The International Journal of

Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92:963–983 doi: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00355.x

Love, drive and desire in the works of Freud,

Lacan and Proust

Judy Gammelgaard
Olufsvej 37, Copenhagen 2100 Ø, Denmark – judy.gammelgaard@psy.ku.dk

(Final version accepted 1 July 2010)

Both Freud and Lacan have made love the object of scientific enquiry, which is in
itself remarkable, since we usually turn this subject over to literary and philoso-
phical treatment. This article discusses Freud and Lacan’s contributions to the
psychology of love through dialogue with Marcel Proust’s seminal novel, Remem-
brance of Things Past, with special emphasis on the middle sections.
The point of departure is love’s manifestation in the analytical situation. Freud
has described transference love as both resistance and as an extreme variant of
normal falling in love, to which Lacan adds the deceptive character of transference.
From transference love the investigation continues to the contradictions Freud has
described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as love’s affectionate and
sensual currents. Lacan contributes the concept of desire, which must be distin-
guished from drive and love. The differentiation between desire, drive and love
introduces the perspective necessary for a psychoanalytic reading of Proust’s opus.
The main objective is a reading of the protagonists, Albertine and the Baron de
Charlus, as representatives of the vicissitudes of love and drive, respectively.

Keywords: desire, drive, love

Introduction
Love is not a subject we expect to read about in a scholarly article. We are
more likely to turn to literature or philosophy if we want to know more
about love than our own life experience teaches us. Love’s language not only
resists scientific discourse but remains an oddity that evades our fumbling
attempts to speak it. It is, in the words of Kristeva, ‘‘a flight of metaphors –
it is literature’’ (Kristeva 1987, p. 1).
In this light it is remarkable that Freud (1910, 1912a, 1918a) has devoted
three texts to an examination of the psychology of love. Indeed, he intro-
duces these texts by remarking that the ‘‘necessary conditions for loving
which governs people’s object choices’’ are a topic which it has hitherto been
the privilege of poets to treat (Freud 1910, p. 165). However, he continues,
poets are ‘‘under the necessity to produce intellectual and aesthetic plea-
sure’’, which limits the value of the insights contained in their accounts
(ibid.). Moreover, poets have only been marginally interested in the origin
and development of love’s final form. Having thus justified his scholarly
approach to the topic, Freud describes and analyzes the division in human
love which we know from our own lives and ‘‘whose treatment by artists has
given enjoyment to mankind for thousands of years’’ (ibid).
Freud could not have written his three texts on the psychology of love
without the theory of sexual drive that he introduced in his treatise from

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964 J. Gammelgaard

1905, which in the Kuhnian sense (1962) represents a paradigmatic break

with a traditional, biological understanding of human sexuality, since it
refers the sexual drive to the domain of the psyche and proves its infantile
and polymorphous origin. Nor could he have articulated his idea of love’s
division without the clinical experience he had amassed in his early clinical
work, primarily with hysterics, which allowed him to observe one of love’s
manifestation soon christened transference love. Like other forms of love,
transference love appears paradoxical. It simultaneously is created by the
cure, constitutes the greatest form of resistance to the analytical work effort,
and is the most visible expression of passionate love.
In the following I will discuss this paradoxical division in the nature of
love. After presenting the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Lacan
concerning this division, I will read them into Marcel Proust’s masterful
portrayal of the complicated threads of love and sexuality as they entwine
the narrator of his magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past.
As mentioned above, transference created the basis for the first psychoan-
alytic knowledge of that which was later articulated as a division in human
love. Therefore it is natural to start the investigation here and turn our gaze
towards Freud’s early reflexions on transference love. Next I will examine
the places where Freud hints at a conflict in love between what he refers to
as love’s affectionate and sensual currents, respectively. Finally I supplement
and elaborate Freud’s theory of love’s division drawing on Lacan’s sugges-
tion that we distinguish between drive and desire (1989, 1992, 2004), and
thereby I introduce the perspective that leads to my reading of the narra-
tor’s fate in Proust’s novel.

Transference Love
Long before Freud subjected love to theoretical reflexion he ran headfirst
into the demands of passionate love. He had heard Breuer’s shocking
account of Anna O’s pseudocyesis and must therefore have been prepared
for the ardent effects he could expect from the new talking cure. That it was
nonetheless both surprising and confusing to learn that the hysterical
patients responded to the cure with demands for love emerges not least in
the rhetoric in Freud’s articles on transference. Words such as ‘‘struggle’’,
‘‘victory’’, and other metaphors of war characterize his description of his
efforts to overcome transference. Freud seldom uses the word passion, but
these texts as well as the above-mentioned articles about the psychology of
love are the exceptions to this rule.
The psychoanalytic pen was not, however, to write the psychology of pas-
sionate love, although analytical therapy led directly into the entanglements
of love. Freud’s work was scholarly in nature, and he sought to circumvent
these entanglements to articulate his theory of libido as the origin of love’s
various expressions, from absurd to sublime. Freud’s rationalism and his
scholarly ambitions contributed to the fact that it was the structure and
dynamics of the unconscious representations – rather than the passions
themselves – that constituted the most important object of his investigation
of psychic life. Thus Freud drew on transference love to conceptualize

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 965

passionate love– as we shall see – as a strong weapon of resistance that

should be controlled through intellectual consideration.
In the last pages of The Dynamics of Transference (Freud 1912b), Freud
describes with great clarity the dilemma transference love poses for the
doctor. Transference love is one of the forms that resistance takes and thus
represents one of the greatest challenges to analytical therapy. ‘‘For when all
is said and done’’, he adds, ‘‘it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or
in effigie’’ (Freud 1912b, p. 108). Certainly transference is an artefact and as
such created by the cure, and clearly transference love – in as much as it
serves resistance – is a caricature of normal being in love, but, continues
Freud, tolerant as usual of contradictions, such deviations from the norm
‘‘constitute precisely what is essential about being in love’’ (Freud 1915a, p.
169). He concludes that the analyst has provoked this love by offering the
analytical arrangement with a view towards curing the neurosis. What
unprecedented audaciousness! In other words, psychoanalysis turned love
into a cure.
Freud’s use of the words ‘‘being in love’’ to discuss transference love
points to the question of the character of love in transference, a question he
returns to repeatedly. Is transference love genuine or are appearances decep-
tive?
In his many discussions of transference Lacan has examined the question
from various angles and has shown that deception itself must be emphasized
as a special feature of transference love, which if correctly understood can
elucidate the complex structure of love which we encounter both in the
transference situation and beyond.
That transference love presents itself as resistance entails in Lacan’s words
(1986, pp. 253–256) that it seeks to deceive. Its stubborn insistence on being
taken seriously simultaneously conceals the unconscious desire that has
given rise to it. Through transference love the analysand seeks to prove
the truth of that which is put forward, and there is an obvious danger that
the analyst will actually be taken in and misled.
Allowing ourselves to generalize about the nature of love based on experi-
ences with transference love, points us to the existence of an element of
deceit. Later we will see how Proust has shifted our perspective on the lie
and shown how it represents simultaneously the deceitful side of love and
its moment of truth. Transference focuses on the moment in the structure
and dynamic of love which we designate as the deception: ‘‘As a specular
mirage, love is essentially a deception’’ (Lacan 1986, p. 268). In other words
we position ourselves in relation to the Other so that we make him or her
see us exactly as we wish to be seen. We find ourselves caught up in the
vicious circle of deception, which can turn into a blind alley for both love
and analysis.
For the same reason, however, positioning oneself thus in relation to the
Other can lead to a revelation of the Other and thereby of oneself. This is
the possibility, according to Lacan, which is contained in the analytical situ-
ation. ‘‘[I]n this very convergence to which analysis is called by the element
of deception that there is in the transference, something is encountered that
is paradoxical – the discovery of the analyst’’ (ibid.). This discovery of the

