Talk:Love

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Freudian Dictionary

Love in itself, in the form of longing and deprivation, lowers the self-regard; whereas to be loved, to have love returned, and to possess the beloved object, exalts it again.[1]

Being in love is based upon the simultaneous presence of directly sexual tendencies and of sexual tendencies that are inhibited in their aims, so that the object draws a part of the narcissistic ego-libido to itself. It is a condition in which there is only room for the ego and the object.[2]

Not to love before one gains full knowledge of the thing loved presupposes a delay which is harmful. When one finally reaches cognition, he neither loves nor hates properly; one remains beyond love and hatred. One has investigated instead of having loved.[3]

Love, Sexual

One of the forms in which love manifests itself, sexual love, gives us our most intense experience of an overwhelming pleasurable sensation and so furnishes a prototype for our strivings after happiness.[4]


Below

"love" (Fr. amour)

Lacan argues that it is impossible to say anything meaningful or sensible about love.[5]

Indeed, the moment one starts to speak about love, one descends into imbecility.[6]

GIven these views, it might seem surprising that Lacan himself dedicates a great deal of his seminar precisely to speaking about love.

However, in doing so, Lacan is merely demonstrating what the analysand does in psychoanalytic treatment, for "the only thing that we do in the analytic discourse is speak about love."[7] ---

Love is located by Lacan as a purely imaginary phenomenon, although it has effects in the symbolic order (one of those effects being to produce "a veritable subduction of the symbolic").[8]

Love is autoerotic, and has a fundamentally narcissistic structure since "it's one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level."[9]

The imaginary nature of love leads Lacan to oppose all those analysts who posit love as an ideal in psychoanalytic treatment.[10]

---

Love involves an imaginary reciprocity, since "to love is, essentially, to wish to be loved."[11]

It is this reciprocity between "loving" and "being loved" that constitutes the illusion of love, and this is what distinguishes it from the order of the drives, in which there is no reciprocity, only pure activity.[12]

---

Love is an illusory fantasy of fusion with the beloved which makes up for the absence of any sexual relationship.[13]

This is especially clear in the asexual concept of courtly love.[14]

--- Love is deceptive.

"As a specular mirage, love is essentially deception."[15]

It is deceptive because it involves giving what one does not have (i.e. the phallus); to love is "to give what one does not have."[16]

Love is directed not at what the love-object has, but at what he lacks, at the nothing beyond him.

The object is valued insofar as it comes in the place of that lack.

---

One of the most complex areas of Lacan's work concerns the relationship between love and desire.

On the one hand, the two terms are diametrically opposed.

On the other hand, this opposition is problematized by certian similarities between the two:

---

1. As an imaginary phenomenon which belongs to the field of the ego, love is clearly opposed to desire, which is inscribed in the symbolic order, the field of the Other.[17]

Love is a metaphor, whereas desire is metonymy.[18]

It can even be said that love kills desire, since love is based on a fantasy of oneness with the beloved and this abolishes the difference which gives rise to desire.[19]


2. On the other hand, there are elements in Lacan's work which destabilize the neat opposition between love and desire.

Firstly, they are both similar in that neither can ever be satisfied.

Secondly, the structur of love as "the wish to be loved" is identical to the structure of desire, in which the subject desires to become the object of the Other's desire.

Thirdly, in the dialectic of need/demand/desire, desire is born precisely from the unsatisfied part of demand, which is the demand for love.

Lacan's own discourse on love is thus often complicated by the same substitution of "desire" for "love" which he himself highlights in the text of Plato's Symposium.[20]

Transference

Love arises in analytic treatment] as an effect of transference.


Love and Aggressivity

Lacan lays empahsis on the conneciton between love and aggressivity.

The presence of one implies the presence of the other.

This phenomenon, which Freud calls 'ambivalence', is considered by Lacan as one of the great discoveries of psychoanalysis.

Love and Imaginary

Love is an imaginary phenomenon which belongs to the field of the ego. Love is autoerotic, and has a fundamentally [narcissistic]] structure.

<blockqutoe>"It's one own's ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level."[21]

An imaginary reciprocity between "loving" and "beinbg loved", which constitutes the illusion of love.

"To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved."[22]

Love and Deception

Love is an illusory fantasy of fusion with the beloved which makes up for the absence of any sexual relationship.[23]

Love is deceptive because it involves giving what one does not have (i.e. the phallus) To love is "to give what one does not have."[24] Love is directed at what the love-object lacks, at the nothing beyond it. The object is valued insofar as it comes in the palce of that lack.


Love and Desire

Desire is inscribed in the symbolic order. Love is a metaphor, whereas desire is a metonymy.[25] Love kills desire. Love is based on a fantasy of oneness with the beloeved and this abolishes the difference which gives rise to desire.[26]

First, they are both similar in that neither can be satisfied. Second, in the dialectic of need/demand/desire, desire is born precisely from the unsatisfied part of demand, which is the demand for love.

TWO

From a psychoanalytic point of view, love is the investment in, and ability to be loved by, another without experiencing this love as a subjective threat, such as that represented by the Thing (das Ding) which Freud described in the Project of 1895.

For psychoanalysis the genesis of the love investment must be taken into consideration and the very different modalities through which it manifests itself must be identified.


It is important to differentiate love from infatuation or being in love (Verliebtheit), which is associated with a pathological feeling (Leidenschaft):

"That the state of being in love (Verliebtheit) manifests itself abnormally can be explained by the fact that other amorous states outside the analytic cure resemble abnormal rather than normal psychic phenomena."[27]

Being in love is essentially marked by an overestimation of the love object and a devaluation of the self that resembles the condition of melancholia (1921c).

The genesis of love begins with the oral relation of the infant's mouth and the mother's breast:

"The picture of the child at the mother's breast has become the model of all sexual relations."[28]

Also, in choosing an object later in life, the child will attempt "to reestablish this lost happiness."[29]

But this happiness, even if it is marked by this choice of a primary infantile object, must later reunite and conjoin two libidinal currents, the tender current arising from infantile cathexis and the sensual current that appears during puberty:

"The man will leave his mother and father—as the Bible indicates—and will follow his wife—tenderness and sensuality are therefore reunited."[30]

This can only occur through the loss of the infantile object choice: "The individual human must devote himself to the difficult task of separating from his parents," as Freud indicated in the twenty-first of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.[31]

Yet, in "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,"[32] Freud recalls the difficulty of loving and the numerous splits that remain: "When they love, they do not desire, and when they desire, they cannot love."

In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915c), he examines the different splits and oppositions in which love plays a role; these are: loving/hating, loving/being loved, and loving and hating together in opposition to the state of indifference.

The pair loving/hating is related to the pleasure/unpleasure polarity; the ego interjects pleasure and expels unpleasure, which is transformed into the opposition ego-pleasure/exterior world-unpleasure.

Thus, hatred and the rejection of the exterior world emanate from the narcissistic ego.

The pair loving/being loved originates in the reversal of an impulse into its opposite, of activity into passivity, and corresponds to the narcissism of self-love.

The pair love/indifference is associated with the polarity ego/exterior world.

We love the "object that dispenses pleasure" and we repeat "the original flight before the exterior world" (1926d) in the face of an object that does not dispense pleasure.

In this way the intellectual economy of love is profoundly affected by these different forms of ambivalence.

Definition

Love in the sense Žižek understands it was first developed by Lucan in his Seminar XX.

It is thus from the beginning associated with a certain 'feminine' logic of the not-all and implies a way of thinking beyond the master-signifier and its universality guaranteed by exception:

"Lacan's extensive discussion of love in Seminar XX is thus to be read in the Paulinian sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression. This latter dialectic is clearly "masculine" or phallic ... Love, on the other hand, is "feminine": it involves the paradoxes of the not-All."[33]

Žižek associates love with St Paul, and it is a way for him to think the difference between Judaism, whose libidinal economy is still fundamentally that of the law and its transgression, and Christianity, which through forgiveness and the possibility of being born again seeks to overcome this dialectic:

"It is here that one should insist on how Lacan accomplishes the passage from Law to Love, in short, from Judaism to Christianity."[34]

In other words, this love might be seen to testify - as we also find with drive and enunciation - to a moment that precedes and makes possible the symbolic order and its social mediation, the way in which things are never directly what they are but only stand in for something else:

'Love bears witness to the abyss of a self-relating gesture by means of which, due to the lack of an independent guarantee of the social pact. the ruler himself has to guarantee the Truth of his word"[35]

Lacan conceives of love as a narcissistic misrecognition which obscures the truth of desire.

Quotes

"Love means giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it."[36]

See Also

(see also EXCEPTION NOT-ALL JEW CHRISTIAN)

References

  1. ↑ Template:Narc
  2. ↑ Template:GPAE Ch. 1
  3. ↑ Template:LDV Ch. 1
  4. ↑ Template:C&D Ch. 2
  5. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.57
  6. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.17
  7. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.77
  8. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.142
  9. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.142
  10. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.8
  11. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.253
  12. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.200
  13. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.44
  14. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.65
  15. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.268
  16. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.147
  17. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.189-91
  18. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.53
  19. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.46
  20. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.141
  21. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book I. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953-54. Trans. John Forrester. New York: Nortion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. p.142
  22. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977. p.253
  23. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.44
  24. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.147
  25. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre VIII. Le transfert, 1960-61. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1991. p.53
  26. ↑ Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire. Livre XX. Encore, 1972-73. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1975. p.46
  27. ↑ 1915a
  28. ↑ 1905d
  29. ↑ 1905d
  30. ↑ 1912d
  31. ↑ 1916-1917a [1915-16]
  32. ↑ 1912d
  33. ↑ p. 335
  34. ↑ p.345
  35. ↑ p. 267 n. 5
  36. ↑ Lacan, Jacques.
  1. Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.
  2. ——. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. SE, 11: 177-190.
  3. ——. (1915a). Observations on transference-love: technique of psycho-analysis. SE, 12: 157-171.
  4. ——. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.
  5. ——. (1926d). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety. SE, 20: 75-172.


Index
Love, 4-6, 11-12, 16-17, 24-25, 38-40, 45, 47, 49, 56-57, 66-68, 70-71, 72, 75, 77, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91-92, 98, 104, 121, 137, 144-46
courtly love, 69, 74, 86
as mutual (reciprocal), 4, 6, 85
subject-to-subject, 50, 144
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