Intervenció a Lacanian Compass: 4/10/25
Of the three terms in this title, the second, Jouissance, is undoubtedly the strangest to someone outside our field, the Freudian field oriented by the teaching of Lacan.
Jouissance is a term that seem to resist translation and that has crossed the linguistic border between French and English as such. 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 his torturous fantasy in which rats were inserted into the victim's anus. 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. , 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 , 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 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 and precisely 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 field. 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. And this is something that has fundamental consequences in the field of love, the first term of the title.
The third term is “misunderstandings”. In fact, right after giving the title of this conference to Letícia López, I thought in fact, love itself is a misunderstanding. Love is the misunderstanding par excellence. True love always has a misunderstanding at its origin.
You can read Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice, for example, or any other work), or even Marcel Proust to understand this, to understand that the best love is always a good misunderstanding. And when the misunderstanding disappears, love itself disappears. Then it can turn into hatred.
On the contrary there is no misunderstanding when it comes to jouissance. Jouissance is always certain. But therefore, there is always a misunderstanding between love, that is founded in a misunderstanding, and jouissance.
First loves, between reminiscence and contingency
I will start with a Freudian leitmotif: “On revient toujours à ses premiers amours,” says a proverb in the French language quoted a couple of times by Sigmund Freud throughout his work: “One always returns to one's first loves.” It is not so much about love as repetition but about love as reminiscence, as the presence of an original past, towards the impossible reunion with the lost object. This phrase seems to go against the idea that there is always new in love. Is there anything new if one always returns to one's first loves? Let's look at Freud's reference of this idea. It is found in his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, from 1905, regarding fetishism as a structural feature of infantile sexuality The choice of fetish is based on childhood sexual impressions. The fetish object is chosen—and there is always fetishism in love, especially on the male side—according to a fetishistic trait from childhood. Freud thus refers to “the survival of first love in normal people.” In fact, for Freud there is always a trait of polymorphous perversion, of fetishism, in love, in what survives from childhood sexuality. This observation already indicates that there is an irreducible polarity between and sexuality, between love and sexual jouissance, which in German is condensed into the single term used by Freud, “Lieben,” meaning both love and jouissance. It is a polarity that runs through Western history, especially in the theological debate between divine love and carnal love, and it is a polarity that Lacan will rework until his Seminar “Encore,” following the references of that debate: there is an internal disjunction between the conditions of jouissance and the conditions in the choice of the love object.
But we can now ask ourselves: what are “first loves”? Is it the first romantic encounter, the first sexual encounter? Freud refers to infantile sexuality as a first logical stage in the constitution of the sexual object. Puberty is necessary to move on to the second logical stage, the moment of concluding with a sexual identification. Would the first object of love be the mother, for both sexes? We can go even further back: wouldn't the first object of love ultimately be one's own image? Lacan's famous mirror stage is, in fact, the first experience of jouissance through the mirror image, and it is also the subject's first falling in love. One loves one's own image in the image of the other, or one loves oneself in the other. Therefore: is love always narcissistic? Lacan affirms this at various moments (cf. Seminar “Encore”), although he leaves open the possibility of something beyond. Is there something beyond narcissism in love? This question runs parallel to another: Is there something beyond the Oedipus complex in love?
The Freudian version of love— “one always returns to one's first loves”—is the version of an Oedipal love: one that “contaminates,” as Lacan indicates, the choice of the object of love, both for men and for women. Is love a pure narcissistic mirage in which the subject believes he or she finds his or her first objects of love, his or her first choices?
Three short love stories
To illustrate these questions, I have selected three short stories for us to explore—three stories we can discuss later. They function as three concise clinical vignettes on love, jouissance, and their inherent misunderstandings.
I will put them in series. Love is always a knot of three. There are no two without three, as they say, but we have also needed the three Lacanian registers to talk about love: the imaginary in love—the image of the body, the narcissistic image—the symbolic in love—the Oedipus, the phallus, and beyond—and the real in love. Here the question persists: what is love in the real?
These three short loves stories go from the imaginary to the real, passing through the symbolic. They are also three stories about Lacan's aphorism: "There is no sexual relationship."
1. Imaginary register: Is there any love beyond narcissism?
The first story is about the misunderstanding of narcissism and jealousy, a love story that Lacan referred to several times in his teaching, the story of Alphonse Allais' short play, “Un drame bien parisien”, “A Thoroughly Parisian Drama”. It is the story of a happy misunderstanding in the imaginary register, the happy misunderstanding of the imaginary fantasies between two lovers. I will summarize it for you.
Raoul and Marguerite are two youthful lovers who are constantly fighting and quarreling due to misunderstandings. Each one is jealous of the other, and each one receives a secret letter, stating that each one is being unfaithful to the other. If Raoul wishes to verify this, all he needs to do, says the message, is go to the oncoming masked ball: his beloved will be there, dressed as a Congolese Kano (small boat). Marguerite receives a letter of the same type: go to the ball, your beloved will be there, disguised as a Harlequin. This way, each one will be able to know if their partner is being unfaithful. This is the secret invitation to a masked ball, each to verify or not their jealous fears. The evening of the ball, two figures can be seen boring themselves to death and staring at each other from behind their masks: a Congolese Kano, and a Harlequin...
