We explain what desire is, the origin of the term, its various positive and negative meanings. Also, differences with need.
What is desire?
We all know in one way or another what desire is, that which the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy defines as an “affective movement towards something that is desired”. That's because we've all had the experience of wanting to achieve or get something, yearning for it, or hoping for it to happen.
When we think of the word desire, the first thing that comes to mind is the childhood story of the genie in the lamp, which upon being released grants three wishes to its liberator, that is, it commits itself to magically satisfy three of its expectations, of their wants or desires. This means that desire, in principle, consists of the expectation of having something that you do not have, but you want.
In fact, the history of the word itself traces its origins in the Latin word desidium, translatable as "leisure", "laziness", because it comes from the verb desidere, "Remain seated."
However, these meanings were added by analogy the verb I will wish: "To miss" or "to miss", whose presence is recognizable in the words desire or desirér (both translatable as wish or wish) in English and French respectively. So desire is linked to what we miss, what we want to have.
Today, however, we associate desire with many other senses. The word is used to refer, for example, to sexual attraction (sexual desire), to the vital impulse of the creativity (psychoanalytic desire), and even to the shackles of mundane life that must be rid of in order to experience enlightenment, as proposed by Buddhism and Eastern philosophy.
However, in all cases the desire represents an impulse, a push, which leads us to act, often comparable to hunger and thirst.
Desire can be a source of pleasure or suffering. It is compared to natural or primitive forces that nest within the human being, using for this metaphors like the sea, fire, etc.
Desire and need
In the specific field of marketing or marketing, a distinction is usually made between desire and need when analyzing the consumption presented by the public of a particular business sector.
In this sense, the need is what the consumer it needs to satisfy, for biological, psychological or emotional reasons, and that it obeys primary, basic impulses of its survival. Hunger, for example, is a need to be satisfied.
Instead, desires refer to the consumption of a specific object to satisfy a need through it. In the case of the satisfaction of hunger, the desire to do it while eating pizza constitutes a specific desire, therefore different from the desire to eat sushi, or the desire to eat Mexican food.
This classification operates at different levels and adapts to the characteristics of each consumer public, which can be vastly different from each other, according to cultural, ethnic, socioeconomic and other characteristics.