The Book of Love and Pain

Addresses the limits in treating pain psychoanalytically, and offers a phenomenological description of psychic pain, particularly the pain of a lost loved one.

In The Book of Love and Pain, Juan-David Nasio offers the first exclusive treatment of psychic pain in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic literature. Using insights gained from more than three decades as a practicing psychoanalyst, Nasio addresses the limits faced by the analyst in attempting to think and treat pain psychoanalytically. He suggests that while pain is about separation and loss, psychic pain is intensified by paradoxical overinvestment in the lost loved one. Included are discussions of the pain of mourning, the pain of jouissance, unconscious pain, pain as an object of the drive, pain as a form of sexuality, pain and the scream, and the pain of silence. In offering a phenomenological description of psychic pain, The Book of Love and Pain fills a gaping void in psychoanalytic research and will play an important role in our understanding of the human psyche.

"Psychoanalysis's main purpose is to deal with psychic pain, and I know of no other psychoanalytic book that addresses this problem as its main topic. Nasio explicitly formulates the paradoxes of pain. The first paradox is that love is the 'incontrovertible premise of our suffering' (our psychic pain). As a consequence the loss of a loved one makes us feel empty. Instead of detaching themselves from the lost loved one, people start to overinvest in the lost one. It is this irrealistic overinvestment in the unattainable lost person which creates psychic pain. Nasio's second paradox is about psychic pain experienced by the loss of a loved one. He claims that we desire a loved one because it guarantees a limit to love. A more or less satisfactory love relationship allows a person to control the desire for complete understanding and complete acceptance in a perfect love. The loss of a loved one creates the turmoil of having to find a way to limit the secret desire for infinite love." — Wilfried Ver Eecke, coauthor of Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia, after the Decade of the Brain

Juan-David Nasio is a psychoanalyst who lives and works in Paris and was the first psychoanalyst to be inducted into the prestigious French Legion of Honor. David Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. François Raffoul is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University and the author of Heidegger and the Subject. Their previous translations include Jean-Luc Nancy's and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan and Juan-David Nasio's Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, both published by SUNY Press. They have also coedited Heidegger and Practical Philosophy and Disseminating Lacan, both also published by SUNY Press.