Last time, I said I was really busy. I’m actually still really busy. This will be my last post of 2023. It is also longer than average because it is full of psychoanalysis.

As a gift, I will offer some psychoanalytic insights on how to make a woman fall in love with you. But before you get excited, let me say in advance that the answer is not what most people are looking for. 😂 I will also talk about what Lacan refers as “limitless love” and “soul love”.

Goodbye my curious children.

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Thank You

I just want to thank everyone who stopped by. I don’t pay attention to my website traffic because I know it is not very accurate (I’ve done tests with others). I’d wager that most of my visitors are not from WordPress since I am not active on the community. With this inaccuracy kept in mind, my site traffic has gone up by 18,000% (+/-) since the first year of starting this blog in 2016. One day, this site will become a famous cult blog where I will become the cult leader. 👹 And together, we will start a revolution. 😂

According to these same stats, my top 5 most visited pages in 2023 are:

1. The INTJ: A Guide to Understanding a Bobby
2. Lacanian Psychoanalysis: The Mirror Stage and the Wound of Split Subjectivity
3. Home Page
4. Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Metaphors of Love and the Limits of Human Knowledge
5. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Subversion of the Split Subject

Rising popularity (honorable mention):
Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Clinical Context, Theory, and Practice

Thanks again!
I hope 2024 will bring you all love and peace.

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Chatting with Regulars at Coffee Shop

When I don’t work, my Sunday morning ritual often consists of hanging out at a coffee shop where I read, write, and do other random unproductive things. Just some Sundays ago, I had a chat with a regular where we caught up on our lives and how busy both of us are with work as he is trying to save up for an apartment. We also spoke about Star Wars since he is a big fan of the franchise. Then after he left for work. I ran into another regular where we had another chat about photography, psychology and psychoanalysis. He was a pretty interesting dude. Quite smart and curious. I gave him a few tips on photography and how to light a backdrop using reflectors and soft boxes for his personal music projects. He gave me a few psychologist names to look up on who I thought was pretty interesting—at least from the way he explained it to me. That day, I ended up talking to people for 3 hours straight where I lost my voice and got nothing done. 😂

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On Reading and Learning Psychoanalysis

Not only is psychoanalysis an incredibly niche and complex discipline, I think it also teaches us a lot about ourselves along the way. It is like the cosmology of human consciousness—but with more mind than matter. Due to its focus on the unconscious mind, there is a certain degree of mythical or mystical allure to it that draws its readers. It might be due to how psychoanalysis began with Freud, who analyzed myths from ancient tribes (most famously seen in a book called, Totem and Taboo). Freud saw how people used myths to explain things that they cannot articulate clearly into words, but can only represent through fictional stories and their religions as a metaphor.

I think this is the most important part of learning psychoanalysis. The difference between a good and an average reader of Freud and Lacan is that the latter reads them too literally as if the things they say only has a singular meaning to it (neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity). What they should be doing is read them through the function of metaphor (and metonymy) and take the things they say as only half-said, where there is always something missing in their knowledge as you interpret their works. This is especially true for Lacan’s seminars.

Soon, you might notice how our unconscious mind becomes our own blind spot as we learn Freud and Lacan’s knowledge where they function as our “subject supposed to know”. You might even notice how it produces a similar relationship between the analysand (you) and analyst (the text) in a clinical setting! Part of understanding psychoanalysis is about learning to accept some of these blind spots, metaphors, ambiguities, and obscurity: that something exists outside of our consciousness and symbolic language. And once you discover new knowledge in their works, it’s like a surprise of new knowledge born from our unconscious mind. If you ask me, that’s pretty cool!

Once you start to understand how these deeper underlying structures of their ideas works, psychoanalysis has a lot of interesting things to say in regards to the unconscious mind, where the truth is never where we consciously think it is. And perhaps by learning about ourselves and the human mind, we can come to understand the entire world!

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Is the love encounter identical to love at first sight?

Yes. But I kind of regret using the term “love at first sight” in my writings because it made it sound fictional, even when it’s a real phenomenon, but very rare. Most of the time, it is lust at first sight. Only time will tell which one it is.

