Seminar at the London Society of the New Lacanian School
Saturday 8th February 2025
City of Westminster Archives Center
Erotomania, “colon”, love and jouissance. This is the title I have chosen to work with you today but focussing on a very specific point of view: Jacques Lacan's seminar 20, entitled Encore. In it, Lacan offers some not-at-all-obvious details about love and jouissance that are of great interest to this topic. At no point does he explicitly talk about erotomania, but we can trace reference points that are important for making some observations about the clinical picture that was described by classical psychiatry during the last century.
There are two points I want to make beforehand about my title and subtitle.
Lexicon
The first is the lexicon we use. There are two terms that seem to resist translation and that cross the linguistic border between French and English as such. The first is jouissance. It is a term that functions in a way as a neologism and not so much as a barbarism, as a foreign term. It is interesting to underline the widespread use that this term, jouissance, has found beyond Lacan’s own teaching. But it is still a somewhat enigmatic term: we are not quite sure what we are saying when we name that field of jouissance, so important in the analytic experience, a field that borders on pleasure on the one hand and on the other on displeasure, even suffering and pain. It was Freud who detected it very early on, although he did not name it as such, jouissance. He found it in the famous case of the Rat Man when the latter spoke to him about the torture of having rats introduced into his anus and he heard in the subject’s horrified account the sign of ‘a satisfaction unknown to himself’. That sign of a satisfaction unknown to the Rat Man himself when recounting the torture is the first clinical example of the existence of a jouissance.
The signs of jouissance are always enigmatic and strange to the subject, with an unknown significance, always different from what is expected. The signs of jouissance always have something traumatic, disruptive in the life of the subject, and they must be given a new meaning to make them bearable. Thus, each of us can talk about our own jouissance as if it were really a neologism, a term invented to designate a new reality hitherto ignored, a new meaning, specific to each of us. Each of us has a particular word to name in our own history that ignored field of jouissance. It is always a fundamental word in the dictionary of the unconscious, of the text that unites what one carries written in the unconscious without knowing how to read it.
I thought that the term jouissance did not exist in the English dictionary. I couldn’t find it in the old paper dictionaries that I have (Collins Modern English, or the Concise Oxford Dictionary), but I have seen on the Internet that jouissance is already included in some virtual dictionaries in reference to Lacan’s teaching. It is a success and a failure at the same time. It is a great success because it gives an account of an invention of Lacan, who gave this term a fundamental use that has now passed into common usage in our culture. And it is a failure because when it passes into common usage it loses something of that great novelty that we find, if we read Lacan’s text carefully, as a sort of neological use of this term, jouissance. In fact, nobody knows or wants to know anything about jouissance itself. So, it is difficult to give it a common meaning.
On the other hand, the title of the seminar, Encore, has also been translated literally into different languages, but it has a common use, for example, in music concerts: The audience demanded an encore! The audience wants more, they always want a little more if they liked what they heard. They liked it and at the same time they don’t feel satisfied, if they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t ask for an encore. So, Encore is an insatiable demand, impossible to satisfy. Encore is a name for the demand for love taken to its extreme, to an impossible demand for satisfaction that then appears as an imperative. At this extreme point we could find a link between love and jouissance. And Encore is then for Lacan one of the names of the Freudian superego, an imperative of jouissance, as he argues at the beginning of this Seminar.
Therefore, it seems that the two terms, Jouissance and Encore, have a feature that links them, but that they do not have an equivalent that is easy to find in other languages. This also happens in Spanish, and in Catalan too, which is my mother tongue.
Syntax
The second point I want to make about the title is grammatical and refers to the only term that at first glance might seem the most obvious and understandable, the term that links love and jouissance: the preposition ‘and’. However, it is the least comprehensible of everything we can say on this subject, because it raises a conjunction, a point of intersection between the field of love and the field of jouissance that is not at all evident in the light of what analytical experience learns from each subject. The biggest complaints analysts receive often relate to this issue, especially from the male side of the speaking beings: they love one woman but can only find jouissance in another woman whom they cannot love. The disjunction between love and jouissance is a feature of the contemporary subject, also for many women we listen in analysis.
