'Tormenting Loves"

**Zoom links will be sent out the evening prior to event. 
 

Tormenting Love: From Freud to Lacan

"A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved. In all these respects self-regard seems seems to remain related to the narcissistic element in love" (S.

Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction. 1914, p. 98) ... love demands love. It never stops demanding it. It demands it... encore. Encore is the proper name of the gap in the Other from which the demand for love stems." [...]

"Then what is involved in love? Is love about making

One? Is Eros a tension toward the One"? ".

... for desire

merely leads us to aim at the gap where it can be demonstrated that the One is based only on the essence of the signifier" (J. Lacan, Seminar XX, Encore. P. 4-5)

This seminar will explore the topic of love in both Freud and Lacan. Freud was interested in the subjects

"conditions of love", which he elaborated on by making a distinction between anaclitic and narcissistic types of object choice, while also paying attention to the role of libido or drive satisfaction in relation to love. Lacan's various statements on love both resonate with certain aspects of Freud's account, while also taking us beyond this, as he interogates the place of love in human life via his categories of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

For example, if love is an event that, in a sense, belongs to the lover and the beloved, it is also, at a symbolic level a discourse. Moreover, at the end of Lacan's teaching there arises the question of a love that wants to be One. A love that, one could say, is unreciprocated, unrequited, solitry, and always alone in its relationship with the Other that does not exist.