For many of us, doing psychoanalytic geography demands something akin to a leap of faith. Questioning this assumption, the main purpose of this paper is to shift the terms of discussion about doing psychoanalytic geography from the realm of faith to critique. Drawing on Joan Copjec’s, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (1994), I argue that much of the uncertainty surrounding the research practices of psychoanalytic geography results from inadequate understandings of two fundamental and interrelated psychoanalytic principles. First, causes and effects cannot occupy the same phenomenal terrain. Second, the taking place of society involves a split between appearance, that is, its observable positive facts and relations, and being, that is, its generative principle and the mode of its institution. According to Copjec, a syncopated relation between being and appearance is not only central to Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire; it is also a neglected axiom that distinguishes psychoanalytic from historicist accounts of the spatial and temporal configurations of society. But what is desire and how can we become, to use Copjec’s phrase, ‘literate in desire’? To answer this question, I explore the empirical example of the fictional comic character Alan Partridge (played by Steve Coogan) who exemplifies the taking place of desire as a self-hindering process in terms of the illusoriness, opacity, and duplicity of language.