Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Freud Journal (1958/1964)

Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author of studies on Nietzsche and Rilke.

In 1911, she participated in the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Weimar, and shortly after went to Vienna to undergo a training analysis with Freud. Written during the years 1912-1913, the journal begins with her participation in his Wednesday evening study group and Saturday evening lectures. Following her training, Salomé worked together with her friend the physician and analyst Viktor Tausk at Frankl-Hochwart’s clinic in Vienna and attended both the meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the discussion evenings hosted by Alfred Adler, all reflected in the diary.

Originally published as In der Schule bei Freud, 1958
Translated and With an Introduction by Stanley A. Leavy
Publisher Basic Books, New York, 1964
211 pages

review (Ban Wang, American Imago)
Salomé’s biography at padd.at
Salomé at Wikipedia

PDF (112 MB, no OCR)
See also Victor Tausk’s On the Origin of the “Influencing Machine” in Schizophrenia (1919/1933)

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts (2012)

“Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we’re abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.

Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual’s erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.

The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.

This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.”

Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745661521, 9780745661520
300 pages

review (David Wolpe, Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Jacqui Gabb, LSE Review of Books)

Publisher

PDF

Alain Badiou: In Praise of Love (2009–) [French, English]

“A new century, new threats to love… Love without risks is like war without deaths – but, today, love is threatened by an alliance of liberalism and hedonism. Caught between consumerism and casual sexual encounters devoid of passion, love – without the key ingredient of chance – is in danger of withering on the vine. In In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou takes on contemporary ‘dating agency’ conceptions of love that come complete with zero-risk insurance – like US zero-casualty bombs. He develops a new take on love that sees it as an adventure, and an opportunity for re-invention, in a constant exploration of otherness and difference that leads the individual out of an obsession with identity and self. Liberal, libertine and libertarian reductions of love to instant pleasure and non-commitment bite the dust as Badiou invokes a supporting cast of thinkers from Plato to Lacan via Karl Marx to form a new narrative of romance, relationships and sex – a narrative that does not fear love.”

With Nicolas Truong
Publisher Flammarion, 2009
Café Voltaire series
ISBN 2081233010, 9782081233010
90 pages

English edition
Translated by Peter Bush
Publisher Serpent’s Tail, 2012
ISBN 1846687799, 9781846687792
104 pages

Badiou’s lecture on love (2008)
Review: Fabian Van Onzen (Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, 2012).

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

Éloge de l’amour (French, EPUB, updated on 2020-7-5)
In Praise of Love (English, updated on 2020-7-5)