Love and power: the conditions of love in the Freudian discourse

This chapter centres on the different forms of discourse regarding love in relation to power and sexual difference, its point of departure being the Freudian discourse. This involves illuminating the psychic spaces in which power and love develop, referring them to fundamental splitting in psychic life. The chapter considers how these conditions variously affect the vicissitudes of love, sexual desire and passion in both sexes. The mother-child bond, as well as the relationship between a man and a woman or any other human relationship, consists of power relations, productive spaces, transmission belts. This is power in the sense Foucault gives it: relations of forces between two or more points which can be mobile and changing, with a configuration of their own and a relative autonomy, and not necessarily a reflection of any greater power. Freud attributes the primitive peoples&s; taboo of virginity basically to the attempt to avoid the female&s;s hostile reaction to the male who deflowers her.