There is no suitable subject but that of love, in Plato’s Symposium at least it’s the main topic. There is a succession of personages who, one after the other, come to say what love is. Consequently it won’t be very difficult to introduce the platonic subject in the Freudian Field – Lacan himself did it, since the actual Freudian love designates what we call “transference”. An ordinary word that seems technical and that allows for the veiling of Freudian love; and, as you may know, Lacan talked about Plato’s Symposium in order to develop his seminar on transference.
With Lacan, it has been argued time and again that psychoanalysis has not invented a new perversion. But it seems to me that the notion that psychoanalysis has not invented a new perversion takes on a different meaning, a somewhat displaced sense, if we recognize that psychoanalysis has in fact invented a new kind of love called “transference”. With analytical love, Freudian love, which really is a new type of love, we can easily introduce – through the “binary notation” – an opposition between love and perversion. For instance, between each of what Lacan calls the four discourses there is a love that changes, functioning like the agent of change in the dynamics of the discourses. And what, after Lacan, we call “social link” is but what Freud teaches us: the social link is an erotic or amorous link, as he taught us in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Let’s elucidate what Lacan says by stating that if it’s true that psychoanalysis did not invent a new perversion, perhaps it invented a new love. What Freud invented was a new type of Other to whom we may convey love: a new Other that gives new answers to love and, perhaps, answers better adapted than those found in daily life. Sometimes analysands express it in this way: they find in the analyst’s office answers so adapted to love that they want to take that Other to their daily life, where they would be… disappointed. Freud invented a new Other of love, he didn’t devise a newjouissance, which would certainly be the subject (or topic) of a new perversion.
Along this simple line of reflection, in which I reach the conclusion that “psychoanalysis has not invented a new jouissance,” it would be interesting to think the opposite. Lacan’s lesson is precisely that it is of no interest to think against someone else, only idiots do so. It’s always much more enticing to think against oneself. That is to say, to verify one’s hypotheses by changing them, so that the aspects are multiplied and one is able to find an impediment, an impasse. This is extremely useful since to find an impasse allows us to locate what we can have as equivalent to the real.
Thus we can try to think otherwise and perhaps psychoanalysis did invent another jouissance. That could be, for instance, the purejouissance of the word. As you may know, for a time Lacan strove to develop the fact that indeed psychoanalysis produces a newjouissance, the jouissance of the word. And this was an unexpected “production,” which took Freud himself by surprise, and that became apparent in a very well known circumstance, namely that, through the “production” of this new kind of jouissance in the analytic experience, the cures became exceedingly extended. This is a way to understand that Freud, who envisioned the analytical treatment as a work of interpretation to be completed rather quickly, began to realize that cures were being prolonged beyond reasonable time. Now at least we can see in which sense psychoanalysis is a new disease…
It’s then possible to speak of a new jouissance produced or rather revealed or undressed by the analytical experience; I say undressed because of the magic that is implied when we speak with one another. We may surmise that, in the act of speaking with one another, something takes place beyond the transmission of information, something revealed in the analytic experience as a newjouissance on the side of the analysand. But there is also a newjouissance on the side of the analyst. It’s the binary notation! … The analytical experience is split in the binary notation: the analyst and the analysand. The fact is that Lacan, for example, addresses the issue of the analyst’s jouissance when he shows the homology between the pervert’s position and the position of the analyst, wherein the analyst also becomes an instrument of the jouissance of the Other. And this somehow is enough proof that there is ajouissance on the analysand’s side which is produced by the analytical cure, a jouissance whereby the analyst himself becomes the instrument, since his presence is necessary to obtain it. It is safe then to state, for instance, that the upper line of the analytical discourse in Lacan reproduces the structure of the Sadean fantasm:
Hence Lacan argues that, although the structure is common, the analyst should stay remote from the jouissance that may follow from that position. He must prevent both the sadistic jouissance as much as the masochist jouissance from becoming his own jouissance. It would be interesting to inquire into the history of psychoanalysis and compare the different stances analysts have in fact taken on this kind of jouissance. Some are clearly sadistic while others devise a masochist theory of the transference. And there are many others…
But what is of consequence here is that the answer to the “perversion” of the analyst (which occupies the place of the objet petit a and produces a subjective division in the analysand), the answer to the pseudo perversion is love, the love of transference. Thus, advancing Lacan’s well-known matheme, we would say that with the objet petit a in the position of the analyst and the $ (barred) in that of the analysand the love of transference retorts to the side of “perversion.”