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966 J. Gammelgaard

Other as Other enables the subject to surpass the imaginary level of narcis-
sistic delusion.
No part of the complicated discussion of the deceptive aspect of love –
which has nothing to do with deliberate intention, of course – can be under-
stood without the idea of the structure of desire which Lacan derived from
transference love. Through the request or demand of transference for satis-
faction the analysand seeks to objectify desire which can then only be
decoded in the Other. Thus a displacement of desire and its cause takes
place and the Other becomes the reason for my desire. In the words of
Lacan, ‘‘man’s desire is the desire of the Other’’ (2004, p. 235). Lacan has
illustrated the statement about desire as belonging to the Other in his dis-
cussion of Freud’s hysterical patient, Dora, the prototype of the deceitful
nature of desire.
In his comprehension of Dora, Freud (1905b) has insisted on the girl’s
Oedipal love, which has been transferred to Mr K and to a lesser degree to
Freud himself. Freud sees the patient’s refusal of this interpretation as an
expression of resistance, and what could be more reasonable than to pres-
sure the patient to concede. This is where Freud lets himself be deceived
(Lacan 1988, pp. 183–186), aligning himself with the conscious ego and
pointing to the concrete object which he imagines to be the object of Dora’s
Oedipal desire. If Freud had succeeded in continuing his resistance analysis
and had convinced Dora of her love for Mr K, this would have been a sug-
gestive act which at the very moment when he succeeded in adding a new
motive to Dora’s conscious ego would have maintained both her and Freud
in a deceitful avoidance of the desire which Freud discovered later and
which was directed otherwhere. Only belatedly did he learn of the sexual
element of Dora’s interest in Mrs K, ‘‘I failed to discover in time and to
inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K was
the strongest unconscious current in her mental life’’ (Freud 1905b, p. 120).
Does this mean that the treatment would have stood a better chance of
reaching a satisfactory conclusion if Freud had realized in time that Dora
did not love Mr K but Mr K’s wife? The possibility cannot be dismissed.
What Freud refers to as Dora’s homosexual love might be understood as
desire for Mrs K, but it might also be Dora’s love for herself, whom she
sees reflected in the image of Mrs K. Finally, as Lacan suggests, this love
may ‘‘sustain’’ (Lacan 1986, p. 38) the father’s desire, and in this sense it is
a variation of the statement that desire is the desire of the Other. This
means that a person’s desire makes itself visible through the Other, in order
thereby to be appropriated as the subject’s own desire. Desire makes a
detour, so to speak, around the Other, in order to return and appear in the
subject. It is crucial to follow the movement of desire back to the subject
and to intervene at precisely that moment when it is present. Only then is it
possible for the subject to appropriate its desire for itself instead of ‘‘giving
ground to it’’ (Lacan 1992, p. 321) by imagining that it is identical to the
imaginary wishes which it directs towards the other.
Thus far we have examined the concept of desire through the lens of
transference love. After a brief discussion of the conditions of the concept

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 967

of passionate love we shall further elucidate desire by examining the differ-

ence between desire and drive.

Passionate Love
It is a general experience that the paths to satisfaction of love and desire do
not always coincide. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905a),
Freud introduced the metaphor of ‘‘a tunnel that has been driven through a
hill from both directions’’ (Freud 1905a, p. 207) to illustrate that love’s
affectionate and sensual currents have a hard time coming together. In his
essays on the psychology of love Freud takes up this thread again, analyzing
the psychological and developmental conditions of this division in the light
of his theory of the sexual drive, and using his analytical experience to dem-
onstrate its consequences for the object choice of a mature individual.
Although these essays focus on object choice, he is equally interested in the
sexual drive, and adds his analytical contribution to the general truths about
human love, as follows: ‘‘an obstacle is required in order to heighten libido;
and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men
have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love’’
(Freud 1912a, p. 187). He does not touch on which conventional obstacles
men have invented in their attempts to intensify passionate love. Denis de
Rougemont, however, does so in his classical text on the concept of love in
our culture, which he traces to the 12th century and the troubadours. I will
be drawing briefly on de Rougemont, whose oeuvre – in addition to being a
seminal cultural and historical work on love – rests on a solid knowledge of
Freud’s scholarship.
In Love in the Western World, de Rougemont (1940) shows that our idea
of love is based on ‘‘a dream of potential passion’’ (p. 281), which was intro-
duced as a literary idea through the figure of Tristan and by troubadours
towards the end of the 12th century. This idea lives on in the romantic
concept of love which has largely determined how Western culture conceptu-
alizes love, such that it is possible to insist – drawing on la Rochefoucauld’s
aphorism – that some people would never have fallen in love had they not
heard of it first.
Love is passion and passion means suffering. However, according to de
Rougemont, the problem arises when passion is profaned and demoted from
the realm of the sacred and sublime. What started as a myth about passion-
ate love created through renunciation has, in the words of de Rougemont,
been democratized and has thereby lost its aesthetic and spiritual dimen-
sions. Thus the paradox has arisen that we today seek passion and unhappy,
unattainable love, but only as a fiction, never as a fate we strive for in our
own lives. Tristanism leads a subversive life in our longings and colours our
desire, but disrupts the happiness we experience such difficulties finding in
long-term relationships. But that is not all. When passion is profaned and
loses its sacred and sublime dimensions, it becomes destructive, according to
de Rougemont. He sees the contemporary breakdown of middle-class mar-
riage as a sign of this desecration of passion and interprets it as a late
expression of the contradictions that arose between the medieval heretical

