The Book of Love and Pain: Thinking at the Limit with Freud and Lacan (Psychoanalysis and Culture)

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.