According to the rather incomprehensible French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, what we desire is the desire of the Other.

Explaining what he meant by this quote, Lacan said “The necessary and sufficient reason for the repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent remembrance in a signifier that repression has appropriated – that is, in which the repressed returns – is found if one accepts the idea that in these determinations the desire for recognition dominates the desire that is to be recognised, preserving it as such until it is recognized.”