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WHAT PLACE DO THE NOTIONS OF LOVE AND DESIRE HAVE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY?
Love is obviously an ineluctable part of human nature and as such we can apply the same scrutiny to it—as a psychological phenomenon—as we do to anything else that originates in the psychic domain. We expand in love, beyond our known capacities, and risk it all to sustain such an expansion, based on a lack. This lack is alluded to in Freud, but it is the neo-Freudian thought of Lacan that finally institutes this notion within the psychoanalytic language of love and desire. Before we tackle the question of love and desire within psychoanalytic theory, some preliminary remarks on the basic psychoanalytic conception of the mind is required. According to ‘Psycho-Analysis’, and Freud’s structural topography of the mind, we each are born with biological, libidinal instincts (‘Id’), which keep us alive and fuel our development according to the tension between the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death-instinct (Thanatos). These instincts are largely situated within the unconscious part of our mind. Gradually, through the inevitable experience of separation (from our mothers’ wombs, from the feeding breast, from our early loveobjects) we develop an ‘ego’, as distinct from the world and anyone in it. The ego is largely situated within consciousness, as the ‘I’ of an individual’s subjectivity. Egodevelopment is something that continues across the lifespan as new experiences and setbacks are resolved and as its capacities to manage the hidden impulses of the id are gradually strengthened through an increasing relation to the reality principle (Ananke). According to psychoanalysis, the instincts can be either erotic or destructive, but could both inevitably lead to a regressive state, or to paraphrase Freud, a return to an inorganic state in the psyche1. How the ego manages the id, is conceptualized with the development of the third party in Freud’s tripartite division of the mind: the ‘super-ego’. The accomplishment of a successful resolution of the well known Œdipus complex, whereby, the individual internalizes various quanta of affects towards the parents, particularly of the sexual and aggressive instincts, leads crucially to the emergence of the super-ego: an inner watch dog, 1
“What earlier state of things does an instinct want to restore?...our presumption, an instinct must have arisen which sought to do away with life once more and to reestablish the inorganic state…self-destructiveness as an expression of a ‘death instinct’ which cannot fail to be present in every vital process. And now the instincts that we believe in divide themselves into two groups—the erotic instincts, which seek to combine more and more living substance into ever greater unities, and the death instincts, which oppose this effort and lead what is living back into an inorganic state. From the concurrent and opposing action of these two proceed the phenomena of life which are brought to an end by death.” Freud, S. (1964). Lecture XXXII, ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’. In ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’. Strachey, J. (Ed). London: Allen & Unwin Ltd. (p. 571).
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keeping the libidinal instincts of the id in check2. The super-ego is neither wholly conscious, nor wholly unconscious, but via a conscious register in the ego, is able to perform its function as an inhibiting, prohibiting, repressive but essentially selfpreservative agent. These concepts are not easy to define or divulge, nor do I find that there is any semblance of consensus within the literature. For all intents and purposes, it is merely necessary to grasp a basic dualism within Freud’s thought, of the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious mind, in order to discuss the intrasymbolic status of ‘love’ within psychoanalytic theory. Freud began psychoanalysis with an elaborate investigation into the interpretation of dreams, which established it as a science of subjectivity (of the ‘I’), dealing predominantly with an archaic mentality that had been preserved from a more primitive era in the history of mankind. This archaic mentality came to be represented within the symbolic order of dreams and the unconscious. With the advent of psychoanalysis humanity began a quest of self-knowledge that has not yet reached its apex. An essential part of our lives as human beings, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is our capacity to libidinally cathect our sexual (by this, psychoanalysis means erotic, which includes a destructive element) energies onto others. Indeed, when we consider the primary dependence of our young upon the parents for their survival, we begin to suspect a somewhat fundamental economy of love for both ontogenetic and phylogenetic purposes 3 Love is an example of a concept within human understanding that has an infinite variety of meanings and definitions. We each have our own unique and personal understanding of what love is: what love means to us. Lacan thinks that the question on all lovers’ lips is ‘what value does my desire 4 have for you’, and ‘what is it you want from me’5. I believe these questions to be a useful framework for my 2
“Freud says quite categorically that it is the pressure of what, in sexuality, has to be repressed in order to maintain the pleasure-principle—namely, the libido – that has made possible the progress of the mental apparatus itself” Lacan, J. (1998) ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. London: Random House. (p. 184) 3
“Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfaction it calls for. It is demand for a presence or absence. That is what the primordial relationship with the mother manifests, replete as it is with that Other who must be situated shy of the needs that the Other can fulfill. Demand already constitutes the Other as having the “privilege” of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them. The Other’s privilege here thus outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not have—namely what is known as love.” Lacan, J. (2006). ‘Ecrits’. Translated by Fink, B. London: Norton & Co. pp. 579-580. 4
