Love and transference: from Freud to Lacan

Psychoanalytical concepts

Abstract

This article is devoted to the consideration of love and its particular manifestation in the form of transference arising among the effects of psychoanalytic treatment, which was discovered by Freud and further expanded in the theoretical and clinical corpus of seminars of Jacques Lacan. The concepts of love, crush and transference are closely intertwined with the registers of the symbolic and the imaginary, the distinction of which has clinical value and is refl ected in a Lacanian reading of two cases of Freud: Young Homosexual Patient and Dora. Learning from the mistakes of the founder of psychoanalysis Freud helps to get out of the therapeutic plane of imaginary constructions refl ection into an analytical position in relation to the subject of the unconscious.