Psychology

Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society

By Rousselle, Duane

Duane Rousselle

Real Love: Essays on Psychoanalysis, Religion, Society

Think Media Series | Paperback – December 2021 | 154 pages| ISBN 1777630207 | ISBN-978-1777630201

This is the third book in a series of psychoanalytic "interventions" into culture and society (the first book was an intervention into American sociological theory, and the second was an intervention into American gender theory). Real Love explores today's diverse, multiplicitous, and contradictory modalities of love through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic sociology. It is careful to avoid the temptation to locate love exclusively within the register of human meaning or desire by striving to locate the traumatic "being" of love. The implications are such that love is today the least of possibilities: those who fall in love increasingly do so with a high degree of certainty and conviction. Yet, given that, love finally emerges as an interruption of the tendency that we often have to place the pursuit of happiness, career success, and spiritual/mental growth in the foreground. It is within this context that love can once again become dangerous and revolutionary.

“Real Love explores today’s diverse, multiplicitous, and contradictory modalities of love through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalytic sociology. It is careful to avoid the temptation to locate love exclusively within the register of human meaning or desire by striving to locate the traumatic “being” of love. The implications are such that love is today the least of possibilities: those who fall in love increasingly do so with a high degree of certainty and conviction. ”

— Matthew Keenan

About the Author

Duane Rousselle is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and Canadian sociological theorist. He is currently Assistant Professor of Sociological Theory at Nipissing University in Ontario, Canada. He has published numerous books and articles including Jacques Lacan and American Sociology (Palgrave), Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity (Routledge), and Post-Anarchism: A Reader (with Süreyyya Evren, Pluto Press).