The Other as an Object of Conquest Versus the Other as Horizon: A Reading in Stephen Mitchell and Clarice Lispector

Abstract

This paper presents a dialogue between Clarice Lispector’s story “Love” and Stephen Mitchell’s ideas in his book Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time. Using Freud’s, Meltzer’s, Bion’s, and Lacan’s ideas as a starting point, the close reading of both texts offers an understanding of love as a unique interaction between the heimliche and the Unheimliche as well as between the capacity to relate to the other as a destination to be conquered and the capacity to relate to the other as a horizon that generates a perpetual motion within. The final sections of this paper offer that what makes movement possible is the commitment to the movement itself rather than to its target. Wherever the other is constituted within us as a horizon rather than as an object of conquest, movement toward that other, no matter its vicissitudes, will always be maintained.

Keywords:

• Lispector
• love
• Mitchell
• uncanny.

Notes

¹ Reprinted with the permission of University of Texas Press.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dana Amir

Dana Amir, PhD, is a clinical psychologist, supervising and training analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, a faculty member at Haifa University (head of the interdisciplinary doctoral program in psychoanalysis), poetess, and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry books and two psychoanalytic nonfiction books: Cleft Tongue (Karnac, 2014) and On the Lyricism of the Mind (Routledge, 2016). Her papers have been published in psychoanalytic journals and presented at national and international conferences. She is the winner of many national and international prizes, including The Frances Tustin International Memorial Prize (2011), the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) Sacerdoti Prize (2013), IPA Hayman Prize (2017), and the IFPE Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educators Award (2017).