It is something that Freud also observed – for example, in his text ‘On a General Degradation of Erotic Life’ – in a way that, in fact, is still very relevant today: for the subject of our time, love and jouissance seem to be mutually exclusive. We increasingly find this disjunction, to the point that in current discourses on sex - I am thinking, for example, of queer discourse or transgender discourse - the dimension of love seems increasingly separated from sexual pleasure to the point of becoming absent. Love, to quote one of the theorists of contemporary trans discourse, is understood as a ‘technology of the government of bodies, a politics of the management of desire that captures the power to act and to find jouissance in two living machines and puts them at the service of social reproduction.’ So love would be an obstacle to the jouissance of bodies, an instrument of power that subjugates the subject and from which they should definitively free themselves.
Therefore, even today it is not at all clear how love and jouissance can be combined in the same object. If we listen to the subject of our time, we should rather write ‘love or jouissance’. So, that ‘and’ in the title is a real problem. It does not seem at all easy for the subject to obtain this conjunction in which love and jouissance can meet. And perhaps it is a good formula for talking about the end of analysis from a Lacanian perspective, to somehow obtain that conjunction, that ‘and’ in which love and jouissance could converge. Only at this point the subject could find jouissance in what he loves and love its jouissance. An analysis is a substitution of the ‘or’ for an ‘and’ that must be invented.
What can erotomania teach us about this ‘and’? Can it teach us anything? This is what I propose to study with you today in the light of Lacan's teaching
Antecedents: Erotomania according to de Clérambault
In order to find and comment on some remarks about ‘erotomania’ in the Seminar Encore - we have to find them first, because they are not explicit - we must necessarily refer to the antecedents of this clinical picture described by psychiatry, which are in the antecedents of Lacan's teaching. Lacan took them very much into account. It is precisely in a short text from the Écrits, entitled ‘On My Antecedents’, where Lacan explains his training as a psychiatrist and evokes someone he defines as ‘his only teacher in psychiatry’: Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault. Clérambault was, in fact, the first to describe, in such a detailed and brilliant way, the clinical picture of erotomania, to the extent that erotomania bears his name in psychiatric treatises: it is ‘Clérambault's syndrome’. It is worth getting to know the details of his work and his clinical descriptions, which Lacan undoubtedly always had in mind.
Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault is one of the most prolific and surprising figures in psychiatric practice at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as being an absolutely exceptional, even ‘fascinating’ character, whose clinical genius, inherited from Emile Kraepelin, cannot, however, be reduced to the vicissitudes of his life, vicissitudes that range from the most eccentric to the most tragic of his experience. Starting from the mechanistic and organic assumptions of the time, he constructed an orderly clinic in two areas: erotomania and mental automatism, which we will now look at in detail. In fact, one phenomenon always appears to be linked to the other.
His famous ‘Presentations de Malades’ every Friday in the Special Infirmary were a psychiatric teaching practice that has now almost disappeared, a teaching Lacan continued and which we continue to carry out today in the Freudian Field. His famous clinical certificates are of such precision and such a careful style that they deserve to be read today as a form of research and clinical teaching at the opposite end of the spectrum to the one presented to us in the evaluative and reductionist form emerged from the DSM manuals. Nevertheless, erotomania continues to be listed in these manuals as a very rare and infrequent clinical picture. This was not the case for Lacan, who went so far as to situate erotomania as a structural aspect of the feminine position of the subject, in contrast to the fetishist position of the masculine position.
Let us now look at a summary of the phenomenological description of erotomania by Cléramabult, from which we can learn a lot. I am going to quote almost literally from the excellent book, ‘L'érotomanie’, published with a preface by our colleague François Leguil:
1. The patient perceives that a person of the opposite sex, with a real or presumed good position, shows an inclination towards him and pays him an attention that the patient cannot understand and must interpret.
