Jacques-Alain Miller
You Are the Woman of the Other and I Desire You
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The downgrading of love for Freud seems obvious when one reads what for him is the prototype, Vorbild, of any relationship, of all Liebe. The prototype of any romantic or erotic relationship – this word best conveys the meaning – is the child being fed by the mother's breast. If this were the definition of love, we could say it represents a debasement of love. We define love as the repetition of that primary satisfaction. We can consider what is unsatisfactory in this definition if we take it as a developed definition of love. Love not only means to jouir from an object: it is to short-circuit the definition of love to define it only by the relationship between a subject lacking-in-jouissance and an object that embodies that satisfaction. Developed love needs that this object be found in a person, a person with an imaginary nature, and not only a purely objectal one. This is the ambiguity of the Freudian Liebe: on the one hand, it is love, on the other, it includes jouissance. The breast, it must be said, is not a person.
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