Finally, he approaches her and asks her to dance. This short story ends in a private quarter, where the two will take off their masks; and then –peak of consternation– the story concludes: surprise! He was not he; she was not she. The Harlequin, was not Raoul... The Kano, was not Marguerite... After which the two young lovers agree never to quarrel again, and they were very happy!
And, indeed, the moment the masks of the imaginary reciprocity of love fall, neither he is he, nor she is she. Usually, this moment of truth is also the moment of a deep division, even a breakup, of disenchantment and disagreement in love. Sometimes it is also the moment of a turn toward the deepest hatred. Each person is not themselves, but their unconscious their jouissance as irreducible otherness. The non-identity of the subject with themselves, which we note with the crossed-out S, $, of the Lacanian matheme, is the effect of irreducible division beyond, or beneath, narcissistic reciprocity.
Love is always a demand for this reciprocity, but jouissance is never reciprocal. In the field of jouissance, there is no Other of the Other; the other of the other is not the subject but only the narcissistic image of his or herself. This is what it means in the first place that “there is no sexual relationship”; there is no symmetry, but there is also no reciprocity. And love must necessarily pass through this point of non-reciprocity of jouissance to sustain itself, to be bearable, in the field of desire, as the desire of the Other. This is what Lacan will translate in his aphorism: “Only love allows jouissance to condescend to desire,” only love allows us to do something with the non-reciprocity of jouissance in the non-relationship between the sexes.
Alphonse Allais' story then ends well: once this irreducible otherness in the other is recognized, this non-identity of each with oneself, this non-reciprocity, there is a reconciliation, and the lovers will never argue again. It is an optimistic ending for love when the non-sexual relationship is verified in the misunderstanding of the imaginary of love.
So: there is something beyond narcissism in love, when it is verified that there is no sexual relationship that can be written in the real. But we will say that it is something that must be verified repeatedly, in each case and each time anew, as it seems that it is not valid once and for all. That phrase “there is no sexual relationship... that can be written” is more of a bet than a confirmed truth, a bet that must be confronted each time, each time the masks fall. “I will love you forever,” a man says to a woman in his phallic vision of love as an imaginary unity, following his logic of “everything”: forever. “All my life?” the woman replies, “I would be satisfied if you loved me every day,” every day, taken one by one. In the register of the real, it is a matter of “one by one,” never once and for all; there is no axiom that applies to all cases, as the scientism of our age would sometimes like. The commitment to love requires confronting this axiom each time to confirm it... or not.
2. Symbolic register: Is there any love beyond Oedipus?
“Beyond the imaginary of narcissism”, however, does not mean “beyond Oedipus”. Let us see how this beyond can be approached in the symbolic register by following the second love story I have chosen. It is a short Zen story, another misunderstanding in love between the sexes. I quote:
"After a long pilgrimage, a man buys a mirror in the city market, an object that is completely strange and magical to him. He believes he recognizes in it the face of his beloved father, who died some time ago. He takes the strange object home with him, full of joy, and locks it in a trunk, carefully wrapped in a veil. On days when he feels sad and lonely, he goes to meet his father in this precious object. So many times, in fact, that his wife begins to suspect something. One day, she follows him, sees him open the trunk, smiling with great joy for a long time. She waits for another day when her husband is away from home to go and see what is in the trunk. She lifts the veil and what does she find? A woman. Consumed by jealousy, the woman makes a scene with her husband. A big argument ensues, based on the greatest of misunderstandings. Fortunately, a Zen monk happens to be passing by the house at that moment, and the husband and wife ask him to intervene in the fight, to go and look inside the trunk and settle the real object of the dispute. When the monk returns, he declares the following: “The trunk contains neither a man nor a woman: it is only a monk.”
“It is only a monk.” Here too: neither he was he, nor she was she, nor was each what they believed the other to be. If the mirror embodies for the man his Oedipal identification with the beloved and dead father, for the woman it embodies the figure of the other woman as the object of her jealousy, where both signify the desire of the Other. The phallic mirror is then only a semblance in the Oedipal dialectic that captures the desire of each, including the monk. And the name of the father, of the dead father, is revealed yet another semblance that cannot make exist the relationship between the sexes.
If the man suffers from a longing for the dead father, a very religious longing, to the same extent the woman suffers from an even more justified jealousy. The veil that covers the object is fundamental here; it is the veil of the phallus that shows that the object that causes desire can never be fully revealed. What each person finds is an image that functions as a new veil, perhaps the last, before the object that causes desire: it is their own image. But it is also the signifier of love for the dead father, the name that comes in place of what cannot be named in the place of the Other, which attempts to make it complete and consistent at the same time. But a certain shift is enough to reveal the difference between the sexes and, at the same time, the incompleteness and inconsistency of that place of the Other.