Desire for Lacan is conceived fundamentally in the singular, as a perpetual effect of symbolic articulation. It is not an appetite: it is essentially excentric and insatiable. That is why Lacan co-ordinates it not with the object that would seem to satisfy it, but with the object that causes it. 5
Lacan, J. (1998) ‘The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis’ London: Karnac, p. 192; and “man’s desire is the Other’s
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discussion and as such, Lacan will appear in this text, to support our thesis that love symbolizes something of a lack, or to use a Lacanian term, the ‘lacuna’ of love 6. Essentially, I would like to focus on what psychoanalysis says about love. In talking about love, we perpetually skirt around the edges of something fundamentally ineffable. To follow Lacan’s ideas on the signifier and the signified, we are constantly attaching new signifiers to previous ones, in an impossible attempt to refer to something which we are trying to signify, but because we can depend only on language and words (signifiers), the true signified object, in this case, love, is always and forever to be alluded to and never fully grasped 7. This propaedeutic summary of some of the complex fundamentals to classical Freudianism is important for our investigation into the role of love and desire within psychoanalytic theory, for in order to get to grips with such a vast question, we must first of all understand these foundations to psychoanalytic thought. From here the approach to the key areas of research that will aid us in answering our question is made easier. One such field, which has already been mentioned, is the study of the instincts, which will necessarily involve an elucidation of psychoanalytic libido-theory. The concept of ‘narcissism’ will feature heavily in almost all the references to psychoanalytic research into love. Another critical field of inquiry is the study of the transference, which is arguably the clearest manifestation of love, within the psychoanalytic setting and requires some attention to object-relations theory. Jones says that the: “instincts [are the]…most interesting…most fundamental…most difficult…[concepts] in all psychology…[and that] mental and physical processes are more likely to become correlated by investigating the instincts, and their desire…that it is qua Other that man desires (this is what provides the true scope of human passion). This is why the Other’s question—that comes back to the subject from the place where he expects an oracular reply—which takes some such form as “What do you want?” is the question that best leads the subject to the path of his own desire, assuming that, thanks to the know-how of a partner known as a psychoanalyst, he takes up that question, even without knowing it.” ‘Ecrits’, (p. 688) 6
“What better way of assuring oneself, on the point on which one is mistaken, than to persuade the other of the truth of what one says! Is not this a fundamental structure of the dimension of love that the transference gives us the opportunity of deciphering? In persuading the other that he has that which may complement us, we assure ourselves of being able to continue to misunderstand precisely what we lack.” ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 133) 7
“First I stressed the division that I make by opposing, in relation to the entrance of the Ucs, the two fields of the subject and the Other. The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier that governs whatever may be made present of the subject—it is the field of that living being in which the subject has to appear. And I said that it was on the side of this living being, called to subjectivity, that the drive is essentially manifested.” Ibid, pp. 203-204; and “My definition of the signifier (there is no other)…a signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier. This latter signifier is therefore the signifier to which all other signifiers represent the subject—which means that if the signifier is missing, all the other signifiers represent nothing. For something is only represented to.” ‘Ecrits’, (pp. 691-692)
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emotional expressions”8. Psychoanalysis recognizes the plasticity of the human instincts and appeals to a phylogenetic account of why instinctual plasticity would have such an affinity to creatures, such as man, who experience “a greater variability and choice of instinctual reaction”9. Such variability, obviously renders the task of delineating innate versus conditioned tendencies all the more complex, but psychoanalysis emphasizes the aims of the instincts “as judged by the evidences of its direction”10 as a potential way out of this problem. There is bipolarity within the functional directionality of the instincts; they can be invested in objects ‘outthere’, but crucially, they can also be—and possibly existed primordially as— invested ‘in here’, in the developing ego of infancy. Psychoanalysts avoid the fallacy of reducing the instincts into a purely biological economy and allow a place for the mind within their theory. We are forced to ask how these instincts and drives are represented internally? And in asking this question, we cannot fail to notice the necessarily symbolic status that these notions have within the mind. In his earliest discussion of the instincts, Freud says that: “Originally, at the very beginning of mental life, the ego is cathected with instincts and is to some extent capable of satisfying them on itself. We call this condition ‘narcissism’ and this way of obtaining satisfaction ‘auto-erotic’”11. Autoeroticism for Freud reflects the earliest stage of psychosexual development for the human infant and indicates a primary narcissism that exists before the ego has realized itself as an independent entity. We thus acquire the sense in which a nexus between psychoanalytic theories of narcissism and the libido is indispensible in explaining the dynamic interplay of instincts that underlie the motivational and behavioural manifestations of complex emotional attachments (i.e., love relationships). Since our original dependence on our parents forms the prototype of all later libidinal attachments, we cannot ignore the import of this primary relationship in the intrapsychic meaning and activity of all later love relations. Furthermore, it is precisely these early relationships, and the nature of their libidinal economies that psychoanalysis aims to unveil, through 8
