Audrey McAleese – What’s Love Got to Do with It?
 
Issue 63 Autumn 2016, pages 103 -107
 
The mother-son relationship is examined with reference to Freud’s texts – including On Narcissism and Female Sexuality – and Lacan’s terms, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The paper further explores what psychoanalysis offers in response to the absence of a sexual rapport between a man and a woman and questions ‘What’s love got to do with It?’ – the ‘It’ being any relationship, particularly that between a mother and her son.
 
Keywords: mother-son relationship; narcissism; female sexuality; the Imaginary; the Symbolic; the Real; the difference between the sexes; the Oedipus Complex; the absence of sexual rapport.