What can we know of love?

Can one enter the realm of love without getting hurt? The title “What Can We Know of Love?” was inspired by the section “From Love to Libido”, in Lacan’s XIth seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Lacan, 1973).

Having decided on the title, I then realized that I had got myself into some sort of a trap. This title could be the inspiration for a Haiku, a Beatles song, or perhaps a weighty doctoral dissertation.

But for this paper, I attempt to approach the theory of love in various ways, to profile it, and to examine its connection with knowledge—starting with that wondrous stanza from The Song of Songs:

. . . Love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

[Song of Songs, 13: 6–7]

In his XIth seminar, Lacan poured cold water on the romanticism of the Song of Songs. The conundrum he used in commenting on Freud’s way of relating to love—“The drives necessitate us in the sexual order—they come from the heart. To our great surprise, he [Freud] tells us that love, on the other hand, comes from the belly, from the world of yum-yum” (Lacan, 1973, p. 189)—constitutes a point of reference in this essay. Can the two statements be reconciled? On the one hand, the connection between love and death, the divine fire—worth all the wealth in the world. And on the other, merely something associated with a most basic physical need—perhaps the most straightforward need of all.

Lacan added: “On one side, Freud puts the partial drives and on the other love. He says—they’re not the same” (Lacan, 1973, p. 189). Despite the fact that both partial drives and love are connected with libido, Lacan states that libido is neither streaming nor liquid matter, not energy but an organ—an organ in two senses: (1) a component of the organism and (2) a musical instrument.

Lacan followed the writings of Augustine, who said that love is a form of appetite—hunger. In her book Love and St. Augustine, Hanna Arendt added that craving and appetite are linked to a specific object. Such an object is necessary to ignite the spark and to serve as the object of the hunger. Appetite is determined by the object being sought after by a particular individual, just as motion is determined by the objective that it moves towards (Arendt, 1996).

As Augustine wrote, love is a form of movement and all movements are made towards something. The movement of love, according to this approach, stands in contrast to the movement of desire: from a certain object rather than towards it. In this case, the object is the reason for movement, rather than the objective.

But why should we have to make do with Augustine when such things can be found in the Song of Songs: “I charge ye, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please” (Song of Songs, 2:7).

The Hebrew word for “please”, tehfatz, has a double meaning: the desire and the object that are signified in one word—hefetz. Love should not be awakened until the object appears.

In that context arises a doubting question—has psychoanalysis anything to say at all about love? Such a question seems strange considering the fact that our patients hardly complain about anything other than their love life—and they complain far more frequently (nowadays at least) than they do about their sex life. This question, and the hesitancy around any subject connected with love, were also the lot of Freud and Lacan. Perhaps this was well justified considering their far more outstanding contributions in the area of understanding sexuality. While the fields of love and sexuality have many points of contact, they do not overlap and are sometimes even contradictory.

In 1910, when Freud set out the essential conditions for love in his essay “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men” (1910h), he apologized for invading the territory usually occupied by poets. He contended that science must step cautiously through the field of love—if only because the touch of science is far coarser than that of poetry, and it produces less pleasure. However, according to Freud, on psychoanalysis rests the responsibility of dealing with love, because poets display but little interest in the source of mental states (Freud, 1910h). We may understand from this how Freud, in the same year when he was busy formulating the first theory of love, wrote to Jung thus: “I do not think that our flag of psychoanalysis should be raised on the territory of normal love” (in Bergmann, 1987, pp. 156–157).

In his VIIIth seminar, Le Transfert (1991b), Lacan too said that it is not possible to make significant or logical statements regarding love. In the XXth seminar, Encore (1975a), which deals mainly with love, he contended that one descends to the level of stupidity as soon as one starts talking about it. Following all these words of caution, we cannot but discuss it or at least take note of some landmarks.

Freud provided us with three theories about love or three stages in the development of his theory. I am able to summarize this in short with the aid of Martin Bergmann’s book The Anatomy of Loving (1987). The book in its entirety deals with the history of man’s search for knowledge about love. The initial stage of Freud’s theory was a by-product of his discoveries about juvenile sexuality, and it appears in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905d). In that, Freud said that, for the child, the mother or her substitute is its first sexual object as well as its first object of love. Freud noted our loss of the primal object (in lieu of which the mother already constitutes a substitute) and that suckling from the mother’s breast has become the prototype of every kind of loving connection, so that the discovery of the object is actually its rediscovery (Freud, 1905d). As Lacan put it, love comes from the belly—which is to say, from the breast.