The love encounter is also identical to what some people might refer as running into your soulmate; where your encounter of them feels like the whole world fades away as you get lost in each other’s eyes (“When you look at meee, and the whole world fades, I’ll always remember us this wayy” 🎤🎶). Only that it is not as supernatural as what most people think because it is love transference at work. ♋♌♍♎♏♓ LOL what are these zodiac signs and why is the cancer symbol a side ways 69 Travis Mah?

Near the end of Clinical Contexts, Theory, and Practice, I briefly spoke about seeing eternity in the other’s eyes and mentioned how our love encounter of the other person may inspire new knowledge and offer solutions and new ways to see the world. To be sure, I was talking about the same person who inspired me to write Metaphors of Love and the Limits of Human Knowledge. 😊 I always thought it was obvious. 🥺

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Phone Calls

I hate picking up phone calls. The only calls I pick up on my phone other than family members, work, and other essential things, is my nonexistent girlfriend 😂 (I am #foreveralone). As of right now. I think I get calls from my work more than anyone else who calls me. It’s kind of annoying sometimes because I’m in the middle of writing or reading something really important (the fate of humanity type of importance) then some guy calls me and screams “BOBBAYYYYYYYYY!!”. 😂

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Thoughts on Jordan Peterson

Every time I mention “psychoanalysis” to a random stranger, they bring up Peterson. While I find some of his insights interesting, I’m pretty neutral in a lot of his positions and interpretations of various continental philosophers. In some cases, I think he is just not very well read in the field.

Honestly, his readings on Deconstruction and Marxism resembles something like a first year undergraduate student who doesn’t know what they are talking about. 😂 I think Peterson garners most of his audience from those who never studied philosophy beyond undergraduate level courses—especially in the areas of continental philosophy. Marxist thought is very influential, complex, and difficult to learn because his ideas has evolved a lot since 19th century due to other emerging fields. Deconstruction is also very difficult to learn because it requires you to have extensive knowledge in the history of philosophy.

When he debated Slavoj Zizek, Peterson was caught off guard by what Marxism really is. He was not prepared to debate Zizek, the latter who spent much of his life studying Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Lacan (Zizek’s analyst/teacher was Jacques-Alain Miller, the son-in-law of Jacques Lacan). In fact, you can kind of tell Zizek did not want to debate Peterson. Unfortunately, the audience watched them talk like it was a football game which was kind of depressing. The older I get, the more I realize how many people are clueless about these topics. LOL

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The Lacanians

While Jacques-Alain Miller (JAM) was Zizek’s psychoanalyst and teacher, it is well known that they don’t always get along with each other. JAM thinks Zizek is not a faithful Lacanian. Zizek took Lacanian ideas outside of a clinical setting that deviated from Lacan’s original intentions, which was to train new analysts. Whereas JAM is the one true Lacanian (a purist) who is a genius in his teachings of Lacan. I think he also had a dispute with Alain Badiou as well—another renown philosopher who is very well versed in Lacan.

Lacanians don’t always agree with each other, where they have wide ranging positions. But JAM is a go-to if you want to learn Lacan. Without him, traditional Lacanianism would be lost in translation as intellectuals fuses Lacan into other disciplines.

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Hookup Culture

I’m not a fan of it. But I am also not in a position to judge how people wants to live. Maybe I’m just a romantic, but I think there is something beautiful about two people who are committed, loyal, and grows old together, where they learn to find joy in doing some of the world’s most mundane things as a couple (or family)—like sitting on a bench in silence, going for walks, doing laundry, cooking, or cleaning. Where they exist together, like the calmness of the trees, and the rustle of its leaves; like the movement of clouds, and the stillness of the moon with its stars. To me, this is real and mature love, and not “OMG THIS PERSON IS SO HOT I’M GOING TO SLEEP WITH THEM 🥵” to a new person every week or few months.

Quite often, contemporary society tries to cultivate this latter type of life in so many ways (you see it in movies, TV shows, music, etc.) to the point where it makes people shallow and vain. Obviously this isn’t applicable to everyone, but I sometimes think love is under real threat due to this cultural phenomenon.

(This reminds me of that one movie called Paterson which talks about the life of a bus driver and poet who lives with his wife that champions his writing. The film was quite mundanely beautiful).

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Who is the most physically attractive philosopher?

