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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11398/
Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Eighth Annual Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups (APW) Conference "On Love" at the University of Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce a special lecture at Slought Foundation by noted Psychoanalyst and Translator Bruce Fink on Saturday, March 29, 2008 from 5:30-7:00pm, moderated by Patricia Gherovici.
What are psychoanalysts talking about when they speak of love? If the aim of the cure is to restore the analysand’s ability to work and love, is it, in the terms of Freud's famous opposition, anaclitic-type or narcissistic-type object love that must be recovered? Is it fixation on a lost object, of whichever variety, that must be overcome? Or is it that love and desire have diverged—“where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love”—and must be encouraged to fuse? Is it romantic love that psychoanalysis enables, by inciting the analysand's passion for the analyst?
Lacan's contributions to the study of love span the half-century of his published work, and include—just to scratch the surface—discussions of the imaginary passion of jealousy in Family Complexes; narcissistic love arising from the mirror stage; love as giving what you don't have in Écrits; courtly love and the relations between love, beauty, and the Thing in the Ethics seminar; love as a “comical feeling,” the miracle of love, and the "metaphor of love" in his reading of Plato's Symposium; the “uranian love” of André Gide; and the suggestion of a possible subject-to-subject love beyond desire in Seminar XX.
In his presentation, Bruce Fink will address topics such as these, concerning love as a pivotal force in analytic treatment and in life more generally, and outline some of the features of Lacan’s theory of love—indeed, perhaps of his multiple theories of love.
Click here for a full schedule of the conference proceedings [PDF, 600kb]
The “malady of being two” [mal d’être deux] from which . . . patients suffer hardly frees them from Narcissus’ problem. It is a mortal passion that ends up taking its own life. -— Lacan, Le Minotaure
Bruce Fink is a Lacanian Psychoanalyst, Member of the Ecole de la Cause freudienne, and Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University.
This program is made possible in part through the generous sponsorship or support of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups (APW) and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.
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