Vies amoureuses [Love Lives]
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Abstract
Twice a year, the journal Libres cahiers pour la psychanalyse takes a text by Freud for debate and gathers theoretical, clinical and culturally related papers on the subject. The issue, Vies amoureuses, is inspired by the Contributions to the Psychology of Love, published in 1910 (A special type of object choice made by men [Freud, 1910a]), 1912 (On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love [Freud, 1912]) and 1918 (The taboo of virginity [Freud, 1918]), which were published together in French with some other texts in a volume entitled La vie sexuelle. This is a weighty issue that, I think, is representative of this journal’s balance between highquality cultural references, precise clinical writings and rigorous theoretical research. The volume opens on a spirited note, with a text by Jean-Christophe Cavallin, a professor of literature, a variation on The taboo of virginity that presides over “the opening” of reading a text, for which the paradigm is Mallarm e’s sonnet, Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui [The virgin, vigorous and beautiful today]. Cavallin explains that for Mallarm e poetry is a speech that strives for virginity so as to escape the ‘commerce’ of language, criticized as factual, but above all carnal. “Entering” a text is a desecration that is mitigated by an author’s formulation of his intentions. I cannot do justice here to the brilliant explanation of the literary text that he gives us – it has to be read – although the conclusion about identification as a way of not being the first to stake your life, which is easily understood in the literary register, does not transfer well to the psychoanalytic level. I will bring together here the texts that focus on a cultural reference, which are as rich as might be expected on the theme of the love life. . . Josiane Rolland’s highly documented presentation resituates Freud’s writings on love in the Vienna of his day, and weaves a counterpoint between these and Arthur Schnitzler’s writings, showing how close, even “familiar”, they are in their thinking. Apart from the two men’s meetings, mainly through reading but also in person, having each lost a beloved daughter, she provides for each article by Freud a connection with Schnitzler’s themes: the incompleteness of the man’s love life, his incurable overvaluation of the maternal object, the incapacity for satisfaction in female hysteria, the traumatic dimension of sexuality that is revealed by defloration. The essential difference between the two approaches remains, with Schnitzler setting out to describe what Freud later terms the preconscious in a refusal to take an interest, bordering on denigration, in the method of exploring the unconscious.