Patricia McCarthy – Psychoanalysis is the Knowledge of The Rules of the Game of Love
 
THE LETTER 36 (Spring 2006) pages 35-51
 
Introduction
 
Good, so then I am entering into the core of the subject1. 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.