Painful Loves – Renata Teixeira
“Anxiety is only ever surmounted when the Other has been named. There is only ever any love when there is a name, as everyone knows from experience. The moment the name of he or she to whom we address our love is uttered, we know very well that this is a threshold of the utmost importance.”
Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. R. Price, Cambridge: Polity, 2014, p. 337.
In Lacan’s seminar Anxiety, Lacan links desire and jouissance by having love as an amalgam. Love is no longer the effect of the prohibition, but a creation of the three registers, real, symbolic and imaginary. This is the beginning of the concept of the non-sexual rapport. Both sexes are confronted with this impossible. Lacan introduces the derisory character of love, by noticing the difference between the two jouissances, feminine and phallic, and their incompleteness: man feels anxious in front of his object of love, fearing castration, and woman feels anxious by hiding, through the masquerade, her lack of being (the phallus). In this equation, subjects can overcome their anxiety by naming the Other, the loved other. This named partner becomes the cause of love. By passing through the symbolic, love soothes the anxiety of the non-sexual rapport.
