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Bruce Fink is a distinguished author, translator, and practitioner of Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this recent work he explores concepts of love in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, with an emphasis on the theories of Freud and Lacan. His wide-ranging approach takes up questions of desire, passion, infatuation, sexuality, durable love, and their cultural and historical variations. Along the way, he comments on popular culture and clinical material to convey the myths and mysteries of these universal human experiences. Fink does not attempt a comprehensive review of the subject, omitting, for example, Bergmann's important work on repetition and regression in relationships (1982, 1988) and Kernberg's object relations approach to love (1998). Nor does he cover the varied formulations suggested by Lacan over his long career. Fink focuses principally on Lacan's reading of Plato's Symposium in his Seminar VIII, in which he develops a model of transference love.
Both Freud and Lacan had a lot of things to say about love and its role in psychoanalysis. Freud famously discussed love triangles, the tension between object love and narcissism, the separation of sexual from tender feelings, and the residues of oedipal conflicts in intimate relationships. In his early period, Lacan replaced libidinal motives with the phenomenological notion of a desire that cannot be reduced to drives or object relations, but is inherent in intersubjectivity. “Man's desire is the desire of the Other,” he wrote, borrowing from Hegel's ambiguous phrase. To imitate or fulfill the Other's desire, however, evokes a childish wish for union, not the limited satisfactions of an actual relationship with another subject. In this regard, Lacan distinguished between imaginary love, seeking fusional mirroring of an ideal self, and symbolic love, which accepts incompleteness and separation. The tension between the two makes