I might be bias, but Jacques Derrida is probably one of the most handsome philosophers. 😂 I mean just look at him, dudes a total snacc. And the way he talks probably makes everyone instantly swoon over him. Derrida also had a cute cat if that means anything LOL. But imagine being handsome and intelligent at the same time. Definitely not something you run into every day. Awwww yeahhhhhh.

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Hysterics and the mastery of the Other’s knowledge

This phenomenon is incredibly common. It is also very normal. Sometimes when you meet people who are in a relationship or is in love with someone, you might notice how the hysteric (often a woman) will embody the knowledge of their lover where they become experts at the things they know. They might unintentionally talk about them to others and adopt their positions. What we can see here is how the hysteric is occupying the space of the Other’s desires and knowledge. It’s sort of like meeting someone who can’t stop talking about a specific person because of the important role they play in their lives. In everyday language, this person is usually into whoever they are talking about, since they take up so much space in their minds, even if they might consciously deny it or complain about them. It’s like the person who always talks about their ex, but denies they are into them (they are). Other times, people intentionally do some of these things to set boundaries with the other person. Like the person who randomly mentions their significant other to you just in case. 😂

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How do you make a woman fall in love with you?

I encountered this question the other day. It is very difficult to answer. So let me try to answer it. People can only understand this section if they’ve read my writings on psychoanalysis, especially on split subjectivity, love, and death drive.

The short answer is that, you can’t make anyone fall in love with you because love is an unconscious affect. But you can certainly make someone desire you. It is very (very) common for people to mistake their desires as love. So today, let us go against the entire world of TV shows and dating guides where people are taught how to desire, use pick up lines, flirt, talk, or “attract” a woman via social bonding. By doing so, I am by no means denying the importance of symbolic bond (it’s really important). Rather, what I wish to show you is how, in order for there to be love, a paradoxical condition must occur where love marks the failure of this social bond.

Where Freud once said that all relationships are sexual relationships, Lacan famously says, “There is no sexual relationship”. At the conscious level, it is only through our desires, such as getting to know the other person on an imaginary and symbolic level, where there might eventually be a sexual relationship or social bond. Yet, all of this masks the fundamental experience that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship or social bond at the unconscious level (there are several reasons for this that I won’t have room to explain).

In many ways, desire seeks to satisfy our drives. It’s like consumerism where we endlessly want to desire for new things like this fancy new dress, or that fancy new watch. Desire is like how we try to find something to do or someone to talk to when we are bored. We try to find something or someone new to desire and produce a social bond with. Or you see some handsome dude or pretty lady who you want to chat up at the bar or gym, and want to attract them. It is like those who aimlessly scrolls through social media to find someone attractive to like and follow. Or the person who mindlessly scrolls through dating apps to sleep with as many people as possible. Desire is also like the person who “loves” (desires) you for a few months and moves to another person once they get what they want. Or they might be the person who can’t decide who to “love” (desire) because they have so many options (just like going shopping). The desiring subject is identical to what you see in a child, who wants to play with a new toy only for them to get bored and tries to find something new.

If we look at the relationship between desire and drive, desire is a bit aimless. It only seeks to fill in the lack which creates our desires as such. It tries to satisfy pleasure that gets governed by the Other. Consumer culture is the frenzy of pure desire by telling you what and how you should desire. The market shows you the things it thinks will fill the lack in you without actually doing so (a misrecognition). It tries to make you endlessly buy one product after another, or jump from one partner to another, where you are convinced that these novel experiences would satisfy the lack or void in you, which it never will for your entire life. Desire is indeterminate.

Love on the other hand, is what produces determinacy which has the opposite effect of desire. And when you encounter love in real life, it might even make you run the other way! This is because love consists of unconsciously anchoring the position of lack or object a in the other person which may sometimes cause anxiety due to the temporary collapse of semblance, which gradually reemerges when desire (social bond) reestablishes (I spoke about this in #11). Anxiety never lies—it is very real. It may sometimes reveal to us that, someone becomes object a (our love interest) only at the moment the object (person) is threatened to be lost or filtered through the Symbolic Other (castration/split subjectivity); that this person unconsciously serves as a substitution for someone else (i.e. love transference). And it is only at the level of this loss where love arises. This is why whenever I spoke of the love encounter, I always emphasized on the subject who sometimes experiences anxiety or trips over their words—someone who shakes you out of your comfort zone like stage fright!