This is somehow tempting, but what bores me is to have to write the position of the analyst as “perversion”. It would be more appealing to introduce something refined rather than this somewhat plain concept. Anyway, what matters is that it shows distinctly, at least to me, that love is related to the objet petit a and that love of transference accounts for the veiling of the “statute” of residue of this object. That is to say, it makes evident that in love – in this case love of transference – there is ignorance, or rather deceit; in love there is deception (a well-known and affluent thesis) because the objet petit a is hidden as residue. Lacan gives the formula of that veiling when he writes: i(a), image of a. It is an image that indeed conceals, that grants all the splendor of the imaginary, with all its beauty, to something which in itself lacks all prettiness, i.e. the analysts. That being so we must therefore introduce a “veiling function” to understand what happens.
Liebeslens
Thus I proceed step-by-step to a very precise place in Freud, which, in his own terms, is called Liebeslebens. Liebe is translated as love, and Lebens as life. We have then his three “Contributions to the Psychology of Love.” Here we should notice that while the translation of the Standard Edition refers to the second contribution as “The Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” an older translation, in Spanish, makes use of the term “erotic life”. Although the gap does not seem to be a very great one, it is remarkable, since it indicates that the word Liebe in Freud presents, perhaps, some conceptual difficulties; and to say it plain and simple, I think that what Freud calls Liebeslebens actually refers to the articulation between love and sexual jouissance. As a matter of fact we are dealing here with the articulation that takes place between the side of love and that of jouissance or, more precisely, that of surplus-jouissance:
And when we take the three “Contributions to the Psychology of Love”, namely “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Man” (1910); “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912) and “The Taboo of Virginity” (1917 – 1918), we find in these three texts that Freud was, in my opinion, truly Lacanian. Lacan himself said he was not Lacanian but Freudian, and Freud never said that he was not Lacanian… I sincerely believe that we are dealing here with a very Lacanian Freud, who allows us to reread and to rethink a text of Lacan, which is consequential for this subject: “The Signification of the Phallus.” It means to read Freud in order to go beyond a certain Lacan but, evidently, with the aid of “another Lacan.”
What is the importance of the psychology of love or erotic life? For Freud the question, one that is actually contemplated by everyone, deals with how men and women relate to each other. It means an effort to think the sexual rapport, to think over the sexual rapport, it must be said, from its difficulties, from his impasses. Because when we read Freud so as to know how to position ourselves in the matter, impasses materialize straightaway, perhaps more on the side of men than on the side of women. There is a feminine solution singled out by Freud at the end of his third contribution, and it is the feminine solution par excellence, the “Judith solution”… Hebbel’s Judith, by all means… “Judith is one of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first husband was paralyzed on the bridal night by a mysterious anxiety, and never again dared to touch her. ‘My beauty is like belladonna,’ she says. ‘Jouissance of it brings madness and death.’ When the Assyrian general Holofernes is besieging her city, she conceives the plan of seducing him by her beauty and of destroying him, thus employing a patriotic motive to conceal a sexual one. After she has been deflowered by this powerful man, she finds the strength in her fury to strike off his head. Beheading is well-known to us as a symbolic substitute for castrating; Judith is accordingly the woman who castrates the man who has deflowered her.
[…] Hebbel has intentionally sexualized the patriotic narrative from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament, for there Judith is able to boast after her return that she has not been defiled.” (S.E. XI) That is to say, it appears like a worthy way out from all these impasses, and we may surmise that Lacan caught sight of that.
Then, the question is how men and women relate to each other, how they choose one another. It is a concern recurrent in Freud, that of the Objektwahl, the object-choice. When Freud says Objekt, in no way is it to be translated as objet petit a. When he talks about the choice of the love object, the love object is i(a), it is the image of another human being. Sometimes we choose something other than a human being, sometimes we choose a material object: we call that fetishism… In this case we deal not with a love object but with an object of jouissance or cause of desire, not of love. Because to be able to speak of love it is necessary that the function a be veiled by the image, by the image of another human being, and perhaps by the image of another human being from another sex. Because it is possible to argue the case of masculine homosexual love, that is if masculine homosexual love may be termed as “love”. Feminine homosexual love on the other hand is a different matter, since it seems, for structural reasons, to deserve to be called “love.” What structural reasons? To say it quickly: the structural reason is that, anyway and anyhow, a woman has the value of Other for another woman. All this indicates different ways to explore, but these cannot be followed simultaneously.
Thus we could say that there is love when it is about this particular person and not about another one, when we deal with someone that cannot be replaced. This is the sublime idea of love. On the contrary, in Freud’s psychology of love or “erotic life,” we see that he uses the word “love” whenever there is the possibility of some substitution, of the need for a substitution. And, somehow, when we deal withjouissance, there is no substitution. Nevertheless, we should find an articulation between that love and something different from love, namely the problematic of jouissance, which Freud posits lucidly and in such a way (in “Contributions to the Psychology of Love”) that they are also contributions to the doctrine of jouissance.
(to be continued) - translated by Jorge Jauregui with James Curley-Egan
Jacques-Alain Miller - Lacan.com
