Abstract
Psychoanalytically speaking, it is possible to claim that one is always within a scene of love. This means that the way we make sense of the world and the way we relate to it, that is, our libidinal disposition, what we desire, and we could even say “how we desire,” cannot be thought of as pertaining to different and independent registers. On the contrary, meaning and desire always inform each other. By offering a close reading of Freud and Lacan’s conceptualization of transference and by focusing on the affective force of the “scene,” in this essay, I argue that the kernel of psychoanalysis – the scene of love – involves an aesthetic experience insofar it destabilizes the temporal and spatial/topographical dimensions and registers of meaning and desire (or nodal points and libidinal landscapes) and the way they inform the way we love. Furthermore, I ponder whether such an aesthetic conceptualization of transference allows us to rethink the psychoanalytic “act” in ways in which it moves away from the singularity of the event toward the multiplicity and heterogeneity of always converting bodies.
Thanks to Derek Hook for his most valuable feedback to some of the ideas discussed in this chapter and to Fernanda Palacios for her psychoanalytic wisdom and guidance during the writing process.
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Notes
- 1.
Political theorist Ernesto Laclau theorized this as “heterogeneity.” For details of his conceptualization see my “Becoming the People. A Critique of Populist Aesthetics of Homogeneity” (2019).
- 2.
See Chaps. 1 and 2 of my Radical Sociality: Studies on Disobedience, Violence and Belonging (2013) for a comprehensive discussion on the notions of void, lack, and undecidability, notions I consider to be at the core of the problem psychosocial studies addresses. There I mobilize a dialogue between Heidegger, Ricoeur, Derrida, Freud, and Lacan.
- 3.
I’m using the term rather loosely to think with the body as the space where meaning and wanting in their interruptions, repetitions, and creations takes place. That is, I’m not using the term conversion in a narrow or medicalized way.
- 4.
- 5.
At this point and revising the notions of narcissism and libido, Freud states that the view of ego instincts as different from sexual instincts is no longer tenable, as it is possible to see how the libido is originally directed toward the ego (primary narcissism). What is interesting for us is that by doing this, Freud is confronted with a new aporia, one related to the relation between love and sadism. He asks: “how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim it is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life?” (ibid., p. 54). His answer to this poses a new question: “Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death drive which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function (..) Whenever the original sadism has undergone no mitigation or intermixture, we find the familiar ambivalence of love and hate in erotic life” (ibid., p. 54).
- 6.
Lacan also introduces at this point a critique of the idea of narcissism, which might be relevant to further understand his theorizing of transference as different from Freud’s: “Doesn’t everybody know by now that Freud mistakenly thought that was all there was in the masochistic constant? Narcissism supposedly explained everything. (…). I was already restive regarding the function of the narcissistic wound, but that’s of no importance” (ibid., p. 11). As anticipated too, Lacan approaches the question of lack from a different angle than Freud. If lack as we saw earlier was related to that experience where the self is inevitably injured (what Freud refers to the “narcissistic scar left by infantile sexual life characterized by the most painful feelings of loss” of love and failure), Lacan is not interested that much in narcissism as he is, I would say, interested in a more “existential type of castration.”
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Funding Acknowledgement
This chapter was developed as part of the research project, Waiting Times, funded by the Wellcome Trust [205400/A/16/Z] (see waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk).
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Palacios, M. (2024). The Scene of Love. In: Frosh, S., Vyrgioti, M., Walsh, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30366-1_16
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