"Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career." This English edition is translated by Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg.

The notion of love in Freud’s work and in lacan’s work is explored here in a preliminary fashion, and their many different attempts to discuss love are compared and contrasted. Concepts such as libido, narcissism, anaclisis, the ego-ideal, the ideal ego, ego-libido, object-libido, and the imaginary are brought to bear on Freud’s rather “obsessive” theory of love, and Lacan’s views of passion in his early work are given special attention.

In his psycholinguistic exploration of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge, Jacques Lacan leads into an new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives.