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Love and Discourses

Rik Loose

Love is at the heart of analytic experience: Freud discovered its importance early on via his concept of the transference and Lacan interrogated love from the outset. Central to Freud’s approach to the understanding and treatment of neurosis was the love of the father, a love not always easy to bear for the neurotic subject. Lacan began to shift the question of love towards the field of the relations between parlêtres but never lost sight of the importance of love for the discourse of psychoanalysis.

Lacan ceaselessly questioned the vicissitudes of love in contemporary experience, taking as his starting point, like Freud, that love is intimately correlated with civilization. Everything in the domain of love, including the drives, object-choices and identifications, were ordered by the function of the father, and were corralled into the field occupied by the Oedipus Complex.

Lacan called this function of the father the Name of the Father, but he soon encountered its limitations. This had consequences not only for psychoanalytic discourse, but also for understanding disorders in the field of love. When the Oedipus Complex and the Name of the Father had full reign, the question of love was dominated, although not unproblematically, by how to respond to the love of the father, which in turn allowed the subject to respond to the other sex. Now that this universal function of the Name of the Father has largely evaporated, we are not only confronted with various and new avatars of love; we are also confronted with the fact that love, and thus the transference, must respond to the real, as this latter is not ordered or dominated anymore by the Oedipus Complex or the Name of the Father.

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Prevented Love

Nassia Linardou

In the first lesson of his seminar on Anxiety, referring to Aristotle, Lacan argues that “the best there is on the passions is caught in the net, the network, of rhetoric.” He makes his own net with the signifiers he brings to the blackboard, trying to catch anxiety. He takes his cue from Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. He breaks down inhibition into difficulty on the horizontal axis and movement on the vertical axis of coordinates.

Lacan wishes to avoid the learned word inhibition. He intends to remain on the very ground of experience. He brings in the word impede (empêcher), which patients use when they feel inhibited and inscribes it in the column of the symptom. “To be impeded is a symptom,” he says. Turning to etymology, he points out that impedicare means “to be ensnared.” Something impedes, “not the function […] but the subject.” But Lacan immediately points out that “the snare in question is narcissistic capture.” It introduces a limit as to what can be invested in the object.

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« Or le discours analytique, lui, fait promesse : d'introduire du nouveau. Ce, chose énorme, dans le champ dont se produit l'inconscient, puisque ses impasses, entre autres certes, mais d'abord, se révèlent dans l'amour. »

Lacan, J., « Télévision », Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 530.

"Now this analytic discourse implies a promise: to promote a novelty. And that, awesomely enough, into the field from which the unconscious is produced, since its finesses [impasses] — among other situations to be sure, but it is still the main one — come into play in the game of love."

Lacan, J., Television, trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson, New York/London: Norton, 1990, p. 28.