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968 J. Gammelgaard

movements and Christian orthodoxy. This opposition has left us with two
kinds of morality which are manifested in the crisis of modern marriage.
One morality that assures the endurance of family and society, and one
which lauds passion, although the song has ceased and its expression has
been desecrated, if not perverted.
Freud would undoubtedly have approved of this examination of the cul-
tural and historical idea of love. Nonetheless he chose to follow his science
and examine the psychological conditions of divided love. In the following
we will look more closely at the places where Freud hints at a conflict in
love; in some contexts he refers to love’s affectionate and sensual currents,
and in others a conflict between a person’s wishes and something else, which
seems to obstruct an actual satisfaction of these wishes.
In order to conceptualize this something, Lacan has suggested a division
of the concept of drive into drive and desire. Although these two concepts
in some ways ‘‘talk about the same thing’’ (Hyldgaard 2001, p. 66, KM),
their distinctions can serve to elucidate the internal conflict in love which
Freud observed.
Paul Verhaeghe (1998), however, updated the cultural analysis of love.
Drawing on Freud’s analysis, supplemented with Lacan’s concept of desire
as something separate from wish and drive, he diagnosed the love life of
contemporary humans as a desperate attempt to reconcile wishes and desire;
‘‘We want what we do not desire, and we desire what we do not want’’
(Verhaeghe 1998, p. 24).
These texts constitute an important backdrop to the following presenta-
tion of Freud’s contribution to the psychology of love.

Drive, Desire and Love

Psychoanalytic theory shows us that a drive’s path to satisfaction is strongly
subject to inhibitions, which are commonly understood as socially created
limits on the deployment of desire. In ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Mod-
ern Nervous Illness (1908), Freud explicitly unfolds this train of thought.
Not much later, however, he introduced an idea he had already had in his
correspondence with Fliess, ‘‘In my opinion there must be an independent
source for the release of unpleasure in sexual life: once that source is pres-
ent, it can activate sensations of disgust, lend force to morality, and so on’’
(Freud 1896, p. 222). What Freud expresses here stands in marked opposi-
tion to the idea he articulated in the text about civilized morality. The
thought peaked twenty years later when he formulated his revised theory of
drive and introduced the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920). The contradictory conditions of the path to sexual satisfaction, how-
ever, turn up several places in Freud’s authorship. In Some Character-Types
Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work (1916) Freud discussed clinical as well as
literary examples of people who react paradoxically at a time when long-
cherished wishes seem to be coming to fruition. Rather than delighting in
this they seem overwhelmed by fear, and as a consequence write off these
wishes, while their actions reveal that behind their wishes lurks a desire
which can have fatal repercussions.

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 969

Ibsen (1886) offers a literary example in the form of Rebekka West, the
protagonist of his drama, Rosmersholm. Rebekka has been cohabitating with
Johannes Rosmer since his wife, Beata, committed suicide, but when Rosmer
proposes to her, she turns him down because of a guilt, which according to
Freud, lies as a deeply buried secret within her. The forces that make
Rebekka draw back are so powerful that she succeeds in convincing Rosmer
to commit suicide with her, following the same path as ‘poor Beata’.
Through these and other examples Freud demonstrates that external
obstacles only appear to obstruct the fulfilment of that which a person expe-
riences as his or her most ardent wish. An inner renunciation must be added
to the externally created obstacle, which is, however, only revealed when
the wish is about to come true. In terms of drive theory we may say that the
goal of the drive does not necessarily coincide with its objects. Something
leaves us dissatisfied when our conscious wishes are gratified. This some-
thing Lacan designates as desire, to which we shall return below.
I have already referred to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the
introduction of the contradiction between love’s affectionate and sensual
currents. This contradiction is turned inside out in the three essays about
the psychology of love. From a masculine point of view, Freud (1910,
1912a) observed that man’s love reaches the peak of passion when the object
of his love is obstructed due to Oedipal rivalry, or when the woman appears
sexually disreputable. This is ‘‘love of a prostitute’’ (Freud 1910, p. 166);
suited to arouse the jealousy that is the drive of passion. Thus Proust’s
narrator is driven by jealousy to guess at his beloved’s hidden desire – her
Gomorrhean nature – and to become both detective and scholar.
Freud points to two conditions of psychological development that explain
why something in the nature of sexual drive opposes full satisfaction. Firstly
the sexual drive consists initially of a large number of components which are
not gathered under and subordinated to the genital drive until the Oedipal
phase. Secondly the incest barrier functions as an obstacle during the run-
up to object choice, so that the final object can never approach the original
object, being merely a substitute for it. Here Freud hints at two important
issues for understanding the internal contradiction integral to love. Pregeni-
tal drive is partial and its object is not a total but a partial object. Love,
however, is in an entirely different area, that of the ego.
Freud pondered the significance of this in his meta-psychological treatise
from 1915, Instincts and their vicissitudes, which clearly shows that love and
drive are two distinct entities. It is only reasonable to use the concept of
love, so the argument goes, to designate the relation of the ‘‘total ego’’ to
objects (Freud 1915b, p. 138). In other words, Freud does not want to use
the word love to refer to the child’s relation to the objects it needs.
‘‘We do not say of objects’’, Freud asserts, ‘‘which serve the interests of
self-preservation, that we love them; we emphasize that we need them’’ (ibid.,
p. 137), and he adds that we can only barely say that a drive loves its object.
In other words, something must be added before the drives and the ego
gather around the same object with the kind of feelings we associate with
loving. He then introduced the concepts of the ‘‘total ego’’ and ‘‘sexual
impulsion as a whole’’ (ibid., p. 138) – which he only used this once – to

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970 J. Gammelgaard

sum up the results of the double synthesis, which consists of gathering the
partial drives under what he refers to as ‘‘the primacy of the genitals and in
the service of the reproductive function’’ (ibid., p. 138), uniting the ego and
the drives in a pleasurable relation to the sexual objects. This synthesis finds
its solution at the Oedipal level, which means that it is not until this level
that childish love takes on the form which justifies saying that the child
loves the object.
Following Verhaeghe (1998) this childish love can be emphasized as exclu-
sive and doomed to perish. As opposed to the sexual drive, whose object
can always be replaced, the love object can be qualified as the one and only.
Because this love is directed towards a forbidden – incestuous – object,
however, it is destined, as Freud underlines in his writings about the
psychology of love, to perish. Those objects towards which we as adults
direct our love will always serve as substitutes for the forever lost and
eternally desired object. Remembrance of Things Past is a poetic rendition of
this truth about the genesis of passionate love for the incestuous object and
a narrative of the fate of this love.
The difference between the paths to the object taken by the ego and the
sexual drive – hinted at by Freud in his writings on the psychology of love
and the object of a metapsychological analysis in the essay from 1915 – can
be elucidated by Lacan’s suggestion to split the concept of drive into drive
and desire, respectively. I shall attempt to explain this in the following.

