Lacan said: "To love is to give what you don't have." What this means is that to love is to recognize one's own lack and give it to another, to place it in another. It's not about giving what we possess, material goods, or gifts; it's about giving something else that we don't possess, something beyond us. To do this, you have to assume your loss, your "castration," as Freud put it. And that is essentially feminine. Some truly love only from a feminine position. Love feminizes. That's why love is always somewhat comical for men. But if he allows himself to be intimidated by that comedy, then he isn't truly secure in his masculinity.

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We love those who answer our question "Who am I?" Does psychoanalysis teach us anything about love?

A lot, because it's an experience rooted in love. It's about that automatic and often unconscious love that analysis provides to the analyst, which is called transference. It's artificial love, but made of the same material as real love. It sheds light on the mechanism of true love: Love is directed towards someone we believe knows our true self. But love allows you to think that this truth will be pleasing to you, that it is acceptable, while in reality, it is often too difficult to bear.

Okay, what does it really mean to love?

To truly love someone means to believe that by loving them, we will come to know the truth about ourselves. We love those who hide within themselves the true answer or at least one answer to our question: "Who am I?"

Why do some people know how to love, while others don't?

Some people know how to provoke love in others, such as serial lovers, men, or women. They know which buttons to press to be loved. But they themselves may not necessarily love; they prefer to play cat and mouse with their prey. To love, you must acknowledge your lack, understand that you need another, that you are incomplete without them. Those who think they are already complete, or want to be, don't know how to love. And sometimes, they learn this painfully. They manipulate, pull strings, but they don't taste the risk or the pleasures of love.

"Already complete": only a man could think such a thing…

Well observed! Lacan said: "To love is to give what you don't have." What this means is that to love is to recognize one's own lack and give it to another, to place it in another. It's not about giving what we possess, material goods, or gifts; it's about giving something else that we don't possess, something beyond us. To do this, you have to assume your loss, your "castration," as Freud put it. And that is essentially feminine. Some truly love only from a feminine position. Love feminizes. That's why love is always somewhat comical for men. But if he allows himself to be intimidated by that comedy, then he isn't truly secure in his masculinity.

Is it then much harder for men to love?

Oh, yes. Even a man who loves has moments of pride, outbursts of aggressiveness towards the object of his love, because that love puts him in a position of incompleteness, dependence. That's why he may desire a woman he doesn't love, to regain his masculine position that he suspends in love. Freud called this principle the "derogation of love life" in men: the gap between love and sexual desire.

And in women?

It's less common. In most cases, it involves doubling the male partner. On one hand, he is the man who provides pleasure (jouissance) and whom they desire, but at the same time, he is also the man of love, feminized, necessarily castrated. It's not just about anatomy: there are women who adopt the position of men. And their numbers are increasing. One man for love, at home; and another for pleasure, whom they met online, or on a train.

Why are there "more and more of them"?

Socio-cultural stereotypes of femininity and masculinity are undergoing radical transformation. Men are encouraged to open up to their own emotions, to love and feminize themselves; women, on the other hand, are experiencing a kind of "pressure towards masculinization": in the name of legal equality, they are encouraged to say "I can do that too." At the same time, homosexuals are seeking the same rights and symbols as heterosexuals, such as marriage and adoption. Hence the enormous instability in roles, the wide fluidity in the theater of love, which contradicts the fixed world of yesterday. Love becomes "liquid," as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noted. Everyone is called upon to invent their own lifestyle, to take responsibility for their own kind of pleasure and form of love. Traditional scripts are slowly becoming unusable. The social pressure to conform hasn't disappeared, but it's declining.

"Love is always mutual," says Lacan. Is this still true in today's context? And what does it actually mean?

This sentence is constantly repeated without being understood, or it's always misunderstood. It doesn't mean that just by loving someone, they will love you back. That would be obviously untrue. It means: "If I love you, it's because you have something in yourself (because you're lovable). I am the one who loves, but you are also involved in it because there is something in you that arouses love in me. Love is mutual because it consists of "from" and "to": The love I have for you is the return effect of the fact that you are the cause of love for me. So, you are involved. My love for you is not just my own affair, but also yours. My love may say something about you that you don't even know." This doesn't guarantee that someone's love will always be reciprocated by the love of the other: when this happens, there's always an element of miracle, it can't be predicted in advance.

