Hanna Waar – Does psychoanalysis teach us something about love?
Jacques-Alain Miller – A great deal, because it’s an experience whose mainspring is love. It’s a question of that automatic and more often than not unconscious love that the analysand brings to the analyst, and which is called transference. It’s a contrived love, but made of the same stuff as true love. It sheds light on its mechanism: love is addressed to the one you think knows your true truth. But love allows you to think this truth will be likeable, agreeable, when in fact it’s rather hard to bear.
H. W. – So, what is it to really love?
J.-A. M. – To really love someone is to believe that by loving them you’ll get to a truth about yourself. We love the one that harbours the response, or a response, to our question: ‘Who am I?’
H. W. – Why do some people know how to love and not others?
J.-A. M. – Some people know how to provoke love in the other person, serial lovers as it were, men and women alike. They know what buttons to push to get loved. But they don’t necessarily love, rather they play cat and mouse with their prey. To love, you have to admit your lack, and recognise that you need the other, that you miss him or her. Those that think they’re complete on their own, or want to be, don’t know how to love. And sometimes, they ascertain this painfully. They manipulate, pull strings, but of love they know neither the risk nor the delights.
H. W. – ‘Complete on their own’: only a man could think that…
J.-A. M. – Well spotted! Lacan used to say, ‘To love is to give what you haven’t got.’ Which means: to love is to recognize your lack and give it to the other, place it in the other. It’s not giving what you possess, goods and presents, it’s giving something else that you don’t possess, which goes beyond you. To do that you have to assume your lack, your ‘castration’ as Freud used to say. And that is essentially feminine. One only really loves from a feminine position. Loving feminises. That’s why love is always a bit comical in a man. But if he lets himself get intimidated by ridicule, then in actual fact he’s not very sure of his virility.
H. W. – Is loving more difficult for men then?
J.-A. M. – Oh yes! Even a man in love has flashes of pride, bursts of aggressiveness against the object of his love, because this love puts him in a position of incompleteness, of dependence. That’s why he can desire women he doesn’t love, so as to get back to the virile position he suspends when he loves. Freud called this principle the ‘debasement of love life’ in men: the split between love and sexual desire.
H. W. – And in women?
J.-A. M. – It’s less common. In most cases, there’s a doubling-up of the male partner. On one hand, he’s the man that gives them jouissance and whom they desire, but he’s also the man of love, who’s feminised, necessarily castrated. Only it’s not anatomy that’s in the driving seat: there are some women who adopt a male position. There are more and more of them. One man for love, at home; and other men for jouissance, met on the net, in the street, or on a train.
H. W. – Why ‘more and more’?
J.-A. M. – Socio-cultural stereotypes of womanliness and virility are in the process of radical transformation. Men are being invited to open up to their emotions, to love and feminise themselves; women on the contrary are undergoing a certain ‘push to masculinisation’: in the name of legal equality they’re being driven to keep saying ‘me too.’ At the same time, homosexuals are claiming the same rights and symbols as heteros, like marriage and filiation. Hence a major instability in the roles, a widespread fluidity in the theatre of love, that contrasts with the fixity of yesteryear. Love is becoming ‘liquid’, as noted by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Everyone is being led to invent their own ‘lifestyle’, to assume their mode of jouissance and mode of loving. Traditional scenarios are slowly becoming obsolete. Social pressure to conform hasn’t disappeared, but it’s on the wane.
H. W. – ‘Love is always reciprocal’ said Lacan. Is this still true in the current context? What does that mean?
J.-A. M. – This sentence gets repeated over and over without being understood, or it gets understood the wrong way round. It doesn’t mean that it’s enough to love someone for him to love you back. That would be absurd. It means: ‘If I love you, it’s because you’re loveable. I’m the one that loves, but you’re also mixed up in this, because there’s something in you that makes me love you. It’s reciprocal because there’s a to and fro: the love I have for you is the return effect of the cause of love that you are for me. So, you’re implicated. My love for you isn’t just my affair, it’s yours too. My love says something about you that maybe you yourself don’t know.’ This doesn’t guarantee in the least that the love of one will be responded to by the love of the other: when that happens it’s always of the order of a miracle, it’s not calculable in advance.
