There is, in my view, no singular theory of love to be found in Freud's work or in Lacan's work: there are only multiple attempts to grapple with it at different points in their theoretical development.
Bruce Fink works closely through Lacan's 1960 to 1961 seminar on transference, reconstructing Lacan's reading of Plato's Symposium, the exchange between analyst and analysand, and the turn from the lover who lacks to the beloved presumed to hold something of value. Fink argues that neither Freud nor Lacan settled on a single account of love, and he sets out how it works differently across the symbolic, imaginary, and real. He gives particular weight to transference love as a structural effect rather than a personal attachment, and to the analyst's place as the subject supposed to know. For the clinician the book supplies a worked vocabulary for what happens when love enters the consulting room, kept throughout in contact with the mechanics of the cure and with Lacan's own clinical formulations. Fink also traces how earlier traditions, from courtly love to Romanticism, shape what analysts hear.
About the author
Bruce Fink
Bruce Fink is an American psychoanalyst and translator working in the Lacanian tradition. He trained in France for seven years and holds a doctorate in psychoanalysis from the University of Paris VIII, and he practices as a Lacanian analyst and supervisor affiliated with the Ecole de la Cause freudienne. He is known for translating Lacan's complete Ecrits and several of the Seminars into English, and for clinical and theoretical books including The Lacanian Subject and A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He taught psychology at Duquesne University.
Details
- 2016
- Polity
- Polity
- 288
- 9781509500499