ABSTRACT

In his seminar on transference, Lacan resorts to a commentary on Plato's Symposium in order to examine the questions posed by love and its object. Love goes out to the beloved who appears to posses the object of the lack. For Lacan the ego is looking for something in the object that refers back to an ego-image, and this is why he follows S. Freud in conceiving of love as something intrinsically narcissistic. In the Symbolic dimension of the transference, it is the paternal phallus that functions as a placeholder for emptiness or the agalma as a token of social power. However, in the Real of an Other jouissance, the agalma is simply the wondrous emptiness at the core of being. Lacan says that love within the Real or Real love is directed not at what the love-object has but at the emptiness within and beyond the object.