H. W. – We don’t find him or her by chance. Why that guy? Why that girl?
J.-A. M. – There’s what Freud called Liebesbedingung, the condition for love, the cause of desire. It’s a particular trait – or a set of traits – that have a decisive function in a person for the choice of the loved one. This totally escapes the neurosciences, because it’s unique to each person, it’s down to their singular, intimate history. Traits which are sometimes minute are at play. For instance, Freud singled out in one of his patients a cause of desire that was a shine on a woman’s nose!
H. W. – It’s hard to believe in a love founded on these trifles!
J.-A. M. – The reality of the unconscious outstrips fiction. You can’t imagine how much in human life is founded, especially where love is concerned, on little things, on pinheads, on ‘divine details’. It’s true that’s it’s above all in men that you find causes of desire like that, which are like fetishes whose presence is indispensable to spark off the love process. Tiny particularities, reminiscent of the father, the mother, a brother, a sister, someone from childhood, also play their role in women’s choice of love object. But the feminine form of love is more readily erotomaniac than fetishist: they want to be loved, and the interest, the love that’s shown them, or that they suppose in the other person, is often sine qua non for triggering their love, or at least their consent. This phenomenon lies at the base of the practice of men chatting women up.
H. W. – Do you not attribute any role to fantasies?
J.-A. M. – In women, fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, are decisive for the position of jouissance more than for the choice of love object. And it’s the opposite for men. For example, it may happen that a woman can only achieve jouissance – orgasm, let’s say – on condition that she imagines herself, during intercourse itself, being beaten, raped, or imagines that she’s another woman, or even that she’s elsewhere, absent.
H. W. – And the male fantasy?
J.-A. M. – It’s very much in evidence in love at first sight. The classic example, commented on by Lacan, is in Goethe’s novel, the sudden passion of young Werther for Charlotte, at the moment he sees her for the first time, feeding the rabble of kids around her. Here it’s the woman’s maternal quality that sparks off love. Another example, taken from my practice, is the following: a boss in his fifties is seeing applicants for a secretarial post; a young woman of twenty comes in; straight away he declares his love. He wonders what got hold of him and goes into analysis. There, he uncovers the trigger: in her he met traits that reminded him of what he had been at the age of twenty, when he went for his first job interview. In a way, he’d fallen in love with himself. In these two examples we see the two sides of love distinguished by Freud: either you love the person who protects, in this case the mother, or you love a narcissistic image of yourself.
H. W. – It sounds like we’re puppets!
J.-A. M. – No, between any man and any woman, nothing is written in advance, there’s no compass, no pre-established relationship. Their encounter isn’t programmed like it is between the spermatozoon and the ovum; it’s got nothing to do with our genes either. Men and women speak, they live in a world of discourse, that’s what’s decisive. The modalities of love are extremely sensitive to the surrounding culture. Each civilisation stands out for the way it structures the relation between the sexes. Now, it so happens that in the West, in our societies which are liberal, market and juridical, the ‘multiple’ is well on the way to dethroning the ‘one’. The ideal model of ‘great lifelong love’ is slowly losing ground faced with speed dating, speed loving, and a whole flotilla of alternative, successive, even simultaneous amorous scenarios.
H. W. – And love in the long term? In eternity?
J.-A. M. – Balzac said, ‘Any passion that isn’t eternal is hideous.’ But can the bond hold out for life within the register of passion? The more a man devotes himself to just one woman, the more she tends to take on a maternal signification for him: more sublime and untouchable than loved. Married homosexuals develop this cult of the woman best: Aragon sings his love for Elsa; as soon as she dies, it’s hello boys! And when a woman clings on to one man, she castrates him. So, the path is narrow. The best destiny of conjugal love is friendship, that’s essentially what Aristotle said.
H. W. – The problem is that men say they don’t understand what women want; and women, what men expect of them…
J.-A. M. – Yes. What objects to the Aristotelian solution is the fact that dialogue from one sex to the other is impossible, as Lacan said with a sigh. People in love are in fact condemned to go on learning the other’s language indefinitely, groping around, seeking out the keys – keys that are always revocable. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings whose way out doesn’t exist.
Translated by from the French by Adrian Price for NLS Messager
29 Comments
while at times this interview seeks to discuss that stereotypes are changing, “Socio-cultural stereotypes of womanliness and virility are in the process of radical transformation.” J.A.M Still Upholds very stereotypical views on both women and men, some would say that these ideas are a conservative,stereotypical, and outdated conjecture: ” In women, fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, are decisive for the position of jouissance more than for the choice of love object. And it’s the opposite for men. For example, it may happen that a woman can only achieve jouissance – orgasm, let’s say – on condition that she imagines herself, during intercourse itself, being beaten, raped, or imagines that she’s another woman, or even that she’s elsewhere, absent.”
