A New Love for the Unconscious

Cyrus Saint Amand Poliakoff

In case of love, do not panic because love is a sign. Where there is smoke, there is fire; where there is love, there is what? During his XX Seminar, Jacques Lacan speaks about love with a nod to Rimbaud. Rimbaud’s poem “À une raison” is a dedication. Its title “To a Reason” does not dedicate the poem to love. Subsumed by passion, we overlook love as a sign, a sigh as one changes discourse. Love is for a reason. Why? Why did I fall in love again? “In Rimbaud’s text, love is a sign, indicated as such, that one is changing reasons, and that is why the poet addresses that reason. One changes reasons—in other words, one changes discourses.”[1] Each time there is a change from any discourse to another, we just might locate the analytic discourse. Lacan insists, “I am not saying anything else when I say that love is a sign that one is changing discourses.”[2] The analytic discourse manifests as the very dialectic of discourses.

Interpreting Plato’s Symposium on love, Lacan emphasizes displacement. Just like language, so does love traffic in displacement. Thank heavens we fall in and out of love. Lacan concludes, “It should not be too burdensome for you to think about it if you recall that Dante [in the Inferno] explicitly places the words “eternal love” on the doors of Hell.”[3]

At the infamous hellenic salon, Socrates turns down Alcibiades. He attempts to show the sexy, albeit aging love of his life: it is not me that you want. The desire of the analyst interprets: that’s not it. Catch the intoxicating dart of Eros, turn it back, “Your head turns away: O the new love! Your head turns back,—O the new love!”[4] We do it in the name of reason, to dedicate analysis not to the object of one’s affections, nor to the love of beauty, but to the cause of love itself.

How to not fall in love with your patients? Let them fall in love with the unconscious, a new love. By refusing the I love you—you love me, a psychoanalyst supports the Freudian cause. ​The cause of psychoanalysis can be a painful love for an analyst, he who chooses the sexual non-rapport as an orientation. Socrates dared to embody this by dispelling the mirage of rapport.

Passions of the analyst still exist after traversal. As long as one keeps speaking, being and disbeing remain an active dialectic, even after one passes from analysand to analyst. Many handsome patients are bound to fall in love with you before they do another love, the unconscious. It is the change in discourse that ultimately turns heads. Maybe if we are on our game enough, we can support this love-invention worth believing in—psychoanalysis.

References

[1] J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink. New York/London: Norton & Co., 1999, p16.

[2] Ibid.

[3] J. Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, Transference.  ed J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink.  Cambridge: Polity, 2017, p 163.

[4] Arthur Rimbaud, “To a Reason”, circa 1886.