LOVE AND TRANSFERENCE

CARLOS Ana Cristina


Transference is one of the essential nucleus in which the analytic experience lies on.

Love is one of the fundamental concepts in order to question the analitical practice, as it establishes the beginning of a psychoanalysis.

One of the main lacanian improvements is to place love on the phantom’s logic line, therefore opening a new meaning for love and its real-symbolic-imaginary realms.

Love directs itself to the unconscious knowledge, towards its signifiers. The individual searches for the truth, and this truth is incarnated in his symtoms.

The analitical transference is an important event in the life of an individual, and it is from that point where he places himself that perhaps understands his bond with the symptom; first step of love that will become the entrance door for the analitical mechanism. The stage where the principal signifiers in a history will be articulated by the real presence of the analyst and performed by their repetition. The image of truth that, as it is real, can only represent a part of the unconscious interpretation, in its language structure and in its poetical metaphor of an event. Transference has a creative value of a non-existing reality that sets love as a metaphor of an event.

Transference, considered as a metaphor of love, implies that the analyst works making himself a support of the object "a", just to be thrown from that place. A break, a liberation of the individual’s supposed knowledge. The creative scope of transference establishes a new history, a new order for the speaking individual.

Love, considered in its deceitful nature, will be settled as a support of failure, lie and deceipt since love appears as the main narcissistic passion. It will show the internal possitions of the individual that will be executed in the transference, and the enjoyment related to love will be placed within love’s ideals.

Therefore, the lacanian’s contribution of the phantom will place us within a statute concerning love, desire and enjoyment.

I will take the value of poetics in courtly love, a subject which I am studying as it involves an ethical range, as a model in questions of love.

  1. The value in the beginning of a love idea, underlining a fundamental cultural progress and the rising of an ideal centred on the feminine object.
  2. Model that marks the universality of certain phantoms present on the imaginary resourses of every individual as founder of love in the imaginary field.
  3. The worship to the idealized object and its connection as a condition of the transference. Settlement of the ideal as an entrance door to the establishment of S.S.S.
  4. The possibility to settle the issues concerning feminine object, considered as enigmatic and ambiguous. The woman as an absolute object, establishing a nuclear hollowness.
  5. The real statute of love that begins the creative scope of the metaphor will be placed between courtly love and the relation with the S.S.S., since only love is courtly love due to the impossibility to meet the object.

 

Why did Jacques Lacan consider courtly love as a fundamental improvement in the history of culture?

Because it settles a place for the absolute and the interdict, the exaltation that surrounds the feminine object, the inscription of a signifier, the lady, where the statute of the imaginary reveals itself in order to show us the way in which the settlement of the worship to the idealized object represents an important cultural progress.

It will show us, through poetical writing, the value of the phantoms and their universality. Love and comedy, love and drama, remain as universal issues that continue to be the material of our phantoms.

Psychoanalysis deepens love conditions in a way by which the object will become more desirable. To consider the woman as an absolute object, in this poetics, is due to the fact that she is emptied from her real substance because she is now taken as the object of a passion, as the individual to whom poets refer to, although it was based on a woman, is considered impossible to reach; meanwhile the individual to whom they approach is a signifier, an object to represent the existence of hollowness that will be inhabited by different imaginary compositions as the phantom is the support of desire.

The work of the analyst implies the beginning of a fiction. He is asked to reach a libidinal degree of sublimation in order to work. Ana O and Breuer show us the darkness of the transference. How can the analyst work honestly with his wishes? The model of the lady in courtly love will allow us to place the way in which an object is made to represent the existence of hollowness in the nucleus of the real, the feminine object introduces itself trhough a very singular door of privation and inaccessibility. This is a possibility which exists in the world of language since there is always a distance between the object and the thing, erasure of the place of the individual. There is an interdict object, that is the founder of the real. Unavoidable principle.

The reading that Lacan did of the medieval literature offers us the richness of this poetic so as to rescue the place of the interdict object and the value, for the neurotic, of his phantoms, whether true or not; the sign printed on the skin, the enjoyment of the body is what matters and it is expressed by the signifiers.

The ideal is the condition for the transference. The latter means to the speaking individual the entrance to a new order since love is a metaphor; the love which the individual places around an ideal will be the challenge that the analyst will take, being aware of the tricks of love so that this place of love will be liberated, misplaced, misleaded.

Love is enjoyment.

A meeting with love, with an enjoyment that the phantom hides as a passion and which refers to the ignorance of the desire. Like the courtly love, it will be convenient to introduce the concepts of love and ideals carried by the enjoyments produced by love. The analyst works with the refusal, the possibility of leaving that place vacant, that hollowness in the nucleus of the real. The possibility of representing, examining, refusing to be what it is proposed. In order to enter as an hypothesis in the phantom, the analyst must work with the refusal to any possibility of corporal encounter. It is with this default that the analyst interprets since he knows there is no place where the absolute knowledge is centred.

Love is the imaginary of each individual and, therefore, it needs that root of the impossible, where the process of the ideals of love will open a new version of it, allowing its combination with a desire always far from its object and the establishment of a social bond that only the analitic discourse allows us.

 

ANA CRISTINA CARLOS

FUNDACION DISCURSO <>FREUDIANO ESCUELA DE PSICOANALISIS

e-mail: anaccar@infovia.com.ar

Translated by Mercedes Monteverde.