Since desire is, as we have seen, a remainder or leftover, it can hardly be considered substantial or solid. Virtually no one around us recognizes our desire for what it is, paying heed only to our obvious needs or explicit requests (if those!), finding our hidden or subtler wishes too difficult or annoying to deal with. And we ourselves are often unaware of what we really want. When we perchance have an inkling of what it is, we may well disapprove of it and try not to think about it. As I mentioned earlier, many people seem quite clueless about what they want when they first enter analysis, and it is only thanks to the analyst’s questioning and repeating things they say back to them that they begin to listen to themselves and try to decipher what their speech suggests they in fact want. In other words, the desire that inhabits them is often so well hidden from themselves that they have to listen to themselves speak for a very long time before they can have a sense of what they themselves really want.