BOO! Bad taste.
I can’t believe this article! I would argue that the production of the “rape fantasy in women” is a male production. This article is regressive, I’m horrified it’s published.
Sommes-nous si abrutis qu’on ne puisse plus lire Lacan qu’en anglais ?
Well, interesting comments, and it raises the crucial question: When an analyst speaks, in general terms about gender relations, gender differences, and gender character traits, we might assume he speaks as if he knows from a wealth of clinical experience, from inductive inferences compiled from numerous observations of countless patients who were not led into saying what was said by the suggestive influence of the analyst, direct or indirect – but this is precisely what we do not know, nowhere is this information given, and neither do we know whether it is all but a free-association in the mind of the analyst, thinking about his own partner, or about some singular relationship that falls too close in that moment of utterance, whether within the clinic or without. With that said though, fixating too reductively on the latter epistemic concerns, can also make for the road to a resistance, rather than to an unconcealing, of a subject’s individual truth, where lies the meaning of their desire, which may not have a real meaning at all..
I think this article is about the unconscious love, like “love at first sight”. I was wondering if any other types of love can exist between two sexes.
In addition, I agree with the first entry of “claroquesiputa”; but we should bear in mind that the stereotypes are not yet transformed entirely. Their transformation is slow, so we still can talk about stereotypical fantasies in women and men.
But as 21st century analysts, shouldn’t we take into consideration, or make statement that “these may be stereotypical ideas/assumptions but…” instead of conjecting their truth?
claroquesiputa — which part of the article makes you mad to the point of saying it promotes rape?
I often read J.A. Miller’s writings with somehow admiration, wonder and being defended; why? becoz sometimes I found something tastes conformist in them. Talking about love without a gest or gesture of not-knowing is necessary, I think. Love is a pretend, Lacan said; so it can not be acknowledging our lack but it is a fake, a play of simulation that I (lover) have something (phallus) so I can fill in your lack mu beloved! but it is not a successful fake, becoz at the same moment, I have to play being devoid of something so I need you my beloved and so on. Psychoanalysis is a bribe (as you wrote so many times before) just love.
Shahriar, thank you for your great comment, instead of focusing on women’s rights
I am not sure how what you are saying is mutually exclusive with what JAM said in the article
halooo!!! what about homosexual love? as usual, ignored!
wtf, wassup with the desperate need of distinction? Did u read the article at all?
The love process is the same, but focused on the same gender. Negative Oedipus complex.
“Love” was mentioned many times in this article. But it seems to me, that J.A.M. uses word “love” to describe very different feelings and types of relationships. “Love at first sight”? How can you love someone at first sight when you don’t know that person? You can fall in love and you can have strong emotions, affection, but that’s not love. It is commonly used term (love at first sight) today, but it’s wrong. Different people say they love, thinking of strong emotions they have for someone, but that’s not necessarily love. Not everyone is capable of love, even they say they love and feel something about someone. That’s why I think this article is bad. I expected more.
Finally someone really knows what’s really going on inside the human person. I married one! Just as discribed above, and to the “T.” (He’s so proud, yes he “completes” himself – aliminating healthy emotion towards another). So everyone needs to read it again. Only this time pay attention, you may learn something. It’s been 27 years of marriage for us. And so far, having first hand experience – it’s been tense. Thanks for the confirmation!!!
This strikes me as elucidating in certain ways, but only very obvious ones; it offers back to us that which we already know, now as insight. The difficulty here, though, is indeed that the ‘that which we already know’ bespeaks a cultural ‘we’ that those writing the more interesting comments have largely ceased belonging to or have never belonged to. It’s not, then, that the interview is empty of interesting or appropriate comments on love, but that the ‘that which we already know’ is the knowledge of a ‘we’ that we have no compelling grounds to even want to be. Viz., the constant focus on gender differentiation, as though ‘love in general’ were about things like this and not about things like the lamella or an inexplicable jouissance (I’m aware: it’s been explained–that doesn’t affect its being inexplicable in the slightest). The point (Lacan’s, here redacted) is appropriate: I love my other in part because s/he promises a coherent image of the ‘truth’ of that person that therefore I will have been. But the gendered explication and tracing out is reductively silly and crude (in fairness to Miller, the interviewer has asked for this, but look at [the textual representation of] his glee in response). I’ve tended to think of Miller as more subtle than this, and it’s unfortunate to see him here play Engel’s to Lacan’s Freud.