There are two elements to emphasise here: it is always about the Other sex. And here we should write Other with a capital O, because it is sex, the sexual, as an absolute otherness that is present in the sign of love of erotomania. The second is that the Other does not understand anything, something that the subject himself does not care about, because he certainly understands what it is all about. For the erotomaniac subject there is no enigma whatsoever.
2. Sometimes that sign is a simple exchange of glances, a very subtle event, such as the Other supposedly walking past the window and moving the curtains a little, which makes the patient certain of a hidden love.
Any sign is interpreted by the subject as a sign of love, but it is always a hidden love, sometimes even hidden from the Other. He doesn't know it, but he loves me, the erotomaniac subject seems to say in his certainty. It is the certainty of reciprocity.
3. Soon the signs of the supposed understanding increase in number. Every coincidence, every dress, every encounter, every reading or conversation, acquires for the patient a connection with his imaginary adventure.
Here the contingency, the chance of some signs become a logical necessity, of an absolute certainty.
4. The love that the other person professes to him is an open secret and a topic of general interest, it is talked about everywhere, of course never out loud, but through discreet signs that the patient understands very well...
Here we find a strange paradox: it is an open secret. It must be a hidden secret that that subject must interpret by a discrete sign, but at the same time something known by everyone. It is a language phenomenon, an allusive message that is in fact only addressed to the subject.
5. This peculiar delirium can develop over a long period of time... fuelled especially by metaphorical notices in the newspapers, without anything affecting the rest of the activities of the patient who is really trying to keep the matter secret.
The secret, again, and yet everything happens in broad daylight. The signs of love are evident, known to everyone, but the meaning of these signs is absolutely personal, as Lacan will point out in his Seminar 3 on ‘The Psychoses’. Personal meaning is rooted in the most real of the subject's experience: only he knows what is meant by what is hidden and at the same time in full view of everyone.
Let's now look at a very interesting case from Clérambault's Presentations de Malades that is presented in his 1920 article, ‘Coexistence of two delusions of persecution and erotomania’ (L'érotomanie, p. 43-64).
This is the case of Léa-Anna, a 53-year-old woman with both an erotomaniac delusion and a persecution delusion.
I quote some parts of Clérambault’s text (pp. 45-47): "The Erotomaniac Delusion is based on the following postulate: the King of England is in love with her. She verifies her conviction through a series of imaginary observations of the usual kind. Numerous people she meets, especially officers, are emissaries of the man she loves, but only she belatedly understands the secret meaning of the words they have spoken. […] King George V crosses her path dressed in various ways: as a sailor, a tourist, etc. - In each encounter, she only recognises him too late. […] She did not respond to these incursions because she did not understand them. [There is always a retroactive time: the signs are only interpreted a posteriori, but with absolute certainty]. The cause was her own ignorance, and the King still holds a resentment against her for it.
Here it is the subject himself who first ignored that he was the object of the Other’s love: there is a necessary time to arrive at a certain understanding. Sometimes it will be the Other who must take that time for the subject to also reach the same certainty.
The trigger of delirium is the appearance of a sign, a very precise and subtle signifier in the real with a subject interpretation:
One night, as she passed in front of Buckingham Palace, a curtain moved, which meant that the King was watching her. In London, everyone is aware of the King's passion for her. All the King's relatives and all the courtiers want to see this passion come to an end; even the Princesses want her to be George V's mistress.
Only a slight movement of the curtains and revealed the interpretation of the subject with his erotomaniac postulate is revealed with certainty: “He loves me”. The process, as Clerambaul insists, has a logic timing:
First, there is the postulate: the Other loves me; I am the object of the Other's love. Erotomania is in fact reduced to this ‘postulate’
A few years before this Clérambault’s description of erotomania, Freud had deduced from the famous Schreber case the grammatical turns of the delusional libido in the erotomaniac axiom that Lacan would comment on so many times. This is the same ‘erotomaniac postulate’ that Clérambault describes so precisely in the syndrome that has since borne his name, a feature that Lacan will take to the place of structural postulate of psychosis.
