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Isn’t the clearer explanation that she enjoys a part of the organizing the party, and doesn’t enjoy a different part, and when she is satisfied from the enjoyable part then the displeasing part becomes salient? She enjoys socializing and leading, then is satisfied; she doesn’t enjoy stress, and so when post-party fatigue hits all she thinks about is the stress. No different than a marathon runner swearing off running when they are exhausted, but in a few days when recharged they want to run again.
A Freud-ish leap to the conclusion that “when someone keeps doing the same thing over and over, the most parsimonious explanation is that they're doing it because they want to”, seems dangerous. We can say that there is some aspect of the thing that they like. A drug abuser enjoys the relief from the drug, but wants to find relief in a better way. He doesn’t enjoy every part of the experience of doing drugs.
What you've rightly detected is that psychoanalysis depends crucially upon the notion of contradiction. How, one might ask, could someone look at something unpleasant, acknowledge that it is unpleasant, believe that they don't want it, and yet still, at the same time... want it? Isn't that just manifestly incoherent? And so, on the presupposition that desires can't be self-contradictory, you propose an alternative explanatory model that is free of contradictions: we have a multitude of competing desires and aversions, each with their own individual weights, and these desires and aversions can come into conflict, but ultimately each individual desire is self-consistent, and some will win out in some situations and not in others.
But this is ultimately just a presupposition on your part, and it is a presupposition that can be challenged, in the same way that the presuppositions of psychoanalysis can be challenged. It goes beyond mere skepticism about the unconscious because of concerns about its observability; it is your own positive theoretical axiom about the nature of desire as such. Psychoanalysis takes an alternative point of departure: what if desires can be self-contradictory, paradoxical, "incoherent"? What happens if we try thinking about people in those terms?
In fact for Lacan, the term "desire" is reserved for precisely these moments of self-contradiction and self-undermining. When you know what you want, you know why you want it, and you're happy when you get it - I want to take a nap because it feels good, I want to drink soda because it tastes good, I got the thing and now I'm satisfied - these are "demands", not desires, in Lacan's terminology. Desire is when you take yourself by surprise - it always includes a certain element of dumbfounding. "I don't know why I keep doing this, I don't know why I keep letting this happen to me, and yet it does - eppur si muove". Surely you've had the experience of not really knowing why you did something, yes?
G. E. Moore raised the question of the logical and linguistic structure of sentences of the form "it is raining, and I do not believe it is raining". Ordinarily this seems like an absurd thing to say: one would only say it as a joke, or, if it were asserted seriously, then we would assume that the speaker had somehow failed to grasp the meaning of what he was saying. But the wager of psychoanalysis is that this is a paradigmatic illustration of how the psyche is structured: paradox is the engine of subjectivity.
Now of course you can ask why you should adopt this model over the commensensical one. And the very short answer is just: read Freud, read Lacan, read the commentators in the psychoanalytic tradition who have expanded on their work over the past century, and see if there's something in it that speaks to you. These are ideas that have to be experienced and lived with; there's no knock-down logical argument in their favor, besides asking yourself how accurately the ideas describe your experience of yourself and your experience of other people. But I have tried to provide examples in this thread and the other post I linked where I think psychoanalytic thinking is applicable.
There was a great post on TheMotte one time, and unfortunately I didn't save the link, so you'll just have to take my word for it: someone here was describing their experiences with Adderall. He said, I've always struggled with ADHD and motivational issues before, and it keeps me from accomplishing things that I would really like to accomplish. And when I'm on Adderall I feel a ton of motivation, and I'm able to work hard and get things done, and then afterwards I feel great and everything's great. But for some reason I just... don't really want to take it anymore? I think I might like being unhappy and lazy better? Why would I not want to do this thing, that solves this terrible problem I've had for a long time, and helps me accomplish good things that I want to accomplish, and makes me happy with basically no downsides? And I thought, wow! If that isn't the best case study for psychoanalysis I've ever seen, I don't know what is!
Of course you can always construct a model of any situation that only makes reference to non-contradictory desires, by introducing enough desires and aversions with the appropriate weights. It's not a question of whether it's possible to do that. It's just a question of which story ultimately rings true in the end.
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