What does my love want from me?

Hello friends!

I have received several emails and comments about complicated love situations. In many of these emails, the idea is just to put feelings out, try to put them in order, find logic in the facts, and less seek an answer from psychology or psychoanalysis about what is happening. This is because the questioning is close to the title: “What does my love want from me?” or “What do you think he/she is thinking, wanting, hoping?”

Well, there is one way to answer each of these questions. In the consulting room, in many cases, there is a whole job of reconstructing the issue, because, instead of focusing on the other person, it should be directed inwards. It is the shift from the demand to the symptom, as it is said in Lacanian psychoanalysis. that is, the demander, which in French means asking, demanding, for the discovery of the symptom, the formation of a compromise between the unconscious and the conscious, the conflict that, although conflict, is a temporary resolution for the subject.

There is a famous phrase by Lacan, which comes from Hegel, which says the following: “Desire is the desire of the other”. Lacan was very good at creating catchphrases like this one, like “The unconscious is structured like a language” or “All love is reciprocal, even when it is not reciprocated”.

See also – The love for psychoanalysis

The phrase “the desire is the desire of the other” is ambiguous and points to at least two meanings:

1) Desire is the desire for the other, that is, whoever desires, desires someone.

2) Desire is the desire that comes from the other, that is, the desire of one is an imitation of the other’s desire, it is an identification with what the other also wants.

I recently took a trip to the south of the country (I’m from Minas Gerais) and there I discovered this curious question in the dialogues: “Do you want to kill me?” It is a very interesting question, too, to be asked in close relationships, loving or not, because it questions what the other wants. Like the devil’s question, “What do you want?”

In the many emails I receive, with unsolvable relationship problems, this type of question is there, too. Does the other really want to make me suffer? Is all this I’m going through just useless suffering, a waste of time?

In the office, this question would make an excellent closing question. In general, what we can say is that many relationships are not really based on doing well. It is like the case of someone who, in his melancholy (today often called depression) hates the other, deep down, but loves. Unconsciously, then, hatred for the other turns into hatred for oneself. These are the self-recriminations of melancholics…

The question that arises for those outside is why these relationships do not end? That is, why do two unhappy people (or at least one of them) maintain a relationship based on suffering?

See also – Why don’t couples break up?

This text I wrote with a view to another theory (behavioral psychology) and not psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis also says a lot about love and about all kinds of love relationships, of course, because it has the transference between the analyst and the analysand as its mainspring. Roughly speaking, all analysis is based on a projection of love, unconscious, from the one who performs the analysis to the one who is conducting it. It is evident that this phenomenon, discovered by Freud at the beginning, is multifaceted.

But going back, what would be the response of psychoanalysis about a love affair that is pure suffering?

There are many ways to answer this question. I will say it here in the simplest way: suffering arises because there is a frustration in desire. Desire arises from lack, after all, no one wants what they already have or what they don’t lack. However, the lack whose desire seeks to fill is never filled by the other, who also has his own lack. As Lacan said: “To love is to give what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it”.

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