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The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan

Author(s) : Juan-David Nasio, Translator : David Pettigrew, Translator : Francois Raffoul

Reviews and Endorsements

The author suggests that while pain is about separation and loss, psychic pain is intensified by paradoxical overinvestment in the lost loved one. Included are discussions of the pain of mourning, the pain of jouissance, unconscious pain, pain as an object of the drive, pain as a form of sexuality, pain and the scream, and the pain of silence. In offering a phenomenological description of psychic pain, The Book of Love and Pain fills a gaping void in psychoanalytic research and will play an important role in our understanding of the human psyche.

'Psychoanalysis's main purpose is to deal with psychic pain, and I know of no other psychoanalytic book that addresses this problem as its main topic. Nasio explicitly formulates the paradoxes of pain. The first paradox is that love is the 'incontrovertible premise of our suffering' (our psychic pain). As a consequence the loss of a loved one makes us feel empty. Instead of detaching themselves from the lost loved one, people start to overinvest in the lost one. It is this irrealistic overinvestment in the unattainable lost person which creates psychic pain. Nasio's second paradox is about psychic pain experienced by the loss of a loved one. He claims that we desire a loved one because it guarantees a limit to love. A more or less satisfactory love relationship allows a person to control the desire for complete understanding and complete acceptance in a perfect love. The loss of a loved one creates the turmoil of having to find a way to limit the secret desire for infinite love.'
- Wilfried Ver Eecke, coauthor of Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia, After the Decade of the Brain

Table Of Contents:
Translators' Acknowledgments
Translators' Introduction
Clémence, or the Experience of Pain
Threshold
Psychical Pain, Pain of Love
Archipelago of Pain
Corporeal Pain: A Psychoanalytic Conception
Lessons on Pain
Excerpts from Freud and Lacan Concerning Psychical Pain
Excerpts from Freud Concerning Corporeal Pain
Notes
Index