“results obtained from this study should provide useful data for the most engrossing of philosophical speculations, that concerning the relation of body to mind. And this is perhaps the central human speculation of all, since the relationship between one’s personality and the immediate body of ‘matter’ through which it expresses itself signifies the ultimate problem of how that personality is related to the ‘matter’ in question and how the human soul is related to the universe.” Jones, E. (1977) ‘Psycho-Analysis and the Instincts’. In ‘Papers on Psychoanalysis’. London: Karnac. (p. 153) 9
Ibid, p. 154
10 11
Ibid. Freud, S. (1915). ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, SE XIV (1914-1916), pp. 109-140, cf. p. 133
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the process of analysis. In becoming conscious of these early patterns of object relations, through the dynamics of the transference neurosis, the analysand learns to assimilate a greater and healthier relationship to reality (Ananke) and therefore curtails some of the pathogenic (destructive, regressive) effects of the uninhibited pleasure principle (Eros). We will return to this later. In order to understand the libidinal economy of man from a psychoanalytic perspective, it is expedient to trace the epigenetic sequence by which our libidinal economy develops. That said, there is yet another concept, which we will need to become familiar with for the purposes of our investigation, that being the psychoanalytic notion of narcissism. The study of the instincts and their role within the psychoanalytic conception of the mind and its manifestations, cannot be attempted in isolation; indeed, Freud wrote his seminal paper on narcissism the year before publishing his first attempt at an analysis of love, in his paper on the ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’. Psychoanalytic libido theory and narcissism continue to coalesce in Freud’s later thought12 as he attempts to clarify some of the confusions within the psychoanalytic description of the actions of the instincts. One such confusion is the debate between Jung and Freud, about the original unity or differentiability of the ego-libido and sexual-libido. The logical consequence of Jung’s grouping of these psychoanalytically distinct forces obliges us to speak of sexual and asexual libido, springing from the same source in psychic life. Psychoanalysis, however, reserves the term libido for those erotic instinctual forces of sexual life13, whereas the ego-instincts are more closely connected to: “the affective state of anxiety”14. Freud takes as a premise of his work with the transference, that the ego-, and sexual-instincts are delineable: “We termed cathexes of energy which the ego directs towards objects of its sexual desires ‘libido’; all others, which are sent out by the self-preservative instincts, we termed ‘interest’”15 12
Freud, S. (1964) Lecture XXVI ‘The Libido Theory and Narcissism’. In ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’. (pp. ??.......) 13
“Sexuality is, indeed, the single function of the living organism which extends beyond the individual and is concerned with his relation to the species. It is an unmistakable fact that it does not always, like the individual organism’s other functions, bring it advantages, but, in return for an unusually high degree of pleasure, brings dangers which threaten the individual’s life and often enough destroy it.” Ibid, p. 413 14 15
Ibid, p. 412
“By tracing the course of the libidinal cathexes, their transformations and final vicissitudes, we were able to obtain a first insight into the machinery of mental forces. For this purpose the transference neuroses offered us the most favourable
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Jones reiterates this important tenet to the psychoanalytic conception of the instincts when he talks about the: “impulse to unite flesh…[as] the most salient attribute of all sexual activities…[where] union is the goal above all else” 16. Hence, we can observe Freud’s conclusive dualism between the life- (Eros), and death(Thanatos) instincts as a contrast between sexual-, and ego-instincts, which relate differently to Ananke (the reality principle) from the outset. The other contrast, as Freud and Jones both point out, is: “between object-love, or allo-erotic libido, and self-love [qua] narcissistic libido”17, which also symbolically represents the struggle between the life and death instincts respectively18. “We thus slowly became familiar with the notion that the libido, which we find attached to objects and which is the expression of an effort to obtain satisfaction in connection with these objects, can also leave the objects and set the subject’s own ego in their place; and the notion was gradually built up more and more consistently. The name for this way of allocating the libido—‘narcissism’…in which the adult treats his own body with all the caresses that are usually devoted to an outside sexual object.”19 We can now, theoretically explain a number of mental states in terms of libido theory, that posits an organic primary narcissism or autoeroticism as foundational to all future object relations including the “psychical behaviour of a person in love”20. However, if we attribute a primary libido-cathexis to the ego, why is there any need to differentiate sexual libido from non-sexual libido in the ego drives?
