Lacan on Love by Bruce Fink

Author:Bruce Fink
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509500536
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Dependency (or so-called Natural Love)

Love and cupidity cannot coexist in one and the same person. If love does not stem from a purely gratuitous sentiment, if it is granted only in expectation of something in return, it is not love, but a mere simulacrum thereof that profanes and falsifies it.

Chapelain, 2004, p. 20

Dependency might be associated with what Saint Thomas Aquinas (1952, p. 312) called “natural love,” which according to him is “found in all things, even those lacking reason,” including animals. It is the kind of love found in the animal kingdom between a cub and its mother, for example, and is clearly related to what Freud called “anaclisis”; as we saw in Chapter 2, anaclisis literally means leaning up against or propped up by, and anaclitic love is propped up by or is based on the self-preservative or life drives – namely, the drives for nourishment, warmth, and care. A baby animal has this natural sort of love for its mother (or parents, in cases where both parents participate in raising it) owing to the care it receives from her.

Although in the human world love and dependency are not complete strangers to each other, and dependency at times gives way or paves the way to love, we are aware that a mother might complain of her children that they are happy to have her cook for them and wash their clothes but do not really love her. Here a simple form of dependency is sharply contrasted with some other, perhaps more exacting, notion of love.

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