Drive and Desire

When we say that the sexual drive in its pre-genital form is partial, this must
be understood in relation to the biological aim of sexuality. In the words of
Lacan,
If the drive may be satisfied without attaining what, from the point of view of a bio-
logical totalization of function, would be the satisfaction of its end of reproduction,
it is because it is a partial drive, and its aim is simply this return into circuit.

(Lacan 1986, p. 179, my emphasis).

On its way to satisfaction, the pre-genital drive circumnavigates that which
is merely its apparent object. When Freud points out that the object of
the drive is that which is the easiest to replace, he does so to emphasize that
drive circulates independently of the object. The role of the object in the sat-
isfaction of drive can be described as follows ‘‘la pulsion en fait le tour’’
(Lacan 1986, p. 168). Faire le tour is to be understood here with the ambigu-
ity it possesses in French, where it denotes both circling around the object,
and playing a trick. The prototypical example is the oral drive and the
maternal breast, as when the mouth of a little child closes complacently
around its own thumb as it drifts off to sleep, or that of the lips kissing
themselves (1905a), Freud’s ideal model of auto-erotism.
What I would like to emphasize here as fundamental to the path of drive
towards satisfaction is a circular movement around the object. We usually
overlook this because we have used the original object of the oral drive –

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 971

the breast – as a prototype of the satisfaction of the partial drive, thus fail-
ing to notice that this object – from the point of view of drive – exists only
as an absence, a void which can be cathected to any object. Strictly speaking
the main significance of the object is as the centre of the detour along
which drive moves; the object lends consistency by nature of being some-
thing that can be circumnavigated. Thereby it functions to designate the
location of the Other’s presence. The replaceability of the object is the con-
dition of the opening towards first the other as partial object, and later
towards the Other as a representative of the Symbolic Order and as
the subject towards whom desire can be directed. Already on the level of
the path of drive towards satisfaction the object is indicated by its absence,
which here means that drive in its independence of the object will always be
sure to reach its goal, of which the prototypical example is auto-erotic
satisfaction.
The basic structure of desire is likewise indicated by lack, but unlike drive,
desire is directed toward a subject rather than an object; towards another
person. This is what is established during the Oedipal situation, where the
genital drive is subordinated to the regulation of family ties and where
the Symbolic order allows exchange between subjects. In the area of genital
love, love is directed at the Other as subject, and this is precisely what initi-
ates the split between desire and drive. That desire is directed towards
another subject and another person means that it is no longer a question of
satisfaction but of the anxious question of what kind of object the subject
constitutes for the Other. More simply stated, when we desire we find
ourselves in the vulnerable position where the Other determines our worth:
what do I mean, what am I worth to the Other? These anxiety-inducing
questions can never be answered unambiguously.
Lacan’s distinction between drive and desire makes it possible for us to
clarify the inherent conflict in the concept of drive, which Freud exposed in
his own way. At the same time we have found a psychoanalytic counterpart
to de Rougemont’s historical examination of the concept of passionate love.
Desire turns love into passion because desire is only desire in as much as it
manages to defer something (Verhaeghe, 1998).
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is an homage to the polymorph
unfolding of desire of the sensory world as well as the tormented narrative
of an individual who seeks unsuccessfully – in the women he loves – the
counterpart to the phantasm created by his desire. This unrivalled opus
which describes with deep insight the sublime and profaned sides of passion-
ate love is composed by an author who did not think himself suited for the
joys of love.

Proust and Eroticism

In Proust’s novel the narrator is at once a child, losing himself in harmless
– often oral – sensory impressions, and an adult, who in his memory associ-
ates such impressions with people he has loved. The scent of hawthorn, the
taste of a cake dissolved in tea, the sensual enjoyment of orangeade and
the quasi-erotic sensation of softening ice cream; these are merely a few of

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972 J. Gammelgaard

the rich sensory impressions we encounter in a world where remembering is

the same as being in love.
Proust’s opus is famous for the long passages depicting the childish joy
associated with surrendering to the sensory world and thus constitutes a
convincing testimony to that which psychoanalytic terms designate as
polymorphous sexuality. Malcolm Bowie, who has produced one of the most
fascinating interpretations of this novel, uses a stirring metaphor to portray
the hopeless pursuit of the object of the partial drive, as well as the bonus
of pleasure that can be retrieved through the senses during this pursuit:
‘‘Desire as it travels towards its object is handed from sense to sense in an
endless relay-race and in the end simply runs past its objects, leaving the
beloved unsavoured and unknown’’ (Bowie 1998, p. 247). Thus the narrator
is in love with the sight and the smell of hawthorn, and is consumed with
jealousy over Albertine’s erotically alluring fantasy of eating ice cream.
It was in these ‘‘Month of Mary’’ services that I can remember having first fallen in
love with hawthorn-blossom ... in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate,
somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift
and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted
pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.

(Proust 1982, I, p. 121)

It is possible to become a poet if – like the narrator – one pursues the
desire aroused by sight, while endeavouring to translate the impression into
a picture, in other words, create a metaphor. Another example, from the
narrator’s life with Albertine, can illustrate how drive – through its
independence of the object – can displace itself in countless directions. Thus
Albertine gives the narrator a vivid description of how she imagines eating
the ices that can be bought at the Ritz, ‘‘They make raspberry obelisks too,
which will rise up here and there in the burning desert of my thirst and I
shall make their pink granite crumble and melt deep down in my throat’’
(Proust 1982, III, p. 125).
At this point in the narrator’s life we no longer hear of the innocent joys
he indulged in as a boy, when he captured the world with a child’s polymor-
phous sexuality. When he is together with Albertine, desire has become
apparent and has brought him the dubious pleasure of discovering that the
Other’s desire is the point of departure for his desire. We shall return to this.
Not far into the first volume of narrative, however, we realize that these
sensory experiences from his childhood at Combray that are gradually
recaptured by the narrator merely appear innocuous. The most famous of
these is the episode with the Madeleine, whose titillating oral quality
becomes the key to true memory and the first of the memory experiences
that render Proust’s novel a unique testimony to lived and sensed time. The
message is that only through coincidental and surprising sensory expressions
are we brought into contact with the self we once were, and that the impulse
to create arises from the gulf between the former and the present selves. As
does, one might add, the potential to heal the suffering love has brought
upon us.

