In this era, when there seems to be an increase in hatred, action, even violence as aspects of public and private discourse, some think it is important to study what Lacan tells us about love, which itself can be painful but some forms of which may lead to peace and the positive development of human beings. “Painful loves“ is the title of the major English Lacan international conference this May 2025 and this description will use phrases from the Argument written by Patricia Bosquin-Caroz.

Lacan first discussed love at length in Seminar VIII, Transference, emphasizing “the function of lack at the heart of the problem of love” and giving the startling phrase “love is giving what you don’t have”. Always there is “dissymmetry between the lover and beloved”; since neither partner is or has exactly what the other seeks, neither is completely satisfied and the metaphor of “love makes up for the sexual non-relation”. Lacan explores details about the relation between Alcibiades and Socrates, and other participants in the conversation about love in Plato’s Symposium. He refers to the supposed object in Socrates that Alcibiades seeks as the agalma, In Seminar XIV, The Logic of the Fantasm, Lacan draws from Freud’s ideas about love as a narcissistic phenomenon related to the Ego Ideal and “falling in love” as ego-depleting and therefore precarious. In Television, Lacan correlates sadness and depression with a moral failing, a failure to be Well-spoken in terms of the truth of one’s unconscious. In Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis and in Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge Lacan describes the emergence in the Middle Ages of courtly love. Passionate love between the couple was refused (another example of there being no relation between the sexes) and the man had to woo his Lady through the invention of discourse. The “man deals with this by idealizing the Lady and valorising her inaccessibility, while the amorous discourse feeds on lack, mourning, loss and death.”

In contemporary times we have moved in the ordering relations of the sexes from the vertical logic of the “Age of the Father” to a horizontal logic, by networks, in the era of the not-all (Jaques-Alain Miller). New forms of love relationships are explored. Changes in the typical configurations of couples have changed the discourse of failed love from that based on lack and the lost object of the unattainable Ideal to the failure of love as experienced on the imaginary dominant-dominated axis. Suddenly new signifiers of the battle between the sexes illustrated this – control, manipulation, forcing, abuse – as well as a contrasting “consensual form of love being promoted based on mutual recognition and governed essentially by the homeostatic principle of the pleasure principle.”

We hope that these and other topics, including case material, will provide ample opportunity for discussion and study by the participants.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Itemize various aspects of love that Lacan presented in his work.
2. Consider the desire, drives and psychic agencies involved in various experiences of love.
3. Consider the effects of Lacan’s emphasis on discourse in the field of love.
4. Consider the varieties of ways in which failures of love are experienced.
5. Consider whether and how the discourse of love can or might make any inroads on the contemporary flooding of the social field of hate.

Judith Hamilton, MD (Ret’d), FRCPC Psych

Psychoanalyst. She teaches in the Extension Program of the TPS. She is a co-founder of Lacan Toronto. Member TPS&I.

Reza Naderi, PhD

Reza Naderi, PhD is a computer scientist and an author and researcher in the areas of logic, mathematical philosophy, and theories of the subject. He is the author of Badiou, Infinity, and Subjectivity (Rowman & Littlefield).

Carlos Rivas, PhD, RP

Studied psychology, philosophy, and social sciences in Venezuela. He trained in Gestalt Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Motivational Interviewing, Focusing, and EMDR, and in 2005 was the recipient of the Venezuelan National Award for Research in Psychotherapy. He has a private practice in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Member of Lacan Toronto; Guest of the TPS.

Alireza Taheri, PhD, RP

Wrote his dissertation for the University of Cambridge on Nietzsche, Freud, and Lacan. He also holds an MA in philosophy from Essex and an MSc in psychoanalytic thought from University College London. He has done psychoanalytic work in London (UK). He works in private practice in Toronto. Member TPS&I.