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There are certain men, Freud tells us in “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” who are incapable of falling in love with a woman unless she is already involved with another man. A woman is uninteresting to such men in the absence of this formal, structural, symbolic condition – a condition that obviously harks back to the Oedipal triangle where, right from the outset, boys had a rival for their mothers’ affections in the form of their fathers (and/or siblings). Freud indicates that such men need to feel jealous of and have “gratifying impulses of rivalry and hostility” toward the other man, the man who was already involved with the woman before he came on the scene.
Men who love in this way often end up having a whole series of triangular attachments, proving that it is not the particular women they fall for who are important but rather the structural situation itself: a situation including a woman who is already “taken” and the man who “possesses” her. Should the woman in question leave her boyfriend, fiancé, or husband, the triangle collapses and the woman is no longer of any interest to our lover, who can no longer fancy himself an interloper or invader of the other man’s territory. It is only the continued impossibility of the situation – the enduring hopelessness of ever possessing the other man’s woman – that keeps him interested; as soon as the obstacle to possession disappears, so too does his love for her.
This is an obsessive configuration insofar as the obsessive’s desire is always for something impossible: to attain an unattainable status (e.g., perfection, omniscience, or immortality), to complete an uncompletable project, or to possess what he cannot possess. In saying that the obsessive is characterized by an impossible desire, Lacan goes so far as to add that his desire is for impossibility itself. A relationship with a woman is not in and of itself appealing or gratifying enough to our obsessive: it must be mediated by a living, breathing, third party who renders his quest unrealizable, allowing him to go on dreaming “the impossible dream” (as the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha put it).
This third party may be no older than our lover, even if older men are the most enjoyable targets of his rage and shenanigans. The obsessive is most intrigued when the Other man is clearly designated, in socially recognizable linguistic terms of the historical era and culture, as having an official status as a boyfriend, lover, partner, fiancé, husband, or whatever the other terms of the time and place may be (for example, mignon, favori, “favorite,” or “servant”). Yet even when the third party simply is someone who occasionally hangs around the woman (actually or virtually), having some sort of nebulous, vague, undefined relationship with her, our obsessive can often imagine that he is far more substantial than he appears to be or than she lets on – that is, that he is a genuine father-like rival.
Although it may appear outwardly that our lover is captivated by another man’s woman, it is the Other man himself who is of libidinal centrality to him – for it is the obsessive’s competition with this Other man that gets his juices flowing, so to speak, that gets him angry or stirred up, feeling, by turns, inferior or superior to him. Consciously he believes that it is the Other man’s woman who fascinates him; unconsciously it is the battle with the Other man that fascinates him.
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