Thus Freud went further than Augustine: love is, indeed, directed towards an object, but an object that had already been ours in the past. This refers to the same object that Lacan said is to be found in a person who is loved, but which is loved more than that person. In regard to this, Freud said some five years later in 1909 in his “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis”, given at Clark University in the United States: It is inevitable and perfectly normal that a child should take his parents as the first objects of his love. But his libido should not remain fixated to these first objects; later on, it should merely take them as a model, and should make a gradual transition from them on to extraneous people when the time for the final choice of an object arrives. [Freud, 1910a (1909), p. 48]

This is the normal love that he speaks of. In neurotic love, however, the complete opposite happens, as he set out in “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love”: if the currents of affection and of desire do not intersect, the desire as a whole will not focus upon one object. This failure to combine the two currents triggers neurotic symptoms: where they love they do not desire and where they desire they do not love (Freud, 1912d). This came at a period when Freud discovered that there are specific preconditions for love and the awakening of sexual passion.

An example can be found in part of Freud’s description of the Wolf Man case of 1914 (Freud, 1918b [1914]). Freud constructed the case of the Wolf Man, who had seen his parents having sex when he was 1½ years old. His mother had been penetrated from the rear. Freud saw a connection between the way he supposed the child had gazed then and the way he gazed at the age of 2½, as he watched his nanny’s behind when she was scrubbing the floor. The Wolf Man remembered that when he saw her, he had urinated. Freud interpreted this memory as male identification with the father.

As an adult, the Wolf Man would fall hopelessly in love with bending-over peasant girls. Freud noted that he would fall in love with them in a flash, uncontrollably—without even having glanced at their face.

The second stage of Freud’s theory on love was based on the discovery of narcissism. He formulated an antithesis between the libido of the I and the libido of the object. He said that the state of love is the highest attainable level in the development of the libido of the object. This is the stage when the subject is ready to sacrifice its personality for the object of love. Excess libido on the part of the object impoverishes narcissism (Freud, 1914c). There are two sorts of fixation that threaten the love for another: incestuous fixation (sexual love towards either one of the parents) and narcissistic fixation. In 1914, Freud began to term the first sort anaclitic love and the second narcissistic love. In his paper “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914c), he classified the different types of love:

1. Narcissistic love (love of the identical or similar). In this category, there is love for:a. Oneself—that is, one’s reflection in the mirror.b. What was—that is, an older person’s love for a younger person or a lover’s love of his beloved (as described and discussed in Plato’s Symposium).c. What one would like to be—in this case, the object occupies the position of the ideal of the I. If such love is reciprocated, it means that one is loved from the place where one would like to see oneself. d. Somebody who was once a part of one—in this kind of love, we love what we have previously repressed within ourselves. For this category, Freud gave the example of the love of men who give up their own narcissism in favour of narcissistic women—love for a femme fatale. However, I prefer to point out how frequently examples of the opposite occur—where women fall in love with men who are entirely devoted to their own narcissism, men who graciously allow women to adore them or to play a role in that narcissism.

2. Anaclitic love (love for another):a. Love for the woman that nourishes one.b. Love for the man that protects one.

By 1914 Freud was using economic terms more and more in referring to love. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921c), he said that the object devours the I—that is, the I becomes the object of love. In it he differentiated between love for another and love of the I.

In his article “Fetishism”, Freud pointed out the difference between erotic investment in an object and the state of being in love. In the latter, there is far more investment in the object while the I empties itself, ostensibly in favour of the object. However, in the case of erotic investment, one invests in another in order to satisfy one’s own needs (Freud, 1927e).

While Freud’s first theory concentrated more on the genetic angle by emphasizing the past, his second theory turned to economy by emphasizing the transition of hypothetical quantities of libido from the I to the object. In Freud’s opinion, falling in love occurs at the moment when narcissistic libido becomes the libido of the object. Now, why does that transition occur and how does it happen?

As was mentioned above, Lacan dealt with this in his XIth seminar (1973) in the section entitled “From Love to Libido”. He adopts the opposite approach, saying that love, as a kind of imaginary screen (semblant), constitutes a kind of link between the subject and the Real, which is intended to veil the fact that such a link does not really exist at the level of the drive. According to him, the subject has a constructive link to the Real, a link confined to the narrow borders of the pleasure principle, which is not compelled by drive.

Within these borders appears the object of love. The question is, how can this object of love fulfil a role that is parallel to the object of desire? Upon what equivocations could the possibility rest of the object of love becoming an object of desire? (Lacan, 1973).

