Perhaps human culture exists to a large extent to suppress these natural species impulses. We can ask ourselves the conjecture that culture orders, makes official the appropriate way to implement the impulses that boil in our soul. When the heated impulses are repressed, we feel like a pressure cooker, without a safety valve, overflowing and getting lost.
The most genuine impulse is to be. We all wish to be one way or another. Spinoza understood that the conatus (persevering in being) is the essence that sustains our finite existence. At first glance, the idea could be quoted both with the verification that the suicide's impulse is not to be and in the proof of the overwhelming aggressiveness that emerges in times of war.
The impulses that sustain us.
Freud argues that alongside the irresistible impulse to love nests in our psyche the drive to death. Dying is incorporated in our cells, in our very atoms. There are two elemental forces in the universe. One attracts matter to matter. It is the way life originates and the way it spreads. In physics this force is called gravity; in psychology, love. The other force destroys matter. It is the force of disunification, disintegration, destruction. For Freud science does not understand morality, there is no good or evil. The death drive is part of our biology. The prototypical example can be found in cancer; If a cell does not die, it continues dividing, reproducing incessantly, in an abnormal way.
What we want.
What we want often does not match what we want. Desire requires lack, while wanting implies presence. We hate or want something because it demands a response from us, a certain decision. We desire the absent, that is why passionate love ignites and explodes in the chiaroscuro. When we dwell in clarity, desires hibernate, although incandescent - by the very fact of being alive - they push us to explore unknown territories.
When wishes come true.
Few times our wishes come true. In most occasions, we run into cracks or holes. When we wish someone, a placid wealth, a family or an artistic life, we imagine or fantasize. While imagination can generate utopias, fantasy engenders chimeras. Stubborn reality confines us, draws the limits of our desires. Nietzsche, exalter of lived life, exhorts us to love fati. Love what happens to us and get rid of escapist vertigo for a paradise to come. Desire is a journey, a longing to be somewhere else.
Happiness theorists, championed by the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, understand happiness as flow. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as a state in which the person is completely absorbed in an activity for their own pleasure and enjoyment, during which time flies and actions, thoughts and movements follow one another without pause. The psychologist and the philosopher coincide: to soak up the present, wanting what life offers us. Thus, at first glance it seems that our nature pushes us to constantly desire, to imagine or fantasize other possible worlds. Happiness would be an effort to learn to love, to see what happens to us in a different way.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Wish or want: difference, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotions.
