1st Edition
Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love A Kaleidoscopic View
1. Prelude. The Bubble 2. Prologue. Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love 3. Love’s Infinitives 4. Lovestruck 5. First Love 6. Labrador Love 7. Animal Love 8. The Square of Desire 9. Biologised Love Panoramic Intermezzo I 10. Love Between Neuro and Meta 11. The Ideal of Love 12. Love Sung 13. Artful Love 14. Mystic Love 15. Love as an Event 16. The Beloved Mirror Panoramic Intermezzo II 17. Transference Love 18. A Loving Place 19. The Couple on the Couch 20. Love Generations 21. The Shadows of Love 22. Unnatural Love 23. Passion Victims Panoramic Intermezzo III 24. A Radiography of Seduction 25. The Sweetest Lust 26. Pornocracy 27. Contemporary Love 28. Internet Love 29. The Consumption of Love 30. Dying of Love 31. From Prehistoric to Futuristic Love Panoramic Intermezzo IV 32. Epilogue. The Algorithms of Love
Biography
Mark Kinet is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst based in Belgium. He is the author of The Spirit of the Drive in Neuropsychoanalysis (2023), Psychoanalytic Principles in Psychiatric Practice: A Remedy by Truth (2024), Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in Psychiatric Practice: Premises and Clinical Portraits (2025), Patient Testimonies of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Reported and Recorded (2025) and The Psychodynamics and Psychogenesis of Parentification (2026).
‘If you want to understand love, Lacan, sex or psychoanalysis, read Kinet!’
Arnon Grunberg, novelist, essayist, and columnist, Netherlands
‘For Freud, love boiled down to sex, assuming all pleasures arise from a broadly ‘sexual’ drive. For biologists, sex is important because of reproduction; yet, why do we so frequently obtain sexual pleasures in non-procreative ways? In this book -a moving meditation upon love in all its guises- Mark Kinet re-prioritises the mental side, with profound implications for our understanding of the mind’s place in Nature: feelings clearly have intrinsic causal powers.’
Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town (SA) and founding father of Neuropsychoanalysis.
These psychoanalytic essays on love’s struggles range from Freud to Solms, from Plato to Žižek, traversing deep chasms and celestial heights, from prehistory to science fiction, and from the womb to AI. Their chemistry might disenchant, but their alchemy deepens mystery. A kaleidoscopic perspective opens the reader’s mind, also thanks to a style that lucidly names what emerges from darkness. Must read for professionals and lovers.
Paul Verhaeghe, emeritus Professor of Psychoanalysis at Ghent University and an internationally acclaimed author.
‘Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love is a sweeping and deeply humane exploration of what it means to love, to desire, and to be recognised. Dr Kinet brings together psychoanalysis, philosophy, and clinical wisdom to illuminate love's generative possibilities and its contradictions. This is a beautifully written, intellectually vibrant book that clinicians and thoughtful readers alike will return to again and again.’
Mark L. Ruffalo, M.S.W., D.Psa., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Central Florida College of Medicine, Florida, USA
‘Do not read this book by Mark Kinet — because it is too beautiful, too compelling, too accurate. Every chapter, every paragraph, every line, every sentence, like a ballerina, makes a leap and lands on its feet where it makes its point — its pointe. Kinet’s sentences sharpen our thoughts, honing them until they cut precisely at the place where we believe the matters of love ‘settle’.
Marc De Kesel, philosopher and essayist, emeritus Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL) and former associate professor of philosophy at Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canda.
‘Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love is a wide-ranging meditation on love as the central, conflicted force of our lives. Mark Kinet holds together psychoanalytic insight with philosophy, literature, and clinical sensibility in a voice that is lucid and humane. The result is a book that invites readers to think, and rethink, what loving truly means.’
Arthur Eaton, PhD, psychoanalyst, journalist and author based in Amsterdam, Netherlands
‘In Psychoanalysis and the Struggle for Love, Mark Kinet brings together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature and, in a brilliant, thought-provoking way, shows how love can passionately push people beyond themselves or drag them into catastrophic depths. This is a marvellous book about the many paradoxes of love and, therefore, about what it means to be human.’
Herman Westerink, Associate and Endowed Professor at the Centre