We are in the passage from the logic of “for all”, the logic of the phallus and the Oedipus, to the logic of the “not for all” that reveals the structural misunderstanding between the sexes. Where he placed the purest love (it could also be maternal love), she finds the most impure, most unfaithful jouissance. And this without realizing that, on the other hand, hidden in that image of the other woman is the enigma of her own femininity, of the womanhood she rejects in her own complaint. Under the veil, there is yet another veil, that of the object in the place of a semblance before the real. Finally, beyond the series of Oedipal semblances, in the real, a mirror is only a mirror, identical to itself.
Let us also note that in the register of objectivity, in the register of accuracy that today's scientism defends at all costs, there is no possible solution: each person observes what they see and not what the Other sees. At this point, any treatment by “cognition,” any attempt to correct erroneous thinking to adapt behavior and observation to the reality of the other, fails from the outset, destined as it is to compound the misunderstanding in the deceptions of a false . The Zen monk may well be cognitive psychologist of our time who, with his best instruments of evaluation, attempts to capture the truth of the subject with the accuracy of his observations. The more accurate and verified his observations and evaluations are, the more the misunderstanding between love and jouissance will increase.
3. Love awaits the real
Here comes the third love story I wanted to evoke. This time it is a story taken from reality itself, although it also shows that truth has the structure of fiction. It even shows this better than the previous two because it really happened. It is a love story in the age of the Internet. The news appeared some time ago in the British newspaper Daily Telegraph with the headline “In love with each other on the net,” and I think it is a paradigm of the misunderstandings of the contemporary subject between love and jouissance in their encounters with the real.
He and she met in a chat room and, after an initial exchange of words, immediately began confiding in each other about their respective marriages, about the boredom and problems that each of them experiencing. She called “Sweetie,” he called himself “Prince of Joy” (of jouissance). After a period of virtual , they finally decided to set the long-awaited date. Then, at the virtual masquerade ball, the moment came to drop the masks and, oh surprise! He was he, she was she! In other words, they discovered that they were husband and wife. Unlike the “Very Parisian Drama,” the story does not end well, as they report each other to the courts for manifest infidelity. She stated that everything was so fantastic in the chat, he stated that he still couldn't believe that the Sweetie who had written such wonderful things to him was really the same woman he had married and who had not said a single loving word to him in all these years. What ultimately becomes unbearable and grounds for complaint is the division of each subject with themselves, their division in the face of something impossible to symbolize, in the face of something that is the very limit of the symbolic bond with the Other and whose jouissance then becomes as present as it is unbearable.
At this juncture, each is unfaithful to the other with themselves. Or rather: each is unfaithful to the other with their own fantasy. Or also: each is unfaithful to the other with their own unconscious, about which they want to know nothing. Lacan pointed this out very precisely in the case of the feminine position by stating that a woman can always be suspected of deceiving the man with God, with God taken as one of the names of the jouissance of the Other, of the “Prince of Jouissance.” But here God is on the other side of the chat, two mouse clicks away, without the need for any mystical trance.
In this case, it is not a question of the beneficial effects of confirming the subjective division, as in the “Very Parisian Drama”; it is no longer a question of discovering with surprise that he is not him and that she is not her either, of consenting to love the non-relationship between the sexes, to the non-identity of the subject with himself. Nor is it about consenting to the existence of the unconscious under the phallic veil, love of the unconscious, the misunderstanding sustained in love for the father, and a return to first loves, whether Oedipal, pre-Oedipal, post-Oedipal, or anti-Oedipal. It is about the most absolute, purest, and harshest rejection of subjective division, of not wanting to know anything about it; it is about the rejection of any index of the unconscious as a knowledge that does not know itself and that manifests itself in that division.
The contemporary subject is the subject who wants nothing to do with the signs of his subjective division in the face of jouissance, in the face of his ideal objects of jouissance and love. The nightmare of the contemporary subject is the identity of his own self, his delusion of identity with himself.
Love and jouissance in the Encore Seminar
After these three short stories, we can now find in the Encore Seminar a valuable . Because this seminar opens precisely with a formula where the two terms, love and jouissance, appear. Lacan launched the to his audience. 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 symbolizes 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. 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.
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 like myself. It is an attempt destined to failure, to impotence, to the point of becoming an inhuman, 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? ‘Encore’ is the seminar in which Lacan searches for a love beyond narcissism.
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’.
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: to suppose a knowledge of the unconscious, some knowledge about myself that I do not know. It is the beginning of transference, when I make the Other - 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 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.
To conclude
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. There is always an erotomaniac trait in misunderstandings between love and jouissance. 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 a contingent encounter, not a necessary one. This is what distinguishes love of transference from erotomaniac love and it is also what allows to love 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 we call transference love, that the very analytic experience depends. Like psychoanalysis itself.
Allais, Alphonse, “Un drame bien parisien.” Ornicar? 28, printemps 1984, diffusion Seuil, pp. 151-155.
W. W. Norton & Company, New York - London 1998. London, February 2025.