The evolution of the erotomaniac delusion generally unfolds in three phases:
1) First phase of hope: the subject, in his certainty, simply waits for the Other, he does nothing to go to a romantic encounter with him. It is enough for him to wait in his certainty.
2) Second phase, phase of spite. The Other, generally, does not meet the subject (and it is better that this is the case). The Other remains someone distant, from another place and social condition. Then, the feeling of spite begins, the feeling of being belittled by the Other.
3) Third phase of resentment. The reverse of the certainty of the sign of love, that was there at the beginning, begins now to appear as a sign of the hatred of the Other. Finally, at the end of the process, the Other becomes someone hostile, someone who presents an intolerable jouissance for the subject. This sign of jouissance only appears at the end and in a clearly definitive way, with no turning back.
In this case, let us emphasise the sign of the curtain, which is the initial language phenomenon, the trigger for the whole process. It is a sign of the gaze of the Other that is first a sign of the love of the Other and that will later become a sign of the jouissance of the Other. It is an allusive phenomenon (an elementary phenomenon, in the terms of Clérambault that Lacan takes up) that triggers the interpretation of the subject developed in the delirium. It is a language phenomenon, the irruption of a ‘signifier in the real’, as Lacan points out in Seminar 3 on ‘The Psychoses’, with a certainty that is very different from the uncertainty of jealous hysteria.
It is a fundamental clinical distinction: the erotomaniac certainty of psychotic delirium is totally different from hysterical intrigue. It is a certainty that dispenses with any verification in reality, and that has nothing to do with the enigmas and passions of the neurotic subject who suffers from a disjunction between love and jouissance. Lacan also points this out, in this same Seminar III, with regard to the difference between the delusion of jealousy and the intrigues of neuroses. These are two totally different positions of the Other.
Let's see how Lacan comments on this (on page 76 of the English edition of Seminar III) regarding the object and the subject's certainty:
‘You will then notice for example the extent to which the phenomenon of jealousy is different according to whether it presents itself in a normal or in a delusional subject. There is no need to recall at length what is humorous or even comical in the normal form of jealousy, which, one could say, spontaneously rejects certainty, whatever the reality is. There is the famous story of the jealous husband who pursues his wife to the door of the very bedroom in which she has locked herself with someone else. This contrasts sufficiently with the fact that the delusional exempts himself from any real references.’
This is an important clinical remark: the difference between the certainty of the psychotic subject – it is a certainty founded on its axiom on the object of the joy of the Other – and the intrigue of the neurotic subject that always depends on the question about the design of the Other.
A clinical example: “Yo amo”
I can give you a clinical example from my own experience, an example of the force with which this postulate can appear as a trigger for erotomania from a single signifier that became a sign, a sign interpreted by the subject as a sign of love from the Other. It is an example that I always keep in mind. In a talk I gave many years ago in a Spanish-speaking country, I mentioned love as a form of the master's discourse. If you allow me the irony, I will say that this observation could be taken as a precedent for the trans discourse that today points to love as an instrument of the master's discourse. It turns out that in Spanish, when I say: ‘I love’, ‘Yo amo’, the phrase can be understood in an equivocal way, because it also means ‘I master’. The Spanish amo is a master, the master of Hegel's master-slave dialectic. We can put a comma to punctuate that equivocal ‘I, master’. The discourse of the ‘I’ is, in effect, the discourse of the master of our time, also in what was the famous American Ego-psychology from which a large part of post-Freudian psychoanalysis derived. Today's psychology is also the Psychology of the master, the psychology of the ‘I, master’ that rejects the dimension of the unconscious.