So, we're not just randomly thrown together. Why that guy? Why that girl?

Here comes something Freud called Liebesbedingung, the condition of love, the cause of desire. It's a particular characteristic - or set of characteristics - that play a decisive role in someone being chosen as a beloved. This completely eludes neuroscience because it varies from person to person and depends on their individual, intimate history. Traits that sometimes only appear for a moment. For example, Freud singled out one case of a man, his patient, for whom the cause of desire was the glimmer on a woman's nose!

It's hard to believe in love based on such trifles!

The reality of the unconscious surpasses imagination. You can't imagine how many things in human life, especially in love, are based on small things, details, "extraordinary details." It's true that in men, such causes of desire play a predominant role; they are like fetishes whose presence is necessary to ignite the spark that leads to love. Such small particularities, reminders of father, mother, brother, or sister, or someone from childhood, also play a role in the female choice of the object of love. But the female form of love is more often erotomaniacal than fetishistic: they want to be loved, and the interest or love expressed to them, or assumed to exist in another person, is often a sine qua non for eliciting their love, or at least their consent. This phenomenon lies at the heart of male flirtation with women.

Do you assign any role in all this to fantasies?

In women, fantasies, whether conscious or unconscious, are more decisive for the position of pleasure than for the choice of the object of love. And it's precisely the opposite for men. For example, it can happen that a woman can experience pleasure – orgasm, for example – if during intercourse she imagines being beaten, or raped, or imagines being another woman, or being somewhere else, absent.

And male fantasy?

It plays a role in love at first sight, for example. A classic example, commented on by Lacan, is from Goethe's novel: the sudden passion of young Werther for Charlotte when he sees her for the first time feeding a heap of children gathered around her. Here, motherhood ignites the spark of love. Another example, from my practice, is as follows: an employer in his fifties welcomes candidates for the position of secretary; a twenty-year-old enters, and he immediately declares his love to her. Then he wonders what came over him and analyzes himself. Then he discovers the trigger: in her, he saw traits that reminded him of what he himself was like when he was twenty, when he went for his first job interview. In a way, he fell in love with himself. In these two examples, we see two sides of love distinguished by Freud: either you love the person who protects, in this case, the mother, or you love a narcissistic image of yourself.

It sounds like we're puppets!

No, nothing is predetermined between any woman and man; there's no compass or pre-established relationship. Their encounter isn't programmed like the meeting of sperm and egg; it also has nothing to do with genes. Men and women speak; they live in the world of discourse, and that's what's decisive. The modalities of love are extremely sensitive to the culture that surrounds them. Every civilization is responsible for how it structures relations between the sexes. For example, it happens that in the West, in our liberal, market-driven, and legal societies, "pluralism" is on the right track to dethrone "uniqueness." The ideal model of "great love for a lifetime" is slowly losing ground in the face of fast outings, quick loves, and a whole fleet of alternative, consecutive, or even simultaneous love scenarios.

And love for all time? For eternity?

Balzac said, "Every passion that isn't eternal is detestable." But can any relationship be passionate and last a lifetime? The more a man dedicates himself to only one woman, the more she will receive a maternal significance for him: more sublime and untouchable than loved. Married homosexuals develop this cult of women best: Aragon declares love to Elsa, but as soon as she dies, he turns to men! And when a woman clings to her man, she castrates him. So the path is narrow. The best outcome for love in marriage is friendship; that's essentially what Aristotle said.

The problem is that men say they don't understand what women want, and women say they don't understand what men expect from them...

Yes. The objection to Aristotle's solution is the fact that dialogue between the sexes is impossible, as Lacan said with a sigh. People who love are doomed to go forward constantly learning the language of the other, wandering, searching for keys to meanings – keys that can always turn out to be wrong. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings from which there is no way out.