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suspended in another subject, which is why we experience an anxiety which
shatters our previous self-perception. But when we have found a partner and
established a love relationship, we are then often anxious that we may lose their
love.
In today s culture where anxiety is publicly perceived as something that has to
be annihilated or at least minimalized, and where some gurus of the self-help
industry are convincing people that love is just a matter of choice, one witnesses
the emergence of an advice culture that tries to find solutions to the anxiety of
love. In this chapter, we will look at how writing love-letters seems to be an
activity especially liable to cause anxiety, which is why people have often in the
past searched for intermediaries who will compose love-letters on their behalf,
and today look to the Internet to alleviate their anxieties about love. One can thus
find numerous Internet sites offering detailed advice on how to address a beloved
with the help of a love-letter (or an e-mail). On one site, for example, we find the
following instructions:
Clear your desk and your mind of distractions.
Place a picture of the one you love in front of you.
Put on your favorite music.
Take out your best stationery and pen.
On another sheet of paper, make two lists: (a) his/her unique qualities;
[b] your hopes for the future together.
Personalize the salutation. Dear , or To my darling , are both fine.
In the body of the letter, begin by telling him/her what you think makes
the individual so special. List at least three qualities, ideally emotional,
physical, and spiritual ones.
44 LOVE ANXIETIES
In the following paragraph, share your hopes and dreams for the future
you can have together.
Personalize the closing. I will love you always, Loving you forever,
My heart is yours, are all good possibilities.
Don t forget to sign!
Spray the letter with a light fragrance.
Address, seal, and stamp the letter.
Wait a day before you send it; you may change your mind.
Drop it in the mail, and look forward to the response.
On other advice sites, would-be letter writers can also purchase all the necessary
equipment (stationery, special stamps, pens, etc.) to complete the task. And there
are lots of additional tips on how to write a successful love-letter like Don t
mention anyone else but yourself and the addressee in the letter , and Make sure
you only send a love-letter to someone who will appreciate it . For those who
still find writing love-letters a far too complicated or time-consuming task,
special Internet sites offer to compose a love-letter. A lover using this service
gives a cyber-Cyrano some basic information about the beloved and Cyrano then
composes and sends a love-letter (or even a break-up letter) for the lover.
But the most interesting part about the Internet craze with love-letters is the
fact that lots of people send various e-greetings and love-letters, not to some
distant lover, but to themselves.1 (One wonders if they also send break-up letters
to themselves.) This information might at first seem surprising, but with love-
letters there is always a question who is actually their addressee. The artist
Sophie Calle in one of her shows exhibited a love-letter that her former lover
wrote to another woman; but Calle decided to cross out the name of that other
woman and wrote her own instead. As part of her art project, Calle thus simply
wrote a love-letter to herself. This supports Jacques Lacan s claim that a subject
who writes love-letters actually does not address the beloved but writes letters to
none other than himself. No matter how much a lover tries to capture in the letter
the essence of his beloved, he is primarily addressing himself, i.e. he is dealing with
his own desires, fantasies, narcissism all that constitutes his in-love feeling. At
the same time, the writer of the love-letter is also in a particular way dealing with
anxiety; however, as this chapter will show, this anxiety differently affects men
and women.
In literature and in the cinema we find many stories in which someone offers
to write love-letters for someone else in order to appease that person s anxieties
related to the expression of love. However, the one who puts his writing skills at
the service of a friend often himself falls in love with the intended recipient.
While it is easy to understand how the act of writing a love-letter can provoke
anxiety, it is harder to comprehend why the person who offers his writing
services to allay the fears of a friend often falls in love with the addressee of the
letter.
LOVE ANXIETIES 45
Anxiety in love primarily concerns the fact that lovers always love in the
beloved what he or she does not have what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls
object small a and also offer to the partner nothing but their own lack.
However, in the way people deal with their own lack and the lack in the Other,
one can see clear differences between hysterics, obsessionals and perverts. This
chapter will analyse these differences by looking at three cases: the 1940s
melodrama Love Letters (William Dieterle), the famous play Cyrano de
Bergerac (Edmond Rostand) and the more contemporary film Law of Desire
(Pedro Almodovar).
LOVE LETTERS: HYSTERICAL DESIRE
Questions about the desire of the Other provoke the most anxiety, since the
subject on the one hand questions who he or she is for the Other, but on the other
hand is also perturbed by what the Other really wants. In love relationships, these
dilemmas especially haunt hysterics who often try to find solutions by forming
love triangles. The film Love Letters presents an illustration of the hysteric s love
anxieties, especially their problems with desire of the Other. This film also
shows how there is no need for the subject to actually encounter the other person
in order to fall in love, but need only create a fantasy scenario around the
sublime object that he or she perceives to be in possession of the Other.
In Love Letters the protagonists create love fantasies in a complicated triangle
between the soldier Allen who writes love-letters for his friend, Roger, which the
latter sends to his girlfriend Victoria. Through the process of writing letters
and reading Victoria s responses, Allen falls deeply in love with Victoria. After
the war, when Allen learns that Roger has died, he decides to find Victoria. By
chance, Allen comes across a beautiful woman called Singleton who has lost all
her memory of the past and who is supposedly holding a terrible secret. Allen
discovers that Singleton is actually Victoria and that she has been accused of
murdering Roger. Victoria has been deeply unhappy since her husband did not
resemble the character she felt in love with from reading the love-letters. One
evening, when Victoria was again reading the old love-letters, Roger angrily
threw the letters into the fire and told Victoria that he was not their author. In the
next scene, we see Roger lying dead on the floor and Victoria in total shock next
to him. Although charged with Roger s murder, Victoria has lost all memory of
the past. (Later, however, we learn that the true murderer was a loving old aunt
who tried to free Victoria from her husband.) At the end of the film, Victoria
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