Well, a few months after giving this talk on the ‘I love’, a woman (a psychiatrist, no less) showed up at my office in Barcelona, without warning, and blurted out the following to me: ‘you have opened the doors of my unconscious with this phrase, “I love”.’ You can imagine what came next: a florid erotomania triggered by this equivocal signifier that touched on the subject's postulate that ‘the Other loves me’. A series of delicate operations had to be carried out, also with the collaboration of colleagues from that other country, to manage a transference that was impossible to treat and interpret from the place marked by this postulate, a postulate that was itself an immovable interpretation. I will not detail for you the number of messages, of written histories that I received over a long period of time, always from the geographical remoteness implied by the distance of the Other that we have seen in Clérambault's clinical descriptions. I will only tell you that making myself the repository of that avalanche of writings from a distance was a good way to find a stabilisation for that subject.
Lacan's observation, which we find in his Seminar III on ‘The Psychoses’, and which undoubtedly follows on from Clérambault's observations, is very useful for understanding this form of stabilisation. You will find it on pages 42-43 of the English edition:
‘The other addressed in erotomania is very special, since the subject doesn't have any concrete relations with him, so much so that it has been possible to speak in terms of a mystical bond or platonic love. He is very often a distant object with whom the subject is happy to communicate in writing, without even knowing whether what's written will get to its destination. The least that can be said is that there is diverted alienation of the message. The accompanying depersonalisation of the other is apparent in that heroic perseverance through every trial, as the erotomaniacs will themselves say. The erotomaniacal delusion is addressed to such a neutralised other that he is inflated to the very dimensions of the world, since the universal interest attached to the adventure, as de Clérambault used to say, is an essential part of it.’
Indeed, the subject of erotomania does not need to verify anything either. The person I referred to earlier with the ‘I love you’ episode did not bother to come to Barcelona to verify or to find any answer from me to her postulate, she only came to offer me the testimony of that certainty. It was what had to be understood, without making the mistake of contradicting anything or wanting to clarify the misunderstanding, which would have had disastrous consequences. The subject of erotomania then remains in his place, at a distance from the Other, only to turn him into a repository, a testimony of that unshakeable certainty.
The interesting thing about this case is that the appearance of an equivocal signifier, a signifier in the real, we could say almost with the same force as a hallucinated signifier, was enough for this surprising clinical phenomenon to occur, the triggering of erotomania.
Encore Seminar
After this long journey, we can now find in the Encore Seminar a valuable indication for the study of erotomania. Because this seminar opens precisely with a formula where the two terms, love and jouissance, appear. Lacan launched the formula to his audience, an audience that also seemed to always ask for a little more, an Encore. It is a phrase that may seem strange and that poses some problems for the long-suffering English translator, Bruce Fink, who has had to include a long footnote. The phrase reads like this (it is on page 4 of the English edition): ‘Jouissance of the Other,’ of the Other with a capital O, ‘of the body of the Other who symbolises the Other, is not the sign of love.’
The phrase is ambiguous because it can refer to the jouissance that the subject finds in the body of the Other, but also to the jouissance that the Other finds in the body of the subject. They are not the same and, finally, it is very contradictory, because when it comes to jouissance there is nothing less certain than reciprocity between the subject and the Other. The subject can find a jouissance in the body of the Other in a way in which the Other finds no jouissance at all. And the reverse is equally true: the Other can find a jouissance in the body of the subject in a way in which the subject finds no jouissance at all. So, Lacan cannot say of jouissance what he said of desire: the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other. The jouissance of the subject, precisely, is not the jouissance of the Other; there is no reciprocity in the field of jouissance. Sade's experience is the most obvious example. Jouissance is not necessarily reciprocal; in fact, it never is if we continue to read this Encore seminar.
On the other hand, Lacan points out that ‘Love is always reciprocal’, always, which may seem strange to us. It is a strong statement, surprising to say the least: ‘Love is always reciprocal’. In fact, to love is always to ask to be loved, and if not, there is no love. And what about unrequited love? For Lacan, it does not exist; complaining that the Other does not love me is a silly complaint; it is seeking to be loved by the other without being the lover oneself. It is seeking to be the ‘eromenos’ (loved) without first being ‘erastés’ (lover). Then, true love is always reciprocal. True love is always a little crazy, a little delirious. It always has something of that crazy phrase: ‘he (or she) does not know it yet, but he (or she) loves me.’ Don't worry, he will know. That is the crazy certainty of love.