The third stage of Freud’s theory of love can be found in his article “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915c). When Lacan spoke of Freud’s contribution to the theory of love, he was referring chiefly to this work. How does sexual drive turn into love? The question remains unsolved. Freud said in the same article that the matter of love and hate take on particular interest because of the fact that they refuse to fit in with the way we perceive drive. There is no doubt about the close connection between the two opposing emotions and sex life, but naturally we do not want to think of love as just a component of the sex drive, similar to other components that have been discussed. We would prefer to relate to love as an expression of the combined emotional and sexual current, but this concept does not clarify everything. Still, we cannot see what significance should be attached to an antithetical meaning (hatred) in this current (Freud, 1915c).

In the case of love this refers to three antitheses, rather than just one. Beside the love/hate antithesis, there is also the loved/beloved antithesis and the love/apathy antithesis, as opposed to love/hate.

The first category is of the opposing love and apathy, which belong to the Real order. Lacan terms this “real antithesis”. Following Freud, who attributed the auto-erotic trait to this antithesis, Lacan explained that in the case of auto-eroticism, this does not mean that a baby is not interested in things outside itself; rather, it means that objects would not appear at all if the subject did not have a use for them. Narcissistic love of this type is located in the Real. First the I appears, defined by its function as an apparatus of the central nervous system that maintains tensions at the lowest, homeostatic level. Apart from this role, the only sensation is of apathy, and at this level apathy means non-existence. The rule according to which auto-erotic interest functions is not the non-existence of objects but, rather, their function solely in relation to pleasure.

Lacan termed the love/hate category the “economic category”. In psychoanalysis this antithesis is not considered to be real since at the level of the unconscious the power of the affect is what determines things, even when a minus sign is added to it. In this context, Lacan said: “Here, then, is constituted the Lust-Ich, and also the field of the Unlust, of the object as remainder, as alien. The object that one needs to know, and with good reason, is that which is defined in the field of Unlust, whereas the objects of the field of the Lust-Ich are lovable” (Lacan, 1973, p. 191).

Lacan termed the third category—the loved/beloved antithesis—the “biological antithesis” or the “passive/active”. He said that this is the only category entered by the problem of non-existent sexual connection. Following Plato’s Symposium, Lacan refers in the VIIIth seminar, Le Transfert (1991b), to the significance of the love that is generated when the function of the lover (Eronemus) as the lacking subject is replaced by the loved object (Erastes). In an essay entitled “Mazes of Love”, Jacques-Alain Miller (1992) said that this perception introduces the castration complex into love. The basis of deceit in love is located in the place of the ideal of the I, from which the subject sees itself as others see it, in a kind of illusionary vision. Such love is directed not at what the Other has but, rather, towards what it is lacking in—a phallus. This is focused on the point of the ideal, which is located somewhere in the Other—the point from which the Other sees me in the way I like to be seen (Miller, 1992). Regarding this, Miller added that loving the Other means establishing it as a phallus, but wanting to be loved by it means that one wants the loved to be the lover—that is, lacking, which in effect means castrating it. Loving, therefore, is in essence wanting to be loved. This lack of symmetry is what differentiates between love and drives. The entire theory of transference can be considered within the context of this definition.

In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes” (1915c), Freud contended that love is not a drive. The total I is the lover of its objects (just as fishermen tend to like fish—though in this case, it is the fish that eat the fisherman rather than the opposite: the objects devour the I). For Freud, love stems from the I’s ability to satisfy some of its compulsions in an auto-erotic way by achieving the pleasure of the organ. Narcissistic love is thereby transferred to the expanded I, from objects that have been assimilated. In “The Subject and the Other: Alienation” in the XIth seminar, Lacan related to the myth of Aristophanes. In this myth, love is seen as a way of finding that which makes us whole. He saw this as identical to our quest for our other sexual half. The experience of analysis replaces this mythical presentation in regard to the mystery of love as the quest of the subject not for the entity that will compliment him sexually but, rather, the other part of himself that he lost forever, precisely due to his being a sexual mortal (Lacan, 1973). Perhaps, like the woman in the Song of Songs: “I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer” (Song of Songs, 5:6).

By noting the connection between love and knowledge in the XXth seminar, Lacan shed more light on the question of transition from love of narcissism to love of the Other (Lacan, 1975a). The connection is made not just in the context of “What can be known of love?” but also in the sense of “To love means loving what the Other knows of me”. Lacan said that all love is based on a kind of link that exists between two subjects, through the unconscious knowledge of each of them. In this context, transference to the subject-that-is-supposed-to-know [sujet supposé savoir] constitutes only one specific application.

