“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” “Ask nicely,” “In this household, we do not yell when we’re hungry,”

As part of socialization and education, parents typically begin to introduce the discipline of insisting that the child articulate his/her requirements and urges in specific manners (“Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” “Ask nicely,” “In this household, we do not yell when we’re hungry,”

The child learns that he/she must accept, internalize, and speak “the discourse of the Other” (in this instance, the parents) in order to get his/her needs recognized, acknowledged, and addressed in a satisfactory fashion. 

In short, he/she must make demands couched in terms and conventions imposed by O/others’ socio-symbolic regimes.

Lacan maintains that natural bodily needs hence, via the inter- and trans-subjective dynamics of demand, are “overwritten” by the signifiers of an ultimately Symbolic Otherness, an overwriting through which the bases of the libidinal economy are denaturalized and subjected to socio-cultural forces and factors. 

Much of this beds down in the young, nascent subject’s psyche, thereafter exerting (often in unconscious ways) decisive effects on this person’s libidinal economy throughout his/her life.