McGowan — Enjoying What We Don’t Have
Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (University of Nebraska Press, 2013)
The Argument
McGowan, working from Lacanian psychoanalysis, argues that capitalism’s fundamental promise — that the next acquisition will satisfy — is structurally impossible to fulfill. Enjoyment (jouissance) is not found in having but in the gap between desire and satisfaction. We enjoy precisely what we don’t have, and the system that promises to close the gap through consumption is not failing when it doesn’t satisfy — it’s functioning as designed. Dissatisfaction is the engine, not the bug.
The political implication: a genuinely emancipatory politics cannot promise satisfaction through redistribution or access. It must transform the relationship to enjoyment itself — from the fantasy of completion through accumulation to the recognition that the gap is constitutive. You will never have enough house, enough security, enough equity — not because you’re doing it wrong, but because the desire structure doesn’t work that way.
The Sacrifice of Surplus Enjoyment
Capitalism depends on a fantasy that someone, somewhere, is enjoying fully — the rich, the famous, the person with the better house. This fantasy sustains desire and consumption. McGowan argues that emancipatory politics requires the collective sacrifice of this fantasy — the recognition that no one has the thing we’re chasing, and that this is freeing rather than depressing.
Relevance to the Project
This is the deepest-level psychological challenge the project faces. The CLT caps equity. It refuses appreciation. It says: your house will not make you rich. For people formed by a culture that promises satisfaction through homeownership-as-investment, this feels like deprivation — giving something up.
McGowan reframes it: the project isn’t taking something away. It’s releasing residents from a fantasy that was never going to deliver. The person whose home appreciates 200% is not more satisfied than the person whose carrying costs are frozen — because the appreciation was never about satisfaction. It was about the promise of satisfaction, endlessly deferred.
The “enough” problem. The irreducible minimum asserts a floor. McGowan’s framework explains why floors are psychologically difficult: in a desire economy organized around “more,” a floor feels like a ceiling. The community’s culture has to help residents experience sufficiency as liberation rather than limitation. This is the hardest cultural work the project will do.
Growth-independent enjoyment. Growth-Independent Housing removes the economic growth imperative. McGowan’s framework suggests a parallel psychological project: growth-independent enjoyment. Can people find satisfaction in stable, sufficient, non-appreciating housing? McGowan says yes — but only if the relationship to desire is transformed. You have to stop chasing the fantasy object.
The envy structure. If housing-as-investment is a fantasy of enjoyment, then neighbors with market-rate homes represent the fantasy that someone else has the thing you sacrificed. McGowan’s analysis predicts that CLT residents will sometimes feel envy not of actual wealth but of the fantasy of wealth that market homeownership represents. This is normal and the community should be prepared for it.