material.” Ibid. p. 415 16
“Freud felt himself justified in bringing together the re-creative function of the sexual instinct, its tendency to start ever afresh, with its function of uniting and binding together…identified the libido, a purely clinical term, with the Eros of the poets and philosophers, the principle that creates, binds together, and sustains all life.” Jones, E. (1977). ‘Papers on Psychoanalysis’. (p. 164) 17
Ibid.
18
“The premises are the existence of a positive tendency towards self-destruction and of an outwardly directed aggressive impulse; the inference is that these two are identical.” Ibid, p. 165 19
“Reflection will quickly suggest that if any such fixation of the libido to the subject’s own body and personality instead of to an object does occur, it cannot be an exceptional or a trivial event. On the contrary it is probable that narcissism is the universal and original state of things, from which object-love is only later developed, without the narcissism necessarily disappearing on that account. Indeed we had to recall from the history of development of object-libido that many sexual instincts begin by finding satisfaction in the subject’s own body—auto-erotically, as we say – and that this capacity for autoeroticism is the basis of the lagging-behind of sexuality in the process of education in the reality principle. Auto-eroticism would thus be the sexual activity of the narcissistic stage of allocation of the libido.” Freud, S. (1964). Lecture XXVI ‘The Libido Theory and Narcissism’. In ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’. (pp. 415-416) 20
Ibid, 417
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From reading Freud’s paper on narcissism21, the value of the concepts ‘ego-libido’ and ‘object-libido’ reside in the fact that they derive from the thorough study of the intimate characteristics of neurotic & psychotic processes. The separation of the libido into one that pertains to the ego, and one that becomes attached to objects is a necessary corollary of a primary hypothesis that differentiated between sexual drives and ego drives. This conclusion is arrived at as a result of the analysis of both of the pure forms of transference neurosis (hysteria and obsessional neurosis) though the other path to understanding narcissism, relevant to this discussion, is the study of the love life of the sexes. A key question at this point, and which Freud himself asks, is where does the compulsion that makes the psyche transcend the boundaries of narcissism and invest the libido in objects, come from? Towards the end of the first part of his paper on narcissism, Freud suggests that this transcendental compulsion arises when the libidinal cathexis of the ego exceeds a certain level, and a uniquely psychoanalytic anatomization of libidinal-cathexes (i.e., love) is offered. There is the imitative type, which refers to the source of object choice for the sexual drives being initially developed by the imitation of the ego-drives and their gratification. This is supported by the fact that the parents or primary caregivers become the infant’s first ‘sexual’ objects, in the psychoanalytic understanding of the word sexual (as erotic, self-preservative). The second type, then, must be the narcissistic type, which refers to people whose libidinal development has been disturbed in some way and who consequently model their love-object on themselves 22. Both paths are open to each individual, and Freud makes clear that we all relate primarily to two sexual objects: our mothers and ourselves. It is now that we see the inextricable link between narcissism, the libido and love within psychoanalytic theory. In the second part of Freud’s paper on narcissism, he further deconstructs love relations into a fairly reductive and I would argue, 21 22
Freud, S. (1914) ‘On narcissism; an introduction’. SE XIV; (pp. 67-102)
Freud labels perverts and homosexuals as examples of these disturbed individuals. He postulates a primary narcissism in all human beings, which in certain circumstances can prove dominant in the object choice. Though which circumstances these are, he does not say. Lacan in speaking of the structure of perversion says: “Strictly speaking, it is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of subjectivity” and; “the subject assuming the role of the object is precisely what sustains the reality of the situation of what is called the sadomasochistic drive, and which is only a single point, in the masochistic situation itself. It is only in so far as the subject makes himself the object of another will that the sado-masochistic drive not only closes up, but constitutes itself.” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 185)