NB: I do think it helpful that we begin here with transference. The logic of transference is far more readily explicable than that of love, by definition inexplicable. The speakability of transference, its fictiveness, is as Miller notes in part due to its artificial character. Not, however, artificial in the sense that the analysand brings a ‘contrived love’ to the analyst, though this happens too. Rather, what is truly artificial about transference is it, itself, invented by Freud to help relocate what was then in danger of being unanimously recognized as Charcot’s desire.
*ahem*. Engels to Lacan’s Marx.
This seems a little old fashioned and sexist to say that a man is embarrassed to love and therefore has to sleep around to feel better about it. Do you think that man is worried about losing control of his reality ego when he is in love? Is this the problem? Isn’t this just a problem with power? or abusing power that doesn’t exist anymore. Women get embarrassed about love too, and in turn, concerned about losing control of their reality ego. I don’t think love is a gender specific thing anymore, what you are talking about is a very old fashioned construct. It is very sad if you think that man is too embarrassed or looks silly if he is in love. We all love.
I think gone are the days when male theorists are commended for writing horribly misogynist things too.
Isn’t it funny that most old psychoanalysis is written by men so players use these theories as the explanation for being cruel. Lucky we have third wave deconstructive feminist theorists out there, is all I can say.
While it is true that we all love and it is becoming outdated to talk about love as sex-specific, I believe the social construct of the male gender is slower to change, and still contains the subtext of emotional detachment. It is on the way out as well, but slowly.
Oh well us women will just have to go out with the Chris Isaak or hippie types won’t we? My last boyfriend did heaps more of the usual expected “feminine” stuff than I did. Thanks Rick you are right but things only change if you make sure that they do.
I think the general point that only a lacking being can truly love is a profound one. However, there is a tendency in psychoanalysis to emphasise a woman’s capacity to accept her lack, which I find suspect.
Not simply a lacking being, but rather, a being which recognizes their lack, has accepted their castration. The pervert cannot love.
I was never castrated in the first place! Psychoanalysis shouldn’t be read so seriously. Seriously guys you’ll do your own heads in. Its usually something that’s come out of a psychoanalyst’s meeting with a single patient and I don’t think it should be read as a cultural “generalised theory”. If cultural theory is doing any of your heads in I strongly recommend a mental health first aid workshop where you can look at clinical symptoms and stop worrying so much about poetic analysis. It simply isn’t true.
Don’t worry Penelope. Deconstructive third way feminism will save the day!
Castration is a bullshit, Christian concept, ideal, desideratum that reeks of a morbid resignation that Freud falsely generalized from his idiosyncratic Judeo-phylogenesis. Nonetheless, in terms of a power differential, men and women have to learn to see the difference for what it is. No point moralising the bio-facticity of that to which we come. And there is no doubt we come. If we can not be first, nor best, just be sure to crown with laurel the right victor.
oui Madeleine c’est navrant… heureusement qu’on a appris une autre langue alors.
I read the article and comments with interest. I can understand why Penelope and others are indignant, but I just wanted to make a few points here: firstly that Miller points out that women ‘may’ have a fantasy of..it is one possibility. In the analytic sense, this may or may not be present, but a fantasy is not reality. I think therefore, we need to cautious in interpreting Miller’s words in a literal sense, that women want this as an everyday ‘real, conscious’ experience (real here being used in the everyday sense, not the The Real in the Lacanian sense). Accusations of patriarchy in Psychoanalysis are not unusual, however I would recommend reading Jacqueline Rose on feminine sexuality, reading Lacan against the grain, Rose argues that the phallus (although there is some inevitability that boys will allign with having it), is lacking and no guarantor. Rick’s comments on the movement within the socio-cultural field in relation to the deconstruction of masculinity maybe supports this thesis. There is, I agree, a difficulty within psychoanalytic language at times which is at odds with a post-modern political correctness, but when we deal with fantasy, the unconscious and social construction and discourses maybe there has to be an element of discomfort to keep pace with flux and lack of stability (and as Soler points out, an unmitigated rise in anxiety, but Lacan’s contribution is surely that the question posed is idiosyncratic to each subject, and in my practice, the question that love poses, is an ever recurring one.