For love to be reciprocal, it must first make the place of the Other exist from which to establish this reciprocity. It must make the Other exist as such, make it exist as a radical alterity, not only as that which is different from me, but as the Other of me (the Other that is in me, the Other that divides me).
The limit of this position is erotomania, which is for Lacan inherent to the feminine position, as fetishism is inherent to the masculine position. Erotomania makes the Other exist with the certainty that the Other loves me. This can produce a subject as Schreber, whose delirious axiom was also this erotomaniac certainty, always present in psychoses.
Love is always reciprocal, but that does not mean that it is symmetrical. The reciprocity with the Other of love, of the love that makes the Other exist, is not the symmetry with the other, of the love that seeks to be loved by the other first. In neurosis, or also in the Christian imperative, love seeks a symmetry: it seeks ‘to love the other as myself.’ An imperative from which, as we know, Freud retreated because it seemed to him simply inhuman. One cannot love the other as oneself. It is the model, the ideal of narcissistic love: to love the other as myself, to reduce the other to something like me, to make the other the image of myself. It is an attempt to make the Other like me, to make him similar to myself. It is an attempt destined to failure, to impotence, to the point of becoming an inhuman imperative, which segregates what is not like myself from the other, which segregates the radical otherness of the Other.
It is for this reason that love was always linked for Freud to narcissism: to love the other and to love oneself in the other. Is there another love that is not narcissistic love? And ‘Encore’ is the seminar in which Lacan searches for a love beyond narcissism. The starting point of love is the ‘sign’ (a look, a glance, that of Beatrice for Dante, ‘a movement of the eyelid, less than nothing’ ‘three times nothing’ says Lacan, but which brings out the dimension of the Other, a dimension that Dante identifies with Beatrice's jouissance, but it is an ‘identification’ that is always virtual, never verified as such). What is a sign? This is a problem of language. Love is an experience that cannot be understood outside of language, it is an experience of meaning, starting from the sign.
On the contrary, when it comes to Jouissance, the starting point is not the sign, no longer the signifier. The starting point is the body. Jouissance is an experience of the body. ‘Sexuality’ (not genitality) will be precisely the translation of this experience in the field of language, of symbols, of signifier and sense: ‘joui-sens’ (a neologism of Lacan) condenses this sense and jouissance. But jouissance is that which has no sense. This is the ‘traumatic’ experience of every subject with jouissance (Cf. little Hans and the erection of his penis, what Lacan calls ‘the real penis’).
And of love? We can remember Shakespeare's poem: ‘To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit’: hearing, listening with the eyes is proper, corresponds to love's wit. Love has its silent side but love, above all, makes one speak. “Indeed, –Lacan says in this Seminar– people have done nothing but speak of love in analytic discourse.” (p. 83). There is a jouissance in speaking of love but love and jouissance are still separated.
So: how to reach, reunite jouissance and love? Lacan makes a promise at the end of chapter IV: “Love and the signifier”, (p. 50): “The course I will try to continue to steer in our next classes will show you where love and sexual jouissance meet up.” This is an enigma, because it is not obvious where Lacan will give the answer and will show it in this seminar. It seems he did not keep his promise. Instead, at the end of the Seminar (p. 146): true love is ‘the approach to being’ (that which escapes by definition), but also ‘true love gives way to hatred’ Therefore: ‘true love’ is not a pastoral, it is not a harmony between love and jouissance. True love, beyond the sweet and bitter narcissism of being loved, addresses the heart of being, the most real of the being of the other which implies something that is not lovable, that goes instead towards hate.