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restrictive list. According to Freud, in the narcissistic type we love one or other of the following: (a) what we ourselves are, (b) what we ourselves were, (c) what we would like to become, or (d) a person who was once part of our own self, i.e. our child. In the imitative type, we love (a) the woman who feeds us, or (b) the man who protects us (and the many surrogates who take their place). It is not clear as to why it would not be possible for a person to love more than one, or even all, of these possibilities. Indeed, Lacan says that the ideal-ego is synonymous with the love of an ideal version of who you would like to become (Freud’s narcissistic type c). Freud, who finds it purportedly aimed toward the immortality of the parent’s ego, an illusion that is clearly at odds with reality, places the love of the parents for the child firmly within the narcissistic scheme. Parental love, then, is essentially childlike and is symbolic of the re-emergence of narcissism in the parents. Again, it is unlikely that we have the full story here, and Freud still had time to revise his views, but since we are not primarily interested in parental love, it is suffice to say, that even here, in the love between the parents and the child, there is a reciprocal narcissism underlying their intrapsychic interactions, according to traditional psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic research serves as a means to track the various fates of the libidinal drives once isolated from ego-drives and found in conflict with them. Assuming an original unity of the two sets of drives qua narcissistic interests, Freud believes that the libidinal drive-impulses, which clash with the internalized ethical and cultural considerations of the super-ego, undergo a process of pathogenic repression, emanating from the ego’s respect for itself and culminating in setting up an idealego, according to which the subject now measures himself (his real ego). “It is this ideal ego that is now the recipient of the self-love enjoyed in childhood by the real ego…what they project as their ideal for the future is a surrogate for the lost narcissism of their childhood, during which they were their own ideal.” 23 Within love relationships, then, we can translate this psychoanalytic formula and see that idealization of a love object involves the narcissistic exaltation of the Other to a desired status of the subject’s ego alongside its sexual over-valuation. In this 23
Freud, S. (1914) ‘On narcissism; an introduction’. Section III, (p. 98)
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way, the self-feeling in love is immanently narcissistic and is enhanced by being loved and diminished by not being loved. To quote Lacan: “And does not everything essentially begin by deceiving the first to whom the enchantment of love was addressed – who has passed off this enchantment as the exaltation of the other, by making himself the prisoner of this exaltation, of this breathlessness which, with the other, has created the most false of demands, that of narcissistic satisfaction”24 The economy of love can be seen as a transfer of energy, within the Freudian perspective: loving someone means sacrificing a large quantum of libidinal investment in your own ego and projectively identifying it onto an idealized ego, as symbolized by the loved-object, and this state of libidinal affairs can only be sustained when this sacrifice is made reciprocally by the loved object and returned to the subject’s ego.25 Or to put it in Lacanian terms: “at the level of love, there is a reciprocity of loving and being loved.”26 For Freud, love in psychoanalysis: “is derived from the capacity of the ego to satisfy some of its instinctual impulses auto-erotically by obtaining organ-pleasure. It is originally narcissistic, then passes over on to objects, which have been incorporated into the extended ego, and expresses the motor efforts of the ego towards these objects as sources of pleasure. It becomes intimately linked with the activity of the later sexual instincts and, when these have been completely synthesized, coincides with the sexual impulsion as a whole.”27 His views on desire and the lack inherent therein, are ironically missing, leading the way for Lacan to enter the stage of our discussion. For Lacan, analytic experience allows for a declaration of the limited function of desire. When in love, he says: “I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that—You never look at me from the place which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.” 28 Lacan 24
Lacan, J. (1998) ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 61)
25
“…moreover…the libidinal cathexis of objects does not enhance self-feeling. Dependence on the love-object has a belittling effect; to be in love is to be humble. Loving someone means…forfeiting part of our narcissism, and we can make good the deficit only by being loved…self-feeling remains…proportional to the degree of narcissism involved in the subjects love-life." Freud, S. (1914) ‘On narcissism; an introduction’. (pp. 100-101). 26 27 28
Lacan, ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 200) Freud, S. (1915). ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, SE XIV (1914-1916). (p. 137) Lacan, J. (1998) ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 103) Lacan elaborates this important point later
