Psychoanalysis is the Knowledge of the Rules of the Game of Love

Good, so then I am entering into the core of the subject[1]. This is how Lacan opens the Ninth session of Seminar XXI - Les non-dupes errent. Going on to introduce three differently shaped Borromean knots to his audience - an African one, a plaited one, and one with a complicated symmetrical core - he then announces that he is 'in the process of questioning love'[2]. Because 'we imagine that love is two' and also 'the Imaginary is not what is to be most recommended for finding the rule of the game of love'[3] he exhorts us to do better than to simply rely on the Imaginary to find out about love, now that the analytic discourse is a fact of our lives for over a hundred years.…