Abstract
This paper combines psychoanalysis with socio-cultural theory in order to illuminate the vicissitudes of romantic love. Contemporary sociological theory argues that we are witnessing a new discourse of intimacy in popular culture and in everyday narratives of love and relationships. In a postmodern age, the need for or belief in romantic love might seem unreconstructed and naive, but romantic love retains a compelling hold in contemporary culture and psychoanalysis can help to explain why. This paper demonstrates the need for a socio-psychoanalytic analysis of love ideals and love talk via case material from two female interviewees from different generations and it will discuss what romantic love means for them. It will argue that there is a complex interaction between one's psychic and social self, and demonstrate that it is by analysing this dynamic interplay that we can understand why romantic love is desired and deconstructed in one case, but remains decathected and uninterrogated in the other.
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