Book of Love and Pain, The

The Book of Love and Pain

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Contents

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pp. v-

Translators’ Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-

Translators’ Introduction

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pp. 1-8

J.-D. Nasio’s The Book of Love and Pain¹ engages the experience of pain in psychoanalysis. It is a striking fact that there is no exclusive treatment devoted to pain in the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic literature, given that psychical pain is the essential concern and even raison d’être of psychoanalysis...

Cl�mence, or the Experience of Pain

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pp. 9-12

Clémence³ was thirty-eight years old. She suffered from infertility and was struggling to become pregnant. I saw her in analysis for three years. My memory is still fresh of the day when she told me that she was finally pregnant. She exclaimed, “We have succeeded!” I had the feeling that I was sharing the joy with a group of close friends who had worked together with Clémence...

Threshold

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pp. 13-18

I decided to begin this book with a fragment of a cure—I should say with a fragment of a life that brings two persons together: one who suffers and the other who assumes the suffering. One, a mother overwhelmed by the cruel loss of her first child whom she desired so much and who was lost so brutally, and the other, a psychoanalyst who tries to give a meaning to a pain that, in itself, has none. In itself, pain has no value and no signification...

Psychical Pain, Pain of Love

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pp. 19-40

In contrast to corporeal pain caused by a wound, psychical pain takes place without physical injury. The cause that triggers it is no longer located in the flesh but in the bond between the one who loves and the object of his or her love. When the cause was located in that protective envelope of the ego that is the body, we called it corporeal pain. Now the cause is situated...

Archipelago of Pain

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pp. 41-48

There are two ways to react painfully to the loss of a loved one. When we are prepared to see him or her go due to a terminal illness, for example, we experience his or her death with an infinite yet representable sadness. It is as if the pain of mourning was named before appearing and as if the work of mourning was already begun before the death of the loved one. Therefore, although unbearable, pain remains integrated...

Corporeal Pain: A Psychoanalytic Conception

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pp. 49-76

We think most often that physical pain is the exclusive concern of neurophysiology and only concerns the psyche if it has an effect on the personality of the suffering man or woman. It is as if, on the one hand, there would be a painful phenomenon that can be explained scientifically by the transmission of the nociceptive message of pain within the nervous system...

Lessons on Pain

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pp. 77-122

The pages that follow are the transcription of an oral seminar that was the basis of this work. In spite of the stylistic differences between these lessons and the preceding chapters, a single intention guides the entire book: to raise pain to the rank of a psychoanalytic concept. In the course of these lessons, influenced by Lacan’s theory, you will find a kind of thinking in progress...

Excerpts from Freud and Lacan Concerning Psychical Pain

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pp. 123-130

Freud and Lacan have rarely addressed the theme of pain and never devoted an exclusive study to it. The citations that follow are drawn from short passages from the works of these authors. The lines in italics are Dr. Nasio’s commentary. What is physical pain? For Freud, pain results from a sudden internal hemorrhage of psychical energy...

Excerpts from Freud Concerning Corporeal Pain

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pp. 131-136

Corporeal pain Freud thought that physical pain resulted from the violent eruption of great quantities of energy that reach the heart of the ego where the memory neurones are located, that is, at the level of the unconscious. Pain in the body is inscribed in the unconscious...

Notes

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pp. 137-140

Index

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pp. 141-143