Why, according to Jacques Lacan, to love is to give what you don’t have?

Love is giving what you don’t have. It is seeing the other as someone unique, new and exceptional who deserves the best from us and not projecting old, erroneous patterns from the past onto them. It is loving in an authentic, free and mature way without expecting that this affection will lead us to forms of love already lived and known that caused us suffering. Giving what we don’t have is embracing the here and now to recognize the other.

Few figures like the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan had such skill in constructing authentic dialectical juggling. when transmitting their theories, statements and knowledge. Despite this, we recognize his transcendence and unmatched mastery in making us reflect on determining topics such as love.

with the aphorism “To love is to give what you do not have, to someone who is not” constructs a sentence from a denial to play once again with psychoanalytic jargon. What he was basically looking for was to make us think about something. People often build their relationships based on lack.: the love that we did not have in childhood we look for in adulthood.

The affection that our last partner did not give us, we look for in the next one. We always embrace love bringing with us an ideal of what love is. Giving up that ideal will allow us to free ourselves from the past to give to others what we did not have in their day, that is, authentic affection.

Why is love giving what you don’t have?

The aphorism “to love is to give what you don’t have” is nourished by the complexity of the relationships that people build. Jacques Lacan spoke about it in his seminar VIII “The transference” when referring to Feast of Plato. Thus, something that he pointed out is that love is very often combined under the figure of a lover wounded by lack, by lack. This causes us to tend to think that what we lack is hidden in the other and that he is also obliged to give it to us.

Sigmund Freud also addressed this question. In his clinical practice he realized this, how the patient transfers during psychoanalytic therapy many of those deficiencies, those voids that love has left in his life, especially during childhood. So, That transference, that of “we are missing something” is something that we project in almost any relationship.

When we bond with other people we repeat, without realizing it, relationships from the past.

Something that both Jacques Lacan and Freud himself bequeathed to us is the idea that Our unconscious influences us more than we think. It does so to the point of boycotting the way we interact with the world and establish friendships and also relationships. Thus, one aspect that we need and look for above anything else is love, it is recognition.

Thus, “to love is to give what one does not have” alludes, according to Lacan, to a very specific fact embedded in our unconscious: the lost paradise of our childhood. A part of us drags the shadow of an out-of-tune yesterday. The one where our parents did not, perhaps, nourish our needs, embrace our fears or offer us a secure and enriching attachment.

As we grow, we long, according to Lacan, to heal that lost paradise (that of childhood). This need causes many of our emotional relationships to fail and, as we fail in love, more voids, more longings, more unsatisfied anxieties are created. In each bond, we repeat the same pattern until love becomes a frustrating repetition flavored with unhappiness and incomprehension.

To love is to give what you don’t have, to someone who isn’t

According to psychoanalysis, there is an unavoidable way to achieve satisfaction and maturity in our relationships as a couple. It is through renunciation and acceptance. We must give up giving us the love that we did not receive in childhood because that time is already behind us, because the affection of parents is not that of a couple.

We must also give in to this obsession with waiting for new loves to offer us the affection that others did not know how to give us. Because those people who hurt us are others and the person who now occupies our hearts is someone different. Demanding that some repair what others caused us is not logical, mature or advisable.

We have to start from scratch and assume what we did not have in the past (love). From that acceptance, we will feel freer to give and receive, to recognize the other without demanding them, to put aside the past and embrace the present. To love is to give what you don’t have, to someone who isn’t, because that person is someone else. (different from those who could hurt us in the past).

To love here and now, leaving behind what is no longer

The suffering of traumatic childhood persists for decades, it is true. The effects of a love that betrayed us or that violated the basic principles of respect and commitment last over time, it is true. However, Nothing is as necessary as opening ourselves to new relationships starting from the present, of the here and now, leaving behind what is not, what no longer exists.

Something like this takes time. To cross that threshold and allow ourselves to build happier bonds requires repairing self-esteem, accepting the past, healing it and strengthening our self-love. Only in this way will we build a more enriching future between two.

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