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 973

It is not coincidental that Proust begins his narrative with a long story of
the little boy who cannot bear to be separated from his mother. His deep
longing to be one with his mother appears in the narrative as a persistent
desire, which is not satisfied by the love objects the narrator encounters
later, on his journey from boyhood to youth and adulthood. We shall hear
more about this journey, not least the narrator’s infatuation with and love
for Albertine. In other words, the way to Albertine sketches the unfolding
of desire and love in the novel, and which commences in the opening scene
of the novel.
In my interpretation the path of drive, however, takes a different road,
depicted through one of the novel’s other main characters, the Baron de
Charlus, who is destroyed personally and socially as a consequence of the
indomitable inner logic of drive. Thus I focus on Albertine and the Baron
de Charlus as representatives of the split with which Freud characterized
love, and which Lacan supplemented with a further division of drive into
drive and desire.
Proust’s opus has been read and understood mainly as a unique portrayal
of the nature of time and memory (Kristeva, 1993, 1996; Beckett, 1999),
themes that unfold in the introductory and concluding volumes. In the
middle part of the opus we find love and drive represented in the figures of
Albertine and the Baron. This part has not received as much attention, inas-
much as literary criticism has not primarily focused on love and sexuality.
Faithful to the novel’s explicit theme of memory, let us first follow Proust as
he lets two memories lay down a trace in the very first volume, which the
narrator will follow in his attempts to unite the destinies of drive with the
phantasms of desire. With an insight which it is tempting to designate as
psychoanalytic, Proust has constructed his novel so that we encounter these
memories early on but deployed in the narrative through the perspective of
a child who experiences them without grasping their significance. This sig-
nificance is revealed to us and to the narrator as the story is refracted
through the prism of memory.
When the Madeleine episode takes place, we have heard about the little
boy the narrator used to be, who waited in despair for his mother’s good-
night kiss, without which his was unable to fall asleep. We have heard of the
fatal evening when paternal prohibition was suspended and the boy achieved
the mixed satisfaction – as it turned out – of having his mother all to him-
self. This evening turns out to have fateful consequences in the shape of the
desire that was aroused in the boy that night. Thus his love for Albertine is
dominated by jealousy, the fear of loss, boredom and disappointment, when
wishes are gratified, while desire remains unsatisfied.
There is another episode – also in the first section of first volume of the
novel – which similarly illustrates the structure of Nachtrglichkeit built into
Proust’s description of the narrator’s erotic life. The still quite young boy
witnesses a primal scene which he voyeuristically narrates with the same hint
of fatefulness as colours the story of the mother’s good-night kiss.
The composer Vinteuil lives with his daughter at Montjouvain. Vinteuil is
a character who recurs throughout the novel; together with the author Berg-
otte and the painter Elstir he serves as mouthpiece for Proust’s ideas on art,

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974 J. Gammelgaard

and he is the creator of a magnum opus, the like of which Proust lets his
narrator dream of creating himself. While the narrator is spying on Vint-
euil’s daughter and her girlfriend, they play an erotic game, during which
the girlfriend suggests that they spit on the father’s portrait. This scene
functions like a grain of sand around which the narrator’s nacreous love
experiences and sexual perversions are spun, revealing its significance only
successively: ‘‘It is perhaps from another impression which I received at
Montjouvain, some years later, an impression which at the time remained
obscure to me, that there arose, long afterwards, the notion I was to form
of sadism’’ (Proust 1982, I, p. 173). Thus the episode has far-reaching
consequences, but not until much later, thus following the principle of
psychological development which Freud has described (1895, 1918b) as the
two moments of trauma.
The Montjouvain episode also contains the germ of the sadism that
Proust has sketched, morally as well as sexually, in the figure of the Baron
de Charlus, the Sodom figure of the novel and the counterpart to Alber-
tine’s Gomorrah. These two figures are henceforth to be read as metaphors
for the two paths which all the way back in the Combray of the narrator’s
childhood designated love and desire, respectively.

Swann’s Way and the Guermantes Way

Like his narrator, Proust never had a happy love life (Carter, 2006; Tadi,
1996), and in his novel he has described with unusual empathy the struggle
that takes place when elements of drive must be redirected through love and
sublimation to be satisfied. The routes of the two paths the narrator can
take are charted in the first volume of the novel. In the narrator’s retrospec-
tive experience of the vacations with his grandparents at Combray these two
paths are geographical in nature and correspond to those the family took
on their Saturday walks.
On one of these excursions, when they passed by Swann’s property, the
narrator spied a reddish-blonde young girl with dark, gleaming eyes. She
gazed at him for a long time, ‘‘and her hand…sketched in the air an indeli-
cate gesture’’, which the narrator interprets as ‘‘a deliberate insult’’ (ibid.,
p. 154). The young girl is Gilberte Swann, whom the narrator has already
desired in his imagination, and who will later be the object of his first infat-
uation and the precursor of Albertine. At her side was ‘‘a gentleman in a
suit of linen ‘ducks’ [who] stared at me with eyes which seemed to be start-
ing from his head’’ (ibid.).
When the narrator does not understand until he is an old man, that
Gilberte was beckoning him and that the ‘stare’ of Baron de Charlus was a
flirting invitation, this illustrates a general truth about life. In the poignant
words of Lagercrantz ‘‘[w]e are prisoners to our misunderstandings’’
(Lagercrantz 1994, p. 87, KM); caught in misunderstandings our lives con-
sist to a large extent of our efforts to resolve them. Drawing on psycho-
analysis we may add that this truth characterizes not least the impressions
of a sexual nature which we receive early in life, and which in Laplanche’s
terminology (1989, 1997) are inscribed in us as ‘‘enigmatic messages’’ and

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 975

causes our psyches to work incessantly at translating. In the forward-look-

ing narrative of the novel Gilberte and the Baron’s invitations serve as the
first hints of the fate that befalls desire when the narrator seeks to direct it
towards an object in the real world and suggests the ambivalence homosexu-
ality carries for the narrator, and behind him, for the author.
Metaphorically Swann’s way goes through the narrator’s identification
with Swann and his unhappy love for Odette de Crecy, a fate that is repli-
cated in the narrator’s love for Albertine. Not till after the loss of Albertine
is love transformed into the creation of the oeuvre, for which the foundation
is laid by the child who cheerfully narrates the two different paths of the
family’s Saturday excursions.
The Guermantes’ way is that of snobbery, and it takes the narrator into
the aristocratic world and ‘‘wasted time’’ (Deleuze, 2000), which however, as
Girard (1988) points out, can only be written with penetrating irony and wit
by an author who has moved beyond snobbery and youthful desire. In the
concluding volume of the novel, Proust can regard the company that was
the object of his youthful desire as a masquerade played out in the ante-
chamber of death, while the narrator has found the key to the idea that will
carry his oeuvre; the idea of an experience outside time created through
sensory perception and the involuntary memory.
The way to Guermantes is, however, also the way that leads the narrative
into the satisfaction of perversions, personified by the Baron de Charlus,
Proust’s primary homosexual character. There are innumerable connections
between the story of the passionate relationship to Albertine and the
perverted drive that leads to the Baron’s human and social collapse. In
the following, however, they are to be read individually as representing the
separate ways to satisfaction of love and drive, respectively.

