Course Description

At the core of psychic development, Lacan suggests, are three passions: love, hate, and ignorance. These are not simply emotions we have; they are ways we come into relation with desire, knowledge, the other, and ourselves. We do not have them; they have us.

We love longingly. We love in fantasy, in fusion, in the hope of completion. We love maternally, paternally, erotically. We long for relationships that have passed, idealize relationships that are present, and attach ourselves to futures that will never arrive. Love organizes psychic desire. It gives shape to hope, dependency, and fantasy.

And because love matters so much, because it exposes us so completely to need, loss, humiliation, and abandonment, hate is never far away. Hate may emerge as a fierce attempt to preserve psychic safety: to destroy the object before being destroyed by it, to attack dependency before feeling helpless within it, to turn vulnerability into power. Clinically, hate is not something to romanticize or minimize. It can be terrifying, destructive, and overwhelming.

Ignorance is always closer than we wish to acknowledge. What cannot be thought will return as symptom, dream, compulsion, enactment, silence, or repetition. We suffer most from what we cannot yet bear to know. The clinician is often positioned, and educated, as the one who is supposed to know, yet our clinical task often requires something more difficult: the skill to remain capable and curious where no knowledge has yet arrived.

This seminar will take up love, hate, and ignorance as fundamental clinical forces. Through psychoanalytic theory, literature, and collaborative discussion, we will consider how these passions shape transference, countertransference, attachment, aggression, resistance, not-knowing, and the work of psychodynamic formulation.