It appears that through the mechanism of transference the psychoanalyst can strip love of its uniqueness and mystery. That is because psychoanalysis generates a kind of non-specific, one-off love. The love of transference in psychoanalysis is directed towards a particular locus—where the analyst and his or her supposed knowledge is, irrespective of who is in that place. Thus the imaginary dimension of love (semblant) is emphasized—but is it so?

Falling in love is a contingent affair. Lacan characterized this contingency saying that unconscious knowledge “stops not being written” or registered, while “sexual relationship doesn’t stop not to be written”. He adds that there is nothing but an encounter, an encounter with the partner of the symptoms, of the effects, of everything that marks within us the traces of its exile, not as a subject but as a speaker, its exile from the sexual context (Lacan, 1975a).

As creatures of speech we find ourselves interminably in exile, even within our own homes. Love serves as the illusion of coming home, the illusion of redemption through the impossible bonding of two beings. In relating to the illusion of love, Lacan continued in dramatic style reminiscent of Albert Camus. The illusion of love registers in every one of our fates, and with its help—for a while at least—what should have established a sexual relation finds its way, like in an imaginary vision, to the speaking being. Lacan said that this stage of delay can perhaps be likened to delaying the tragic fate of love and that it is located in the transfer of negation from “ceasing not being written” to “not ceasing to be written”—from contingency to necessity.

In “Mazes of Love”, Miller (1992) also spoke of the contingency of love, of the chance meeting. In referring to this he used the Greek term tuché, which Lacan also used—but is love, in its essence, really a random phenomenon? What are the conditions for love if not necessity?

Miller said that in love the subject meets with the conditions for his love, as if chance suddenly intersects the path of necessity. If there is choice, it is imposed and predetermined (Miller, 1992), but the imposition of choice does not mean that there is no choice at all. Choice is both offered and denied in one fell swoop, but a gesture so empty may be considered to be subjectiveness, much as in the way highwaymen would offer their victims the choice of “Your money or your life!” We are offered choices that have been predetermined—and in choosing we experience loss.

Imposed choice is always connected with love in its various forms. We must opt for love, thereby surrendering freedom of choice. As Kierkegaard maintained: if we opt for freedom of choice, we lose both. Mladen Dolar developed this approach in reference to erotic love, saying that love and the autonomy of the subject do not coexist and that this is illustrated by all melodramatic love stories (Dolar, 1996a). Most familiar romantic melodramas do indeed follow a similar pattern—a chance meeting between a young hero and a young woman in exceptional circumstances. But that which appears to occur randomly and unintentionally eventually turns out to be the fulfilment of the “young man’s” wishes and his most primal and deepest desires.

I believe there is also similarity in the way female heroines relate to young men that they meet. Chance turns marvellously into the deepest place of truth of the two lovers—a kind of sign of fate awarded by the Other. In retrospect, it becomes apparent that it was the Other that made the choice rather than the helpless young man or girl.

The introduction of the unexpected became vital, tuché turned into an automaton. The moment of subjectivization comes when subjectiveness is put aside in favour of the Other, which reveals itself as pure contingency of the Real. The only choice individuals have is to recognize that choice has already been exercised irrespective of their freedom of choice. All that’s left for them to do is to accept what cannot be avoided as part of their being, thereby adopting and ratifying the decision of the Other. To put it another way, choice here has to be perceived in a retroactive context, always in the past—but a past that has never been the present. It moves directly and immediately from “not yet” to “since always”. These terms were used by the poet Paul Celan in referring to the nature of poetry. Similar perception, perhaps, led Lacan to state that poems are the love letters of the unconscious.

So falling in love is nothing but surrender to necessity, to the moment when the Real begins to speak. Its opaqueness becomes transparency. The meaningless sign becomes the embodiment of the highest meaning, and the subject makes do with recognizing such after the fact. Thus comes the moment of the lauded miracle of love that we all desire. This sudden recognition—the tuché—hints that, in a sense, even the first time is always a repetition.In retrospect, we realize what we have always known. The Real looks back, even if the other individual did not respond, was not affected, and even if they weren’t aware at all. Perhaps Lacan was basing himself on this line of thinking when saying that thing that we all yearn for so much—love is always mutual (1975a).

There is knowledge that is connected with sexuality. In biblical Hebrew the term “to know” is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. This is knowledge of the flesh or perhaps knowledge of the Real. Knowledge of love is not knowledge of the Real, although it does touch on it. It is knowledge relating to necessity, which finds expression in the wake of the chance encounter. Lacan queried whether love is connected with the attempt to become “one”. Are we back at the myth of Aristophanes? We can use this myth as long as we employ the term of discourse and signifiers. “Love that is connected with the one never causes someone to leave themselves behind”, Lacan wrote (1975a, p. 47).