Albertine
Who is Albertine? It is not easy to give a simple answer to this question.
Albertine is not a tangible woman; she is not described as a whole person
(Kristeva, 1996; Goldbæk, 2002). Actually the narrator has sketched her
through subtraction:
As I drew closer to the girl and began to know her better, this knowledge developed
by a process of subtraction, each constituent of imagination and desire giving place to
a notion which was worth infinitely less, a notion to which, it is true, there was added
presently a sort of equivalent, in the domain of real life, of what joint stock companies
give one, after repaying one’s original investment, and call a preference share.

(Proust 1982, I, p. 933).

Albertine is a phantasm, an illusion created by desire, which cannot sus-
tain comparison with objects in real life. She has been fashioned according
to the poet’s conception of love as entirely subjective, a projection of our
fantasies.
That Albertine was scarcely more than a silhouette, all that had been superimposed
upon her being of my own invention, to such an extent when we love does the

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976 J. Gammelgaard
contribution that we ourselves make outweigh – even in terms of quantity alone –
those that come to us from the beloved object.

(Ibid, pp. 917–918).

This is the origin of her dreamlike character; like a petal in a bouquet of
flowers she is one beautiful, constitutive but indistinguishable part of a
whole.
The first time the narrator separates Albertine from the rest of the group
of young women, he identifies her by a mole, which at this meeting he
locates on her chin. This mole turns out to be as flighty and unstable a sign
as everything else that is to designate Albertine, ‘‘In fact when I saw her, I
noticed that she had a beauty spot, but my errant memory made it wander
about her face, fixing it now in one place, now in another’’ (ibid, p. 936).
Not only is his love for Albertine a subjective phenomenon created by
dreams and fantasies; it reaches its zenith not in satisfaction but in longings
and expectations, and is nurtured less by togetherness than by being apart,
thus obeying the law of desire:
What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely a negative, which we
develop later, when we are back at home, and have once again found at our disposal
that inner darkroom the entrance to which is barred to us as long as we are with
other people.

(Ibid, p. 932)
In this dreamer eroticism is – not surprisingly – of an auto-erotic charac-
ter. One of the few times the narrator describes sexual satisfaction he is
together with his sleeping girlfriend. This is also one of the most poetic pas-
sages in the novel where the author provides a sublime tribute to love and
lets his narrator sing Albertine’s praises as if she were his Laura or his
Beatrice. This passage illustrates how drive will always find a quick path to
satisfaction, while desire takes detours and can find its satisfaction in
sublime prose such as this.
Why does the relationship to this woman created of dreams and fantasies
turn into its opposite; to indifference, contempt and insane jealousy? Not
because the wish to possess Albertine has been granted and thereby
supplanted by the boredom of habit, although this is a not insignificant
element. The reason is to be sought in the desire the narrator directs at that
which he imagines her desire to be, a desire which she in his imagination
directs towards other women, and which is therefore inaccessible to him.
It is the physician and scientist, Dr Cottard, who brings to light the hid-
den side of Albertine’s desire, her Gomorrah-like nature. The Doctor reveals
the secret of woman’s greatest desire when he watches Albertine and her
friend Andr dancing close together: ‘‘I’ve left my glasses behind and I can’t
see very well, but they are certainly keenly roused. It’s not sufficiently
known that women derive most excitement through their breasts. And theirs,
as you see, are touching completely’’ (Proust 1982, II, p. 824). What does
Dr Cottard’s message indicate? That the desire of the beloved is directed
otherwhere and that the jealousy that arises binds us in suffering to the

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 977

beloved. But it does not merely bind; it installs deceit between the two lov-
ers. ‘‘I did not remind her of her lie. But it shattered me. And once again I
postponed our rupture to another day’’ (Proust 1982, III, p. 105).
In the two volumes that describe the narrator’s relationship to Albertine
and which in French bear the eloquent titles La prisonnire and Albertine
disparue (The Captive and The Fugitive), it is his assumption that her desire
is directed towards women that binds him to her. Passion is created and
maintained to the extent that desire seeks to seize its object. When this
object – in the figure of the beloved – is within reach, the difference
between the object of the wish and the desire is exposed, and the passion is
inverted and turns into indifference and boredom. The narrator seeks to
delude himself that he can prevent Albertine’s desire from displacing itself
in now one, now another direction by ‘imprisoning’ her. He does not realize
that he is pursuing the shadow of his own desire, which he seeks in vain to
capture by imprisoning Albertine in his home.
What Lacan refers to as the ‘‘myth of Albertine’’ is the mental image of
the drama of passionate jealousy, and reveals the futile pursuit of the phan-
tasm of desire which exhausts the subject because it is unable to grasp that
‘‘desire is the desire of the Other’’ (Lacan 1988, p. 221).
On their last evening together, a conversation takes place which shows
how the lovers have spun themselves into a web of lies. Each seeks in vain
to find the truth about the other’s nature without revealing too much about
their own, and truth turns out to come from another quarter than that in
which they have sought it.
And so she interrupted me with a wholly futile admission, for certainly I suspected
nothing of what she now told me, and I was on the other hand appalled, so vast
can the disparity be between the truth which a liar has disguised and the idea
which, from her lies, the man who is in love with the said liar has formed of the
truth.

(Proust 1982, III, p. 339)

The lie which is created in the attempt to decode a desire in the nature of
the other, and which one evades acknowledging as one’s own, can only
reveal a truth which consolidates the suffering of the jealous person.
Another lie exists, however, according to Proust, which can be a real eye-
opener to us:
[T]hat lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to
what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contempla-
tion of universes that otherwise we should never have known.

(Ibid., p. 213)
This assertion does not refer to Albertine but to the Baron de Charlus,
and it is made when the Baron has discovered that his lover, a young violin-
ist, also sees women with the same vice – women who love women – a truth
which the young man has not communicated to him. This omission becomes
a lie which reveals the truth because the Baron – unlike the narrator – iden-
tifies this discovery as his own, whereby the truth of his own homosexuality

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978 J. Gammelgaard

becomes clear and ineluctable, not least because it is added to a narrative.

In other words it is specified. When the Baron learns that the circle with
which he is intimate and which includes men must be supplemented with a
circle of women who love women he feels ‘‘himself tormented by anxiety of
the mind as well as of the heart, born of this twofold mystery which com-
bined an extension of the field of his jealousy with the sudden inadequacy
of a definition’’ (ibid., p. 212).
In other words, Proust allows the Baron to experience the truth-revealing
function of deceit which Freud and Lacan saw in transference love, and
which consists of a return to our own desire which takes place when we see
the other as Other, and which in order to make itself visible has had to
detour around the Other.

