Massimo Recalcati explains the law of desire on Repubblica

There are fathers, mothers, children: one above all, Telemachus, the “right son” who does not enter into conflict with his father, but seeks his absent face. And then naturally complexes, taboos, relationships that don’t work, fall apart, need to be rethought. Above all, there is desire analyzed at 360 degrees, not just the sexual or amorous one, which acts as a common thread in the new series by Republic dedicated to Massimo Recalcati. Among the volumes of the well-known psychoanalyst, professor and essayist on newsstands from today we will find the cornerstones of his reflection, books that have become classics in their genre, capable of speaking to everyone, even to those who have not become too familiar with psychoanalysis in their lives. contact. And so on What remains of the father a The son’s secret, and The taboos of the world to the last essay With closed fistsreleased in bookstores only a few months ago, it is possible to deal with themes that affect us all in everyday life: the transformation of the family, the hardship of young people, the decline of paternal authority, the use of violence, the cult of the body , the excessive power of social media, the precariousness of work, up to the most recent trauma of the pandemic.

We start today with It is no longer as it used to besubtitle: Praise of forgiveness in love life. And in fact Recalcati – who in addition to teaching in Verona and Milan, where he lives, directs the Irpa (Research Institute of Applied Psychoanalysis) and founded Jonas Onlus, a psychoanalytic clinical center for new symptoms – speaks about forgiveness, discussing the experience of betrayal within those loves that resist, that last over time and therefore are not consumed without leaving a trace, disavowing Freud’s cynical sentence according to which love and desire are destined to live separately because the existence of one necessarily excludes that of the other. Here, he asks himself – and asks us – in this book, who he wants to be «a song dedicated to the love that never passes» as he calls it, what happens in these bonds when the promise breaks and one of the two betrays? Above all: what happens then if the cheater asks for forgiveness? Is it really possible to forgive in these cases? Or should we limit ourselves to evoking the Freudian sentence according to which all love is a narcissistic dream, there is no promise, there is no “forever”, there is no love for the Other that is not love for oneself? And the technique that Recalcati uses here gives us the impression of having two books in one: on the one hand we have a theoretical and clinical reflection on the work of forgiveness in love life, on the other the events of a character, an elusive O. , whose figure arises from a literary mixture of different materials: first of all those taken from some patient stories accumulated in his work as a psychoanalyst and however made unrecognizable.

From love, desire and enjoyment Recalcati asks himself again in the second volume of this series, starting from the title Does sexual intercourse exist? And here too the conclusion the author reaches is that if we want to say something new about love, beyond narcissism, we must leave Freud’s hand and take, instead, that of Lacan. But the desire which, as we said, is among the most in-depth themes in Recalcati’s work, returns forcefully in the third volume of the series dedicated to those Portraits of desire, as he calls them, which he has practiced for a long time. A real gallery, a catalog of categories if we want, in which in the wake of the beloved Lacan ranges from envious desire – which has the face of the child torn by jealousy for his place occupied by an intruder, the newborn little brother attached to the the mother’s breast – to the desire for nothing, from the desire for Elsewhere to the, last, desire for death. To fathers anxious to be friends with their children who do not recognize their authority, in the era he himself defined as the “evaporation of the father”, Recalcati has dedicated several books over the course of his career, which we find here, starting with that What remains of the fatherin which he skilfully mixes the teachings of Freud and Lacan with some figures taken from literature and cinema, from Philip Roth to Cormac McCarthy, to Clint Eastwood, to serve as a warning or example.

The series – 11 books to orient yourself in modern life – On newsstands from today every week with Repubblica at 8.90 euros more than the price of the newspaper, with the exception of the last volume at 9.90 more, the new series dedicated to Massimo Recalcati’s books, which deal with the most current issues of our time to help us find meaning in the chaos of contemporary life. Eleven releases, starting today with “It’s not like before”.