CHF25.00
Download steht sofort bereit
Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle.
Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters – give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about "what love really is"?
In this lively and wide-ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in-depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan's paradoxical claim that "love is giving what you don't have." He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don't have.
This first-ever commentary on Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference , provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan's views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychology and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.
Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He is a foremost commentator on Lacan and has translated a number of Lacan's works into English, including Écrits and Transference .
Autorentext
Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He is a foremost commentator on Lacan and has translated a number of Lacan's works into English, including Écrits and Transference.
Leseprobe
Preface
Whether to vilify and bury love once and for all or, rather, to praise it - the dilemma has preoccupied poets and philosophers for millennia. Whether to celebrate the incomparable joy love brings or denounce the intense pain and desperation one suffers in its wake, whether to glorify its life-giving virtues or expose its cruelty and illusions - that is the question certain psychoanalysts, too, have weighed in on, following in the footsteps of the bards and literati.
Relations between Eros, the Greek god of love (Cupid to the Romans), and psychoanalysis have not always been cordial, to say the least. Freud at times reduced love to the dependency of a child on its mother, the child's affection for her deriving essentially from her ability to satisfy the child's hunger for food, warmth, and closeness. Jekels and Bergler, well-known first- and second-generation analysts, decried love as nothing more than the wish to be loved - hence a narcissistic project. 1 Driving a further nail in the coffin, they alleged that we seek love from someone toward whom we feel guilty, reasoning that we will feel less guilty if we can make that person love us. 2 Wilhelm Reich, on the other hand, who was to become a pariah of the psychoanalytic establishment, conceived of the achievement of utter and complete love as the foremost aim of treatment. 3
It seems that psychoanalysts have long been divided over the question whether to condemn love as a form of self-deception - a mirage, a cover for something else, a simple narcissistic project parading as altruism - or as the holy of holies, the greatest of all possible psychical accomplishments. Erik Erikson attributed to Freud the well-known formulation that psychoanalysis strives to restore the patient's ability to "love and work" 4 (at least one of them making the considerable assumption that the patient had such an ability at some prior point in time). And yet kissing was at times described aseptically by the father of psychoanalysis as the rubbing together of "mucous membranes," 5 "affectionate love" as resulting merely from the inhibition of sexual desire, 6 and the more sublimated forms of so-called selfless love for others (charity, for example) as often but a poor disguise for self-aggrandizement and condescension toward others.
Nevertheless, the early analysts were hardly the first to propose conflicting appraisals of love. Centuries before Plato and Aristotle held court in Athens, Hesiod taxed women with generally being "bad for men," warning men that:
A bad [wife] makes you shiver with cold;
A greedy wife roasts you alive with no help from a roaring blaze,
And tough though you be brings you to a raw old age.
(Hesiod, trans. Wender: 1973)
But he also opined that "No prize is greater than a worthy wife." Love, in his account of it (in the context of marriage) and depending on the character of one's beloved, could give rise to the worst of evils or the very best life can offer.
In ancient Greece and Rome, it was common to characterize love as an attack, Cupid being depicted as physically burning the lover with a torch or shooting the lover with arrows, even as Love was celebrated as a great god. 7 In the early Middle Ages, Andreas Capellanus provided an apparently spurious etymology for the word love itself, deriving amor , the Latin for love, from amus , meaning hook: "He who is in love is captured in the chains of desire and wishes to capture someone else with his hook." This medieval chaplain referred to love as a form of suffering of which "there is no torment greater," but went on to say, "O what a wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character!" 8
Hélisenne de Crenne, the Renaissance author of Torments of Love , depicted love as a
Inhalt
Preface vii
Introduction 1
The Symbolic
I. Freudian Preludes: Love Triangles 9
Obsessives in Love • Hysterics in Love
II. Freudian Conundrums: Love Is Incompatible with Desire 16
Where They Love They Do Not Desire • Where They Desire They Do Not Love • On Women, Love, and Desire • Too Little • Too Much
III. Lacan's Reading of Plato's Symposium 33
Love Is Giving What You Don't Have • Not Having and Not Knowing • Love as a Metaphor: The Signification of Love • The Miracle of Love • Love in the Analytic Context
The Imaginary
IV. Freudian Preludes: Narcissism 55
Narcissism and Love • Love for the Ego-Ideal
V. Lacan's Imaginary Register 62
Animals in the Imaginary • Animals in Love • The Formative Role of Images in Human Beings • The Mirror Stage • The Image We Love More Than Ourselves: The Ideal Ego • The Myth of Narcissus • Sibling Rivalry • Lacan's Beloved: Crimes of Passion • Family Complexes • Transitivism • The Intrusion (or Fraternal) Complex and the Solipsistic Ego • Love and Psychosis • The Dangers of Imaginary-Based Love • Imaginary Passion in the Analytic Setting
The Real
VI. Love and the Real 93
Repetition Compulsion • The Unsymbolizable • Love at First Sight • The Other Jouissance • Love Is Real? • Love and the Drives • Love as a Link
General Considerations on Love
VII. Languages and Cultures of Love 107
Dependency (or so-called Natural Love) • Attachment • Friendship • Agape (or Christian Love) • Hatred • Attraction • Fixation on the Human Form (Beauty) • Physical Love, Sexual Desire, Lust, Concupiscence, Sex Drive • Fin'Amor (Courtly Love) • Romantic Love • Falling in Love (à la Stendhal) • Other Languages and Cultures of Love
VIII. Reading Plato with Lacan: Further Commentary on Plato's Sym…