We see that the relationship between love and jouissance, between love and sexuality is not simple and that the dream of harmony between love and jouissance, of their complementarity (as a therapeutic ideal for example) is a madness, which goes towards ‘the worst’. Lacan's irony about the possibility of therapeutic action on the difficulties of love is present from the beginning of the Seminar. He starts with a play on words in French that the translator has had to explain in a footnote (page 1, note 2): ‘je vous en prie’ / ‘je vous en pire’ I beg you, be my worst’.
Then, we must ask the question again: Is there any love that is not narcissistic? Is there any love that is reciprocal without wanting to be symmetrical? This is the wager of psychoanalysis against a worse madness, that of wanting to love the other as myself to the point of abolishing him as an Other (principle of racism, of the segregation of the Other). Moreover, this religious imperative – to love the other as myself – presupposes first that I love myself. Which is not always certain, rather it is often the other way around. There is always something in myself that I do not love at all, and that does not seem at all lovable to me. First, this something is the unconscious itself. Loving one's own unconscious - the Other of me - is the beginning of psychoanalysis, although not always its possible end: to suppose a knowledge of the unconscious, some knowledge about myself that I myself do not know. It is the beginning of transference, when I make another - the analyst - bear this assumption: he is the subject supposed to know. To make the Other bear what I find unbearable about myself. It is not at all easy to bear this function of the analyst, it can become a little unbearable at times: to bear what the analysand cannot bear about himself. Although to bear it does not mean to feed it, it does not mean to promote it, but to support it, to sustain it from a position of object.
On the other hand, this is the most radical attempt at reciprocity in love: two unconscious knowledges that suppose each other, where I suppose that the other knows something about my being, especially about what I do not know about my own being. When this assumption ceases, then love ceases (and can become hate, which is another form of knowledge about being, more accurate and certain, as Lacan says at the end of this Seminar Encore).
The reciprocity of love is the reciprocity of two forms of knowledge that support each other. Transference, however, is not reciprocal in the analytic device, there is no intersubjectivity there. (This is the criticism that Lacan made of himself in 1967: transference is not intersubjective in the analytic device, there is no possible intersubjectivity there.) The analyst is there only as the object cause of love, as the cause of the lover who is the true subject of the analytic experience. Making each subject a lover. That would be the logic of analytic love, without expecting to be loved.
It is always a feminine position, the position of a subject who is always ready to say: ‘love, encore’, encore, and always encore. In fact, it seems an untenable position in our age, an age of declining discourse on love. Contemporary civilisation needs such subjects, lovers, also lovers of the analytical cause that is not always friendly, in every sense of the word.
Jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love.
To conclude, let us return then to Lacan's initial formula in the seminar Encore: “Jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love” (page 4).
We can now say that the exception to this statement can give us precisely a formula for erotomania: Jouissance of the Other is not the sign of love... except in erotomania. When a sign becomes not only a sign of love but also a sign of jouissance, then we have an erotomania.
Erotomania is triggered precisely when the subject finds a sign of the Other's love that is also a sign of his jouissance. A sign of whose jouissance? The subject's or the Other's? Well, therein lies the whole problem of erotomania.
For the analytic experience to be possible, love must be made into a contingent encounter, not a necessary one. This is what distinguishes love of transference from erotomaniac love and it is also what allows a love of the unconscious: the contingency of the signifier. Love is that contingent encounter with a sign of which we will never know if it had any necessary law. But it is a decisive contingency in the life of each subject. And it is also on that contingent encounter that the very analytic experience depends.
I leave you, then, with a question, a real question for me too. It is a question on whose answer I believe the very future of psychoanalysis depends in order to continue to make the love of transference, the love of the unconscious, exist. The question is this: without the erotomaniac background that the feminine makes present, and which Lacan situated as structural in the feminine position of the analyst, would love exist? Would there be love of the unconscious, a necessary condition of psychoanalytic discourse? Would psychoanalysis itself exist?
Miquel Bassols
February 2025
G.G. de Clérambault, L'érotomanie. Les empécheurs de tourner en rond, Paris 1993.
W. W. Norton & Company, New York - London 1998, p. 4.
