Thinking about Valentine's Day: a Lacanian realist's view

 Photographer: David Newby for The Guardian

I never think of Valentine's day but as we near the fateful day newspapers and magazines and of course ads and commercials never fail to alert us. I have even found in my mailbox a notice for a seminar about John Cage's 4'33 inviting participants to bring a valentine, in whatever media, for John Cage in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birth. Well, one has to find something that appeals to  today's disgruntled students, somehow.
Last weekend The Guardian - I was in there again! - was all about love and Valentine's day, a little sickening really.
Magazines are awash with stories of lovers reunited, people who have found the one. Which brings me to a book I have recently read, authored by Anoushka Grose, No more silly love songs: a realist's guide to romance. Ms Grose is a psychoanalyst of Lacanian orientation. This book is not written by someone who positions herself as an expert. True, she draws on her professional experience, but she also reflects on her life and her very personal mistakes, in a very accessible and humorous style of writing..
It is a sobering read and a much needed one before Valentine's Day. I am not so keen on Sex and the City which Grose refers to again and again, but hey, she is of that generation. And yes, I confess, I too used to watch it, only to dismiss it as silly immediately after the end of each episode and swearing I would not plonk myself again in front of the TV for the next episode. I watched the whole series, in fact.
Back to No more silly love songs. It is, unabashedly, self help material. Ms Grose must have also been thinking of  how to boost her income, a perfectly reasonable goal. I like the free association style she brings to her writing, with Leonard  Cohen and Freud mentioned in the same sentence.
The book came out in 2010, so it has been around for a while. It was written after a disastrous relationship in just 6 weeks - I know that feeling well, I too began a blog vaguely based on myself and my very own last disastrous relationship with a man who was to me as Bottom was to Titania. I have that blog, Monique's Journal, still in my blog list, I decided to keep it private rather than go public with it, I wrote furiously for some weeks then lost momentum and focused on this blog instead. Meanwhile, like Titania, I too woke up from my slumber saying "Me thinks I fell in love with an ass". So Monique's Journal was archived. Stylish Anouschka Grose has some good advice for people looking for love: "keep it real, keep it going".

 Titania and Bottom, Henry Fusely. Source: Google images

However, I can't help wondering whether Ms Grose's realism has a subtext.  As I said, Ms Grose is a psychoanalyst of Lacanian orientation. According to Lacan, explains Zizek,  "the real is located beyond the symbolic", and is "that which resists symbolization absolutely, impossible to integrate into the symbolic order. This character of impossibility and resistance to symbolization lends the real its traumatic quality".
So I wonder whether there is more to this 'realist guide to romance'?
And, oh, spare a thought for those poor souls that celebrate their birthday on 14th February.

(Photo modelled by Alex B)