That is, Fink explores the experience of love as much through Freud as he does Lacan (Fink’s bibliography lists 23 works by Freud, 22 by Lacan), which makes sense given that one must go through Freud to get to Lacan. But Seminar VIII is by no means the sole focus of Fink’s book, nor Lacan the only player. Fink therefore frames his reflections on Lacan (and love) in a way that will be most accessible to his audience, who, if they know anything about the man already, know he’s a bear to read. To be sure, Seminar VIII is, according to Fink, “Lacan’s most sustained treatment of love from the symbolic perspective” as well as “perhaps, the easiest to grasp” of the three psychic registers through which-theorized Lacan-we experience ourselves, the world, and our relationships with others. But none of this has deterred Bruce Fink, himself a psychoanalyst, and a Lacanian one at that, from making a smart go of it in his superb Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference-a book delightfully more rangy and Eros-laden than its tightly corseted subtitle would suggest. Possible answers to such a quest abound of course, far more numerous in fact than Browning could have counted, and plumbless perhaps as the deep blue. The mind’s breach may be a sinkhole into which others sometimes blindly step, but it’s also, for the psychotherapist and her patient, a potential portal of discovery, a way into why and how it is we love as we do. If she were a psychotherapist then maybe she might have an easier time of it, my friend tells me, but she isn’t, and so is doomed, like the rest, to take her leave. Once more unto the breach, my friend tells me, once more, this despite last summer’s debacle when he suggested to his then- soulmate that they take things a step further, and she in reply told him that things weren’t working, that she in fact would be leaving, that it wasn’t him of course but her, a deflection he had long been wise to because the one before her, the one whose name even now he can’t bring himself to mention, told him years ago the same thing, that things weren’t working, that it wasn’t him but her, that she was leaving, a terminus in retrospect as dishonest as it was disturbing though he didn’t know then what he knows now, that it was indeed him after all, and, what’s more, it had always been him, his propensity to cling too much to bear for the women who walked out, and now, he’s afraid, for the one walking in, unto the breach, the breach of his psyche, once more.
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