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goes further in saying that: “The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. This is apparent enough in the form of the scenario it assumes, in which the subject, more or less recognizable, is somewhere, split, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object, which usually does not show its face either.”29 We can say that there is desire in love and that love is linked with sexuality, and again sexuality, for Lacan, emerges in the realm of the subject in the form of a lack30. Desire in a Lacanian sense, is not so much the desire of the subject, but the desire of the Other 31. Even in the Lacanian transference, love is mapped out in the field of narcissism: “To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved”32 but he continues: “It is not a shadow of the former deceptions of love. It is isolation in the actuality of its pure functioning as deception.” 33 Lacan offers an elegant example of the process undergone in the transference of psychoanalytic therapy: “Not so long ago, a little girl said to me sweetly that it was about time somebody began to love her so that she might seem lovable to herself. In saying this, she provided the innocent admission of the mainspring that comes into play in the first stage of the transference. The subject has a relation with his analyst the centre of which is at the level of the privileged signifier…in so far as from there he will feel himself both satisfactory and loved”34 on in this text: “At this level, we are not even forced to take into account any subjectification of the subject. The subject is an apparatus. This apparatus is something lacunary, and it is in the lacuna that the subject established the function of a certain object, qua lost object. It is the status of the objet a in so far as it is present in the drive.” (p. 185) 29
“You see, then, several possibilities here for the function of the objet a, which is never found in the position of being the aim of desire. It is either pre-subjective, or the foundation of an identification disavowed by the subject…But the object of desire, in the usual sense, is either phantasy that is in reality the support of desire, or a lure.” Ibid, p. 185-186 30
“Two lacks overlap here. The first emerges from the central defect around which the dialectic of the advent of the subject to his own being in the relation to the Other turn—by the fact that the subject depends on the signifier and that the signifier is first of all in the field of the Other. This lack takes up the other lack, which is the real, earlier lack, to be situated at the advent of the living being, that is to say as sexed reproduction. The real lack is what the living being loses, that part of himself qua living being, in reproducing himself through the way of sex. This lack is real because it relates to something real, namely, that the living, by being subject to sex, has fallen under the blow of individual death.” Ibid, pp. 204-205. 31
“You see, the object of desire is the cause of the desire, and this object that is the cause of desire is the object of the drive— that is to say, the object around which the drive turns…It is not that desire clings to the object of the drive—desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive. But all desire is not necessarily agitated in the drive. There are empty desires or mad desires that are based on nothing more than the fact that the thing in question has been forbidden you. By virtue of the very fact that it has been forbidden you, you cannot do otherwise, for a time, than think about it. That, too, is desire. But whenever you are dealing with a good object, we designate it…as an object of love” Ibid, (pp. 242-243) and; “man’s desire is the Other’s desire.” ‘Ecrits’ (p. 526) 32
“Love, no doubt, is a transference effect…We are linked together in awaiting this transference effect in order to be able to interpret, and at the same time, we know that it closes the subject off from the effect of our interpretation.” Lacan, ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis’. (p. 253) 33 34
Ibid, (p. 254) Ibid, (p. 257)
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Here again, the subject becomes an object deserving of love, through a narcissistic relational transference to the ‘subject supposed to know’, i.e., the analyst or the Other. This reinvigorates Lacan’s idea of love being a specular mirage of deception, through which the subject tries to find himself lovable 35. From the analyst’s position, however, this transferential dynamic most obviously becomes the tool with which he may proceed in his ‘work’ of interpreting the analysand’s neurotic material: to make the analysand more capable of loving himself and other people 36. The role of the analyst, during the transference neurosis, according to Lacan is: “that of positive nonaction aiming at the ortho-dramatization of the patient’s subjectivity.”37 Love then— in the psychoanalytic situation—becomes “giving what you don’t have”38 and: “Thus the analyst is he who sustains demand, not, as people say, to frustrate the subject, but in order to allow the signifiers with which the latter’s frustration is bound up to reappear.”39 Fortunately, the resurgent narcissistic love of the parents for the child nor the deceptive mirage