The Inhuman World of Desire

In the character of the Baron de Charlus, Proust gives sadism a free rein
and shows the fatal consequences of believing that our desires can be satis-
fied through perversity:
As for M. de Charlus, whatever disdain his aristocratic pride may have given him
for the thought of what people would say, how was it that some feeling of personal
dignity and self-respect had not forced him to refuse his sensuality certain satisfac-
tions for which the only imaginable excuse might seem to be complete insanity?

(Ibid., p. 868)
The Baron’s downfall is, however, not devoid of beauty and heroism: ‘‘In
short his desire to be bound in chains and beaten, with all its ugliness,
betrayed a dream as poetical as, in other men, the longing to go to Venice
or to keep ballet-dancers’’ (ibid, pp. 870–871). The author allows his
narrator to go whole hog and reveals the tentative answers to the frightening
riddle that homosexuality has posed for Proust. Not merely homosexuality
itself, however, for homosexuality becomes a prism through which the
author portrays sexuality in general. The Baron represents a path which
Proust has attempted to take but has abandoned, precisely as he has had his
narrator leave behind the snobbish aristocratic figures depicted in The Guer-
mantes Way. A highly intelligent and educated person, the Baron plays the
piano, writes poetry, paints and is a sharp observer and an accomplished
rhetorician. He could have been a great prose poet, as the narrator observes,
and we understand through these references to his talent and to Venice in
the quote above, that Proust was the Baron but was wise enough to abandon
early on the way that led to the Baron’s downfall. Sexuality has struck the
Baron like an illness in a way that parallels Swann’s love bond, which is also
interpreted as an illness.
In Proust’s world we meet both the child’s innocence, narcissistic and
auto-erotic display of desire, and as an image hereof the idea of the com-
plete union of the two sexes – the hermaphrodite – which ultimately renders
the Baron and Albertine identical. When the meeting is to take place, how-
ever, things necessarily go wrong. In The Guermantes Way Proust describes
with frightening irony the kiss as an anatomical impossibility (Proust 1982,

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 979

II, p. 377) and in Sodom and Gomorrah we are initially introduced to a met-
aphor from the plant kingdom which in a strange and intricate manner
depicts the agency of the sexual drive as an incident; a thing that transform
the beautiful into the obscene.
The narrator interrupts his narrative of how he has been awaiting
the return of the Duke and Duchess from his lookout, when he finds the
moment right to insert the story of the Baron’s meeting with the tailor,
Jupien. This story is framed by the allegory of the orchid and the bee:
I was peering through the shutters of the staircase window at the Duchess’s little
tree and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with
which mothers ‘‘bring out’’ their marriage-able offspring, and asking myself whether
the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and
neglected pistil.

(Ibid., p. 623)
Patient as the feminine flower, the narrator longingly awaits the arrival of
the insect, sent as ‘‘an ambassador’’ to beauty. The stranger – the ambassa-
dor – is the motor that ensures the fertilization of the flower with pollen
from another flower. This is necessary to avoid self-pollination, which
‘‘would lead like a succession of intermarriages in the same family, to
degeneracy and sterility’’ (Ibid, p. 625). Behind these images are visible the
loneliness of a person whose entire fecundity is channelled into the creation
of this oeuvre rich in imagery and beauty.
Hereupon the Baron makes his entrance on the scene, representing the
force without which the sexual relationship cannot be consummated,
although the germ is present in everyone, if we are to maintain the image
for a moment. Drive is in Proust’s imagery an alien, external element, lack-
ing in the poetry contained in the description of the longingly waiting
flower, forlornly opening to the enterprising bee. Like the bee, the Baron is
the active and thereby masculine element of drive, but in the seduction he is
simultaneously the image of the bisexual predisposition which both Proust
and Freud were convinced we all possess.
The Baron who is so infatuated with masculinity and who makes so much
of his own, enters the scene like a woman, and at the moment when the
Baron’s eyes meet Jupien’s, a beauty is revealed that serves no purpose
beyond itself. The obscene character of drive is thus depicted as by a child
witnessing a primal scene: ‘‘what I heard … was only a series of inarticulate
sounds…so violent that…I might have thought that one person was slitting
another’s throat within a few feet of me’’ (ibid, p. 631).
This metaphorical description of sexuality renders it barren and lonely.
The flowers stand about in their lonely beauty waiting to be fertilized by
strangers. At the same time there is a beauty in the meeting of gazes, a
beauty that is explicitly not meant to lead anywhere. It does nonetheless,
because the Baron as represented by the insect (instinct) is the driving force
that must reach its goal. In this sense the Baron represents drive as will,
which follows its own logic and to which the person risks becoming an
appendage. Lacan asserts that ‘‘the subject here makes himself the

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980 J. Gammelgaard

instrument of the Other’s jouissance’’ (Lacan 1989, p. 354) and thus derives
the common characteristic of the movement of drive which Freud (1915b)
referred to as turning against the self and turning the drive from activity
toward passivity. In the encounter between the Baron and Jupien we are
presented simultaneously with the short path of drive to satisfaction and the
way of desire, when it inserts another subject in place of the object and
thereby enables the encounter which is the objective of desire.
However, homosexuality only appears to be related to the Baron’s down-
fall, for – like Stoller (2001) – Proust has understood that perversion hides
the potential for acting out hatred. The novel contains two examples of the
Baron’s perverse actions, both of which point to the psychotic collapse
Proust must have seen as a possibility in homosexuality.
In one of these the aging Baron is disintegrating physically as well as
psychologically. His turn towards the final collapse takes place against the
backdrop of World War I. The flagellation scene unfolds late one evening at
a bordello, where the narrator has implausibly sought refuge. Just like at
Montjouvain, the narrator watches through a hole as a brutal-looking man
flogs a naked man chained to the bed. It is the Baron.
Proust has chosen to conclude the narrative of drive vicissitude with this
sado-masochistic scene, which contains, however, an ambiguity that
demands interpretation. Right after the flogging, when the reader expects
the Baron to be battered and streaming with blood, he nonetheless rises
effortlessly and converses with those present. How are we to understand this
built-in contradiction in the narrative of the satisfaction of perversion?
One interpretation might be that the author has used a fictional tool to
show that we are not on the plane of reality. In other words we ought not
to read the Baron’s fate as a result of the perversion of a sick person. The
author has veiled the scene in order to show that we are dealing with a
fantasy articulated by a poet who has described with great insight how drive
– in this case the sado-masochistic drive – can reach its goal through
sublimation. Proust knew wherein this pleasure consisted, and has given it
its rightful place in his empathetic characterisation of the Baron’s complex
personality.
When the Baron wanted to be chained and demanded gruesome tools of
torture, this is because,
there persisted in M. de Charlus his dream of virility, to be attested if need be by
acts of brutality, and all that inner radiance, invisible to us but projecting in this
manner a little reflected light, with which his medieval imagination adorned crosses
of judgment and feudal tortures.

