The shared void

True love is that beggar who gives away his hunger. Like two voids learning to dance together. The shared lack is the only honest gift.

Love places us in an impossible position: we offer precisely what we lack to someone who does not request such an offering. We extend our empty hands with the promise of fullness, while the other, also inhabiting their own emptiness, does not recognize what we attempt to give. This fundamental contradiction constitutes the very essence of the amorous encounter, where two absences try to complement each other without ever completely succeeding.

Paradoxically, it is this exchange of lacks that sustains the bond. Like two blind people describing a color neither has seen, we build together a necessary fiction. Love persists not despite this impossibility, but because of it; its power resides precisely in the unresolvable tension between what we seek and what we can actually obtain, between the fantasy of completeness and the reality of misencounter.

The analytic experience reveals that this economy of shared emptiness is perhaps the only possible space for genuine love. It is not in complete satisfaction where love finds its dwelling, but in the mutual recognition of our lacks. By embracing this condition, we discover that loving is not possessing or completing, but accompanying the other in the perpetual dance between desire and absence, between hunger and giving.

Psychotherapy

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