There is desire, social bond, or what might appear to be a sexual relationship at a conscious level, only because there is always already a failure of a sexual relationship within the unconscious mind that is represented by object a or lack. There are several interpretations of this. The most agreed interpretation is that such failure is actually a failure of a sexual logic deep within the unconscious mind (a wound) that the split subject attempts to conceal and stitch up through the symbolic (via social bond; language). Such failure of sexual logic produces what we consciously refer as our “gender identities” or sexual difference (famously known as “Sexuation”—I’ll introduce this one day; it’s really complex).

Our desires which produces the social bond circulates around this lack and attempts to fill the void, where it warps our perceptions of the other. Desire creates a narcissistic illusion of Oneness and fullness with the other (recall in Part I, and the Schema L diagram). As such, we might consciously say that this person is “the One”.

In a metaphorical way, it is when our desire diminishes where love is really felt between two people (i.e. when the “honeymoon period” is over). It is the moment where we might get bored, or get annoyed by their quirks and habits where real love happens. This is where we might become surprised by who they really are, their vulnerabilities, differences, insecurities, where love is unconsciously located in the other. It is the part where we might feel like things are getting tough, and even painful. Yet we still love them where we want them to be happy, be with them, and make it work.

Here we discover that, similar to desire, to love is to also be with the “wrong” person (because love is transference). The key difference is that desire attempts to fill in our lack so to achieve satisfaction, love does not. Love keeps our lack open. And it is this experience of what we do not have that we give to the other which allows us to experience love. Thus, love marks the failure or loss of the sexual relationship (or the incompleteness of sexuality). It is the failure of the social bond which consciously produces the experience of human connection and the social bond itself.

In regards to a woman who falls in love with a man. Lacan writes, “A woman can love in a man only the way in which he faces knowledge thanks to which he souloves” (from Seminar 20, p.84). The keywords here are: “only the way he faces knowledge thanks to which he souloves”. People often use the word “soul” to stand in for a supernatural experience that is radically foreign or emptied from their physical selves as a speaking being. The experience of “soul” bears the intolerable; it is a lack—just like object a (in my writings, I mentioned how love is about “caring for the other’s soul” for similar reasons). It is only from how the man unconsciously reveals his love and knowledge (his lack; his soulove of his soul), where the woman is also able to unconsciously locate it within the man’s knowledge, where love happens (keyword: “unconsciously”). One can thus, metaphorically say that, to love one another is to recognize each other’s “soul”—to recognize and locate the lack in the other.

What we can begin to see is how the more someone tries to make a woman fall in love with them via the social bond or attracting them, the more likely their attempts will fail where they mistake their desires as love. They fail to produce the effects of love precisely because love is the unconscious failure of the social bond.💀 This is the function of desire which always keeps us distanced from object a (love) by fooling us (unless they partake in clinical analysis). Desire always misses the point and leads us astray because it is full of projections and misrecognitions; just like how everything we say are always half-said. Our love interest turns out to be not exactly who we thought they were in the beginning stages of knowing them when we tried to produce the social bond. The knowledge that we established via our desires of social bonding warped our perceptions from the beginning only for them to later get “surprised” by it.

It is only at the level of unconsciously recognizing this failure of the social bond—of locating this lack in the other, where love happens. As Lacan would say, love has nothing to do with sex. In fact, love often encompasses all the difficult parts of the relationship since it is the recognition of the lack of a symbolic bond. This is another reason why last time, I said that time will tell who loves you. For they are the people who stays even when you are difficult to deal with—even if you might be long gone. Love is hard work!

Thus, to love is to be dissatisfied. Though not always in an unhealthy way. Yet at times, people might put themselves into situations where this dissatisfaction (split subjectivity) is felt, where they might distant themselves from the person they love by consciously making up a reason for it (we unconsciously “mutilate” the person by isolating object a from them and pronouncing the Other’s law), or we produce a desire of an unsatisfied desire. A good example of this is one of Freud’s patient of the Butcher’s wife, who teased her husband to not give her any caviar, even when it is her favorite food (it is related to her jealousy of another woman that her husband appear to take interest in). Her desire for dissatisfaction or to have an unfulfilled desire is what produces her subjectivity and love for her husband. While this might sound strange, it is this experience of lack or dissatisfaction of not having her favorite food which allows her to produce questions that a hysteric asks, “What is a woman?” (i.e. what is the type of woman which allows her to attract her husband?); or even “What is love?”. Often times, it is these desires that we give up on (i.e. compromises, etc.), that maintains our love (lack) for the other. To love is to learn how to live with our symptoms with the other person. Or as Alain Badiou would say, “To love is to struggle”.

