About the expert
Jacques-Alain Miller (Jacques-Alain Miller) - psychoanalyst, disciple of Jacques Lacan (Jacques Lacan), the founder of the World Psychoanalytic Association. And with our videochat blog we’ll keep the discussion.
"Love is always mutual," - said Lacan. Is this true in our time? And what does it mean?
JA M .: This phrase is often repeated, without understanding its meaning. This does not mean that it is enough to love someone, to fall in love, and in response to us. This means: "If I love you, too, you participate in it, because you have something that makes me love you. This mutual feeling, because there is movement in both directions: the love I feel for you, is in response to an occasion for love, which is in you. My feelings for you are not only my job, but yours too. My love says something to you, and then perhaps you did not know."
Why I prefer only him or her? It is not just an occasion?
JA M .: There is what Freud called the condition for love, the cause of desire. This specific feature (or set), which is for the person determines his choice of love. Sometimes it is important things that are barely perceptible. For example, a cause of love from one of Freud's patients became a ray of sun falling on his nose when he had seen a woman!
Hard to believe that love is born out of these little things!
JA M .: What, in reality our unconscious functions, surpasses any fiction. You have no idea how much of our lives (and especially in love) is based on the little things, to "divine trifles." Indeed, especially in men we often find these "reasons of love", it is necessary to start the love machine. For women in their choices also play the role of details that remind them of a father, mother, brother, sister, about someone from childhood. And yet the feminine form of love is closer to erotomania than fetishism: for woman is important to be loved. Interest in it another (or perceived) is often a prerequisite to evoke her love, or at least agree to intimacy.
But what about the erotic fantasies?
JA M .: Fantasy woman, consciously or unconsciously, most do not define the choice of partner, and that from which it will receive sexual pleasure. For men, the opposite is true. Their imagination is well illustrated by the history of 'love at first sight. " Lacan gave the example of Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Weather": the hero falls in love with Charlotte at the first meeting to see how she feeds surrounded by her young children. Here manifestation of maternal qualities of the woman immediately endears. Another case - from my practice: 50-year-old director picks itself Secretary, 20-year-old woman appears among the candidates, and he immediately recognized his lover. Later, during a session of analysis, he found that was the trigger: in her behavior, he noticed something that reminded him of his own first interview when applying for a job at the age of 20 years. It turns out that he is in a sense, in love with himself. In these examples, we find two kinds of love, marked by Freud: we love or the one who protects us (in this case the mother) or narcissistic self-image.