Lacan put love on a separate route from Freud’s by separating transference (love) from repetition. Fajnwaks states: ‘Thereby giving love a certain dignity’. Freud thematises love in relation to the object:  insofar as it becomes the support (Ahlenung) of narcissism. Freud mistrusts love for “transference is the re-edition of past attachments in the present and the vector of a repetition of the old clichés present in a subject’s way of loving. There is nothing new in this encounter with the analyst, and the possibility of contingency in love present in the type of object chosen remains closed to the Father of psychoanalysis. “

Fanjwaks makes explicit the way love differs in the feminine and masculine positions reiterating how love and desire go together: “desire allows a man to love a woman without falling into incest. Conversely, women believe they love because love allows them to give free rein to desire, but in reality, when they believe they truly love, they desire.” With love we find “a suspension of the impossibility of writing the sexual relation that contingency introduces into the impossibility, but this suspension lasts for the duration of the love, that is to say not for long”… as love is painful.

“Love is referred to the Law, ‘the only place where it can live’, but it is approached as an empty signification. An analysis makes it possible for a speaking being to confront the invariability of the object of his desire and simultaneously empties the object of love, which the transference allows to happen, but also analyses the conditions of a subject’s neurosis, where the symbolic Father condenses much of the subject’s love.”

Love is therefore more exposed to indeterminacy: by being on the side of signification and not meaning it creates the possibility of contingency in the amorous encounter. Love is a symptom governed by discourse “which is not properly a discourse because it does not constitute a barrier to jouissance, but rather produces more jouissance through the fluidity of jouissance between the four terms. Language is impoverished because the link between S1 and S2 does not give rise to a subject, speech is reduced to become a tool for transmitting information.”

For Fajnwaks, psychoanalysis can bring subversion to the capitalist discourse, “not by promoting a ‘love for all’, a ‘love one another’, but by shedding light on the basis of what makes us love and our conditions of love. The only possible way to achieve ‘a more civilised love’ as Lacan puts it, is to be divested of jouissance. »