Literature and its modality of love: a psychoanalytic approach

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has always needed art, in special literature, but also, visual and scenic art to reveal what theory cannot see, by representing structures and procedures of psychical and social functioning. In these terms, Lacan will read this primordial love, which is the love of his own reflection, under the sign of Narcissus myth, as well as the transferential love, themed by Freud, will be calledunder the sign of Symposium, being as an assumption of knowledge, that knows nothing beyond Alcibiades´ desire for Agathon, or as the master´s speech, for assigning the love philia in place of the seductive agalma. The psychoanalysis will also address the tragic love from Antigone´s lesson, the one who gave even what she did not have, in name of human dignity. Whereas the love-passion comes under the heading bovarysme, romantic expression of a loving desire that, in frustration, will end up on melancholy, as a prelude to death. The comic love, on Molière´s sentence, will be the love that degrades the Other, so that the individual does not require the death of love. The love for thinking comes in terms of the one who loves the love itself, whose model will be the Provencal courtly love. At last, on Lacan, Beatrice´s love will illuminate Dante´s sublimation path towards the empty meaning of eternal love. For that, Lacan will remind us, in his homage to Marguerite Duras, that the artist will always precede the psychoanalyst on unknown paths, both in relation to knowledge and love…