Stendhal y Freud

La transitoriedad, los tiempos del amor

Abstract

This text is reading of Stendhal's De l'amour in the light of certain recent reflections on psychoanalytic theory. Its point of departure is a criticism of Ortega's rernark on the relation between love and attention. The text explores the dose relation between the Cartesian Approach to admiration and Stendhal’s conception of the essential role of attention in the source of love. The author moves then to a meditation on the role of detail in attention and, hence, in the cardinal notion of crystallization is related with and confronted against the Freudian notion of narcissism and some recent developments of that notion. The discussion then touches some recent developments of the psychoanalytical notions of day dream and phantasy, and explores the importance of related notions in Stendhal's vision of love. A fundamental issue of this paper is the position and the relevant of gaze in the development and culmination in the passion of love. Stendhal's view of the tyranny of the gazes, as well as the power of music to bring about a radical dissipation of the profiles of the lover's identity constitutes a chief issue of the final analysis. This contribution ends with a meditation on what may be according to Stendhal's the chief feature of love: the fact that it is only recognizable in the experience of irreparable loss.