This is such a good interview from the Freud museum:
https://www.podbean.com/ep/pb-dwkv3-6753df
It’s particularly fascinating on the contemporary nature of reciprocity in love. He reflects on classical ideas of the lover and the beloved as distinct roles, reflecting heterogeneous experiences of love, in contrast to a modern sense of romantic love predicated on the ideal of loving and being loved. This is distinct in turn from the tradition of courtly love in which “‘woman’ becomes elevated into a god like creature endowed with all the virtues of beauty and truth”, something which Fink suggests has ‘infected’ contemporary ideas of romantic love. If I understand correctly he’s saying it’s a kind of moral objectification which eviscerates intersubjectivity and the possibilities for intimacy inherent in it. In the process creating an external category of women who these courtly men perceive as lacking such virtues. The elevated idealisations of courtly love reflect and in turn externalise a deep misogyny.
I was struck by how he described the “imaginary and symbolic conundrums, positions which people feel forced into by the romantic love coming towards them from another person; do I then identify with the ideals, do I try to become like the other person wants me to be, do I try to embody that ideal of beauty, truth, wisdom, virtue of every kind?”. He talks about objet a as a component of love which people tend to be unaware of when they come into analysis, initially offering narrative fragments which soon give way to recognising underlying moments of identification; that which was stirred up in profound and affecting ways by seemingly superficial characteristics of the object of desire. There is a fleeting but overpowering hope of filling a primordial lack which unfolds in these moments, the desperate pursuit of which constitutes the motor for the subsequent trajectory of a relationship; the clinging to a jouissance which was always already lost, to the extent that those imaginary and symbolic conundrums make it impossible for either partner to inhabit their own existence in a relaxed way. Fink talks about how one might be inclined to try and consciously make oneself into the object-cause of desire (as would the case for example, if this libidinal investment was withdrawn by one partner while for the other it persisted) contrasting this with the impulse to identify with the ideals through which that desire is narrativised.
Mark Carrigan 