of the love of transference are not the only manifestations of Eros within humanity; there are so many other styles and objects of love, that are currently under-estimated by psychoanalytic theory, weighed down by its dogmatic classical Freudian roots. This, however, seems to be the only way out of a somewhat bleak picture for non-transferential love. Even though there must be elements of the psychoanalytic transference in real world love relationships, it is more likely that a certain amount of mutual back-patting and honouring of each other’s idealisations goes on, which, of course, would possibly inhibit the neurotic tendencies from surfacing, until this mutual state of affairs becomes unsustainable, or one or other partner lapses in his concern and sensitivity. In no way has this exegesis of love in psychoanalytic theory elucidated the truth of love in the real 35
“As a specular mirage, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of the pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centred on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.” Ibid, (pp. 667-268) 36
“the operation and manipulation of the transference are to be regulated in a way that maintains a distance between the point at which the subject sees himself as lovable—and that other point where the subject sees himself caused as a lack by a, and where a fills the gap constituted by the inaugural division of the subject. The petit a never crosses this gap. Recollect what we learned about the gaze, the most characteristic form for apprehending the proper function of the objet a. This a is presented precisely, in the field of the mirage of the narcissistic function of desire, as the object that cannot be swallowed, as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier. It is at this point of lack that the subject has to recognize himself.” Ibid, p. 270 37 38 39
Lacan, ‘Ecrits’. (p. 184) Ibid, (p. 516) Ibid.
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world: this is a task that psychoanalysis may be incapable of doing, with its reliance on the transference neurosis and second hand commentaries from first person perspectives on love outside of the analytic situation. Furthermore, it could appear that psychoanalysis is loathe to grant love the status it deserves within its theory, because it could be deemed to invalidate the analysts’ quest (of easing the suffering soul) and contradict the purpose of their non-action in the transference, by elevating love to something beyond a merely therapeutic tool in the hands of the ‘subject supposed to know’. What has been attempted here was a survey of the theoretical landscape within which the question of love in psychoanalysis can be addressed and we have found that psychoanalytic theory takes for granted, that at the root of all love-relations is a primary narcissism as evidenced by the autoerotic behaviour of the infant. Love then, in its rudiments, must be the seeking of pleasure. In order to elaborate the psychoanalytic conception of love, we have delved deep into the recesses of some of Freud’s most complex theorizing. We have grasped the activity and the purpose of our instinctual drives and appreciated how a nexus of libido-, and object-relations theory allows us to analyse the complex and at times ineffable nature of love within the transference. Love is an essential notion for the psychoanalytic canon. It is within the transference love between an analysand and analyst that psychoanalysis takes place, and we are all too familiar with the implications of disturbed early love attachments between the infant and his parents, and how the vicissitudes of these relationships, according to classical Freudianism (and by this I mean Freud’s psychosexual theory of psychic development) can have a range of pathogenic effects on later adult love-life. Narcissus appears to have precedence over Eros within the psychoanalytic conception of love, which would seem to taint the rosy picture of love relations one might prefer to hold onto. If we understand that narcissism is a function of the erotic drive, it may be possible to re-evaluate the seeming denigration of love and realize that it is still in the service of the life-instinct and thus has value for us as human beings. Without love, psychoanalysis would not be a viable pursuit, as it has been for over a century. Even if love is an illusion, it would appear to be a necessary one and one that psychoanalysis itself relies upon in order to do what it sets out to do. In the final analysis, the science of subjectivity is de facto a loving
Tom Minor
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endeavour and despite the persistently bleak portrayal of the authenticity of love, which can be inferred from some of the classical Freudian texts and other valuable sources, love still holds a central but obscure place in the theory of psychoanalysis. It can be argued that we would all benefit from giving more serious attention to how the gains made through the love of the transference can be implemented in ‘normal’ love relationships that exist predominantly, and necessarily, outside of the analyst’s consulting room.