Couples’ relationships
Love and transference
Love is central for human beings, and psychoanalysis has addressed the subject intensely starting from Freud and continuing up to the present
First off, the experience of psychoanalysis is based on love – that which Freud called “transference”. Transference is like a type of artificial love, brought on by the “dispositif” but which accounts for the patient’s position.
Psychoanalysis has also explained that love involves assuming that one is lacking something at its core. Loving is a paradoxical experience that consists not of giving what one possesses (gifts, goods, etc.), but rather what one does not possess. If a person is complete, there is no possibility for love.
Therapy and love
In therapy patients are allowed to circumscribe what made them fall in love with or what made them desire another person, as sometimes love and desire do not go hand in hand.
This makes it possible to discover what Freud called a subject’s “condition of love”. We fall in love with someone who is in a situation similar to another person with whom we had a loving relationship, possibly during childhood. On the one hand this explains what we typically call a “crush”, but it also gives love an air of repetition.
On the other hand, for Freud there is a certain mistrust concerning love. This is because love in some cases has a narcissistic element, in the sense that we may love another person who is similar to our self, or someone who resembled our past self, or someone who we would like to be, so that the Other as such is reduced to our self.
Reasons for a session: breakups, pain, questions
Sometimes a person may go to therapy when they are thinking of breaking up with their partner, but they can’t bring themselves to do it.
Patients also come after they have broken up and are faced with a feeling of loneliness or failure. In that case they come to make sense of the breakup.
Other times, a person's complaint arises because they find it impossible to form a relationship, or they have doubts about starting up a new relationship. There might also be questions regarding who could be a good partner.
Love and invention
Without overlooking the fact that narcissistic love still exists and that the experience of love is labyrinthine, Lacanian psychoanalysis focuses on love understood as invention. As Jacques-Alain Miller says in Lógicas de la vida amorosa: “The Lacanian good news is that new loves are always possible”. Lacanian love entails forging knowledge based on words as well as based on the effort to create a new discourse about love during the psychoanalytic experience.