(Proust 1982, III, p. 870)

The Baron is a man who has had to don the ideal of masculinity which
his good breeding and social background demand of him. In the brutal
aggressive scenes he peels all this off to make room for the woman who is
imprisoned in a man’s body.
Precisely because drive is not fixed on a particular object it contains the
potential for beauty, that is to say the possibility of sublimation, which

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 Love, drive and desire in Freud, Lacan and Proust 981

Proust hints at by sowing doubt about the plane of reality on which he

allows the Baron to live out his perversion.
There is no doubt that the Baron’s downfall must be read as an expres-
sion of the ambivalence the author feels about his own sexual drive. In his
personal life Proust constantly pursued details of others’ intimate lives, while
his own love life was short of experiences if rich in fantasies. In this light
Proust’s oeuvre can be read as evidence that drive as well as desire contains
the germ of something beyond pure and simple satisfaction. Drive can be
sublimated and can thus support desire in its pursuit of representation and
artistic creation.
Just like the narrator who realizes at the end of the novel that he must
give up love as well as drive satisfaction in order to create, Proust withdrew
from social life to create the oeuvre which he allows his narrator to
represent as a cathedral, a worthy symbol of that which humans are able to
create through the force of their desire.

Translations of summary
Liebe, Trieb und Begehren bei Freud, Lacan und Proust. Freud und Lacan haben die Liebe zum
Gegenstand der wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung gemacht. Dies ist an sich bereits bemerkenswert, denn
gewçhnlich nhern wir uns diesem Thema ber die Literatur oder Philosophie an. Der Aufsatz diskutiert
Freuds und Lacans Beitrge zur Psychologie der Liebe, indem er zwischen ihnen und Marcel Prousts
bahnbrechendem Roman, Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit, einen Dialog stiftet. Ausgangspunkt
sind Manifestationen der Liebe in der analytischen Situation. Freud hat die bertragungsliebe als
Widerstand, aber auch als extreme Variante der normalen Verliebtheit beschrieben; Lacan ergnzt dies
um den trgerischen Charakter der bertragung. Ausgehend von der bertragungsliebe schreitet die
Untersuchung fort zu den Widersprchen, die Freud in den Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie als
zrtliche und sinnliche Strçmungen der Liebe beschrieben hat. Lacan steuert das Konzept des Begehrens
bei, das es von Trieb und Liebe zu unterscheiden gilt. Mit der Unterscheidung zwischen Begehren, Trieb
und Liebe kommt die Perspektive ins Spiel, die fr eine psychoanalytische Lektre des Proustschen
Hauptwerks erforderlich ist. Der Aufsatz soll zeigen, dass die Protagonisten Albertine und Baron de
Charlus die Schicksale von Liebe bzw. Trieb reprsentieren.

El amor, la pulsión y el deseo en Freud, Lacan y Proust. Tanto Freud como Lacan han hecho del
amor un objeto de investigacin cientfica, lo cual es notable en s mismo, porque normalmente cedemos
ese tema a la literatura y la filosofa. Este artculo analiza las contribuciones de Freud y Lacan a la
psicologa del amor a travs de un dilogo con la novela fundamental de Proust, En busca del tiempo
perdido. El punto de partida es la manifestacin del amor en la situacin analtica. Freud describi el
amor transferencial como resistencia y como una variante extrema del enamoramiento normal. A esto
Lacan agrega el carcter engaÇoso de la transferencia. A partir del amor transferencial, la investigacin
continffla con las contradicciones descritas por Freud en Tres ensayos sobre la sexualidad como corrientes
afectiva y sensual del amor. Lacan aporta el concepto de deseo, que debe distinguirse de la pulsin y del
amor. La diferenciacin entre deseo, pulsin y amor introduce la perspectiva necesaria para una lectura
psicoanaltica de la obra ms importante de Proust. El objetivo principal es una interpretacin de los
protagonistas, Albertine y el Barn de Charlus, como representantes de las vicisitudes del amor y de la
pulsin respectivamente.

Amour, pulsion et désir chez Freud, Lacan et Proust. Tant Freud que Lacan ont fait de l’amour
l’objet d’investigation scientifique, ce qui est en soi remarquable, puisque habituellement nous rendons ce
th
me  des traitements littraires et philosophiques. Cet article traite des contributions  la psychologie
d’amour par Freud et Lacan par le dialogue avec le roman majeur de Marcel Proust, A la recherche du
temps perdu. Le point de dpart est la manifestation de l’amour dans la situation analytique. Freud dcrit
l’amour transfrentiel tant comme de la rsistance qu’une forme extrÞme de tomber amoureux normale-
ment, et  ce Lacan rajoute le caract
re dcevant du transfert. De l’amour transfrentiel l’investigation
continue aux contradictions dcrites par Freud dans Trois nouvelles sur la sexualit comme les courants
affectueux et sensuels de l’amour. Lacan rajoute le concept de dsir, qui doit Þtre distingu de la pulsion
et de l’amour. La diffrentiation entre dsir, pulsion et amour introduit la perspective ncessaire pour
une lecture psychanalytique de l’œuvre majeur de Proust. Le but principal est une lecture des protagon-

Copyright ª 2011 Institute of Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2011) 92

982 J. Gammelgaard
istes, Albertine et le Baron de Charlus, comme reprsentants des vicissitudes d’amour et pulsion, respec-
tivement.

Amore, pulsione e desiderio in Freud, Lacan e Proust. Sia Freud che Lacan hanno fatto dell’amore
l’oggetto di un’indagine scientifica, evento di per s eccezionale, dato che solitamente lasciamo che di
questo argomento si occupino la letteratura e la filosofia. Questo saggio tratta i contributi di Freud e
Lacan alla psicologia dell’amore tramite un dialogo con il fondamentale romanzo di Marcel Proust Alla
ricerca del tempo perduto. Il punto di partenza
la manifestazione dell’amore nella situazione analitica.
Freud ha descritto il transfert amoroso sia come resistenza sia come una variante estrema di un normale
innamoramento, e a ci Lacan aggiunge il carattere illusorio del transfert. Dal transfert amoroso
l’indagine prosegue passando per le contraddizioni che Freud ha descritto in Tre saggi sulla teoria
sessuale come correnti sensuali e di tenerezza dell’amore. Lacan contribuisce con il concetto di desiderio,
che deve essere distinto da pulsione e amore. La differenziazione tra desiderio, pulsione e amore intro-
duce la prospettiva necessaria per una lettura psicanalitica dell’opera principale di Proust. L’obiettivo
fondamentale
l’esegesi dei protagonisti, Albertine e il barone di Charlus, in quanto rappresentanti delle
vicissitudini, rispettivamente, dell’amore e della pulsione.

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