AION 410 Course Evaluation

Course Description

This seminar explores the dynamic interplay between Dorothy Tennov’s concept of limerance—the intense, often obsessive state of romantic infatuation—and the Lacanian notion of jouissance, that paradoxical blend of pleasure and suffering which exceeds the pleasure principle. Through psychoanalytic, existential, and phenomenological lenses, participants will examine how limerance might serve as a modern cultural expression of jouissance, revealing both the ecstatic and destructive potentials of desire. Readings will include selections from Tennov’s Love and Limerence and Lacan’s Écrits, with emphasis on how these concepts illuminate the structures of longing, fantasy, and the limits of satisfaction.

Curricular Notes

AION 410 occupies a psychologically and ethically delicate position within the 400-level curriculum, addressing forms of desire that resist integration, cure, or moral resolution. By placing Tennov’s descriptive psychology of limerence in dialogue with Lacan’s theorization of jouissance, the course reframes romantic obsession not as mere pathology, but as a site where fantasy, loss, and excess converge. Rather than offering techniques for extinguishing desire, the seminar equips clinicians to listen differently—to hear what longing protects, what suffering sustains, and where interpretation must yield to ethical restraint. In doing so, AION 410 extends the curriculum’s recurring return to philosophy: here, as the question of whether desire can ever be satisfied without losing what makes it human.

Open Evaluation
1. Describe Dorothy Tennov’s concept of limerence and Jacques Lacan’s notion of jouissance, and differentiate these constructs from normative desire, attachment, and pleasure-seeking behavior.
2. Analyze limerence as a potential contemporary manifestation of jouissance, identifying how fantasy, repetition, and the pursuit of an impossible object organize both pleasure and suffering.
3. Differentiate intense desire states from relational intimacy and mature attachment, enhancing clinicians’ capacity to formulate obsessional, addictive, or compulsive relational patterns without moralizing or pathologizing desire itself.
4. Apply psychoanalytic and phenomenological perspectives to clinical material involving romantic fixation, longing, and erotic suffering, thereby clarifying the therapeutic task when desire exceeds symbolic containment and resists satisfaction.