Love is indeed narcissistic in essence and connected with the image (semblant) of the one, but it is directed at the remainder, at objet á—which is within you more than it is of you. Unlike desire, love is directed towards being rather than towards its lack—towards what is rather than towards what is not, even if such being already existed or is just about to exist. It could even be said that love invents being in that it somehow constitutes recompense for the non-existence of a sexual relationship. What is meant by the word “love” is the subject—that same subject that is an effect of the unconscious knowledge held by the object, which resides within the subject and is dearer. The subject is not well connected with jouissance, with the exception of jouissance of speech—speaking of what? Of love, as well as jouissance, when the knowledge of that love is revealed.

Towards the end of the XIth seminar, Lacan has a surprise in store for us. He discusses the conclusion of analysis and mentions another kind of love—love without boundaries, which is connected with the generation of new knowledge. This is love for what is left of the object once all the imaginary and symbolic contours have been stripped away (Lacan, 1973).

In the XXth seminar, Lacan continued differentiating between love and sexuality by saying that the jouissance of the Other does not signify love. Love itself is a signifier or sign indicating mutuality, demanding nothing other than love, love, and yet more love.

Perhaps this is the “love powerful as death”, unequalled even by all the wealth in the world.

At the beginning of this essay, I showed how Freud and Lacan link love with need rather than drive. At this point, considering the connection between love and knowledge, love is characterized as a sign rather than a signifier, thereby deviating once again from the fields of imagination and symbolism. Like the letter, it is also located at a kind of intermediate juncture between the symbolic, the imaginary, and the Real. The sign is a form of registry in the Real, registry that can become symbolic as it ploughs a furrow in jouissance. That is the function of love—the role of inscribing the body. That is why poetry knows what to do with it whereas visual art, such as cinema, only knows how to use passion and sexuality to indicate love, rather than how to show love itself. In this context, we may wonder whether art really deals with the visual aspect of love or whether it makes do with displaying some other aspect or sign that then requires interpretation.

What, then, is unlimited love? “Love powerful as death”? “The Fire of God”? I contend that in psychoanalysis, love, like death, constitutes an impassable boundary. A boundary that simultaneously leads to the desire for knowledge, and suicide .

The very same thing that both generates knowledge and annihilates its significance as soon as it is formulated into words.

Furthermore, we desire and insist that it stays that way. All we can do is meekly revert to the realm of poetry, just as Freud and Lacan did. Thus I shall conclude with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 , since he certainly knew a thing or two about love:

Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments. Love is not loveWhich alters when it alternation finds,Or bends with the remover to remove:O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,That looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickle’s compass come;Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,But bears it out even to the edge of doom.If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

References

Arendt, H. (1996). Love and St. Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bergmann, M. (1987). The Anatomy of Loving: The Story of Man’s Quest to Know What Love Is. New York: Ballantine Books Dolar, M. (1996a). At first sight. In: S. Žižek & R. Salcel (Eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (pp. 129–154). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Freud, S. (1905d). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, 7: 125.Freud, S. (1910a [1909]). Five lectures on psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 11:3. Freud, S. (1910h). A special type of choice of object made by men. Standard Edition, 11: 165.Freud, S. (1912d). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. Standard Edition, 11: 179.Freud, S. (1914c). On narcissism: An introduction. Standard Edition, 14:69.Freud, S. (1915c). Instincts and their vicissitudes. Standard Edition, 14:111.Freud, S. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. Standard Edition, 17: 3.Freud, S. (1921c). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Edition, 18: 67.Freud, S. (1927e). Fetishism. Standard Edition, 21: 149.Lacan, J. (1973). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Peregrine Books, 1986. [First published Paris: Éditions du Seuil.]Lacan, J. (1991). Le Transfert [Le Séminaire VIII, 1960–61]. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Lacan, J. (1975a). Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge [Seminar XX, 1972–73]. London: Norton, 1998. [First published Paris: Éditions du Seuil.]Miller, J-.A. (1992). Mazes of love. Pulmus, 7: 7–11. [Hebrew]

Ruth Golan is a clinical psychologist, counsellor and psychoanalyst. She lives, works and teaches in Jaffa, Israel. Engaged in psychoanalysis as Jacques Lacan read it in his return to Freud. In 1991, together with three other friends, she founded the Freudian Place in Jaffa, where she dealt mainly with the encounter between psychoanalysis and other cultural fields, and tried to introduce the psychoanalytic discourse into Israeli culture, or rather, the dissatisfaction with culture. In recent years she has been studying the connection between psychoanalysis and the spiritual, universal and Jewish world. She is a member of Psychoactive, a human rights mental health team.