Lacan once famously pointed out how love has nothing to do with knowledge. Yet, it is also at this point where new knowledge ruptures from the unconscious mind which substitutes for this lack in our conscious thoughts (it takes the place; but does not fill the lack like desire would). And it is only when love becomes real; when the real of the social bond becomes meaningless and emptied of its signifieds, where it no longer makes sense through the symbolic, that love will surface from the unconscious mind. It is like the Lacanian love metaphor of the flower that bursts into flames, where the flower stands in for language, symbolic, or social bond (I spoke about this in Part III).

Conscious love is the unconscious admitting to not knowing (or no longer knowing) what the sexual relation/social bond is with the other person. As a result, one no longer knows exactly why they love the other person because they haven’t went through clinical analysis to uncover their unconscious love transference (some might recognize it, but won’t know why until they go through analysis). They just simply love them without reason.

Just like the initial subject, love must pass through the symbolic like a filter, where parts of it will be missing as we use language and social bond to represent it at a conscious level (our symptoms, transferences, etc.). Love is the failure of our symbolic words (social bond). It is the failure of knowledge while producing its conscious limits (precisely, “the limits of human knowledge”). Love is the wound of our knowledge where it can only unconsciously reveal itself through itself. And it is certainly a wound that not everyone can locate!

The most important dimensions of real love takes place unconsciously in the symbolic as love dissolves into it. The rupture of love holds onto the Other and responds to the conscious symbolic social bond/sexual relationship in an entirely new way, where the split subject no longer resists their traumatic transferences and wounds from the real. Instead, they willingly embrace them. This is what Lacan referred as “limitless love” due to how love exceeds symbolic language as it survives beyond it (survives beyond consciousness); and as its lack gets unconsciously anchored within their symbolic relationship with their love object. Such experience is known as “Jouissance”: that there exists enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle or symbolic law through the form of suffering and pain. In love, desire and drive reemerges where, instead of simply desiring or enjoying the conscious social bond, the split subject also suffers from it, as they manage both at the same time!

This is why you sometimes see people who can love someone so much that they break into tears in a joyful way. Love is the wound of our split subjectivity. To love is to unconsciously confront the loss/lack that is produced by the symbolic Other (by being filtered through it) that can only surface as the social bond/sexual relationship, and simultaneously as its own failure. It is also why some people might notice how, the more someone unconsciously reveals how they face their knowledge which they soul love, where the other person can also manage to locate it, the more love will appear.

Recall in my post on clinical psychoanalysis where I showed you the discourse of the hysteric and analyst. I pointed out how the psychoanalyst will try to help the hysteric reposition into the analyst discourse during analysis. Love happens when the split subject unconsciously changes positions in the psychoanalytic discourse!

Finally, we can also think of it as “the One who got away”. Sometimes, you might hear people talk about how they always felt like there is this one special person in their life who they love, where they wished they could’ve done something different to save their relationship with them. But perhaps psychoanalysts are correct in saying that, the reason they feel this way is because they got away. And it is this dissatisfaction, loss, or lack that we locate in them which fuels our love for them that may traverse across space and time! (We can also think of those who we love that passed away). Certainly, if most of us were given another chance to talk to said person, to get to know this person, or to make things right where we end up together, it doesn’t mean that our love (lack) for them will disappear. It just means that this dissatisfaction will reappear in another way, such as when we compromise for their differences and make the relationship work.

I hope this shows you how love is never where most people think it is. Love is not desire. It is not sex. Love is not even a social bond at an unconscious level. Love is an absolute singularity. It is an infinity—a form of wound, lack, or repression that we locate in the other that we don’t want to replace. Real love must last the test of time that requires immense devotion; even if we might meet someone who we become desirous of, where we remain faithful (love is determinate); or even if love becomes a struggle, which it will be during certain points in our lives. This is the beauty of it, and the only way love will last. For what could love be if not a series of fatal events? Love kills you. Desire does not.

“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the object a—I mutilate you.” —Jacques Lacan