Reflection on Unrequited Love
with reference to Responseless Love Story Three
Gustavo Restivo (Psychoanalyst)

I will analyze love by exploring the two functions that it involves: the lover and the loved.

The lover is the subject of the desire; the loved instead, is the one that seems to have something. The issue is to know if what the loved has, is what the lover is lacking. In other words, if what the loved has, matches what the subject of the desire lacks.

When we explore the dialect of love we will be trying to capture the relationship between the desire and its object.

The lover is the subject who lacks something, and therefore is able to desire, is a subject marked by a loss. The lover doesn’t have it, but also doesn’t know what he/she is lacking. The loved, on the other hand, is the one that doesn’t know what he/she has; probably it is the reason for his/her attractiveness. Love is affected by a structural ignorance.

Among those two; the lover and the loved, there is no relationship, one lacks of something and the other does not have it, and this is the problem with unrequited love.

But there is hope. Sometimes the metaphor of love is produced, something inexplicable, almost a miracle happens. Imagine somebody’s hand, the lover’s hand, stretching, trying to catch a bunch of roses, and from those roses (the loved) comes a hand in the direction to the lover, transforming him into a bunch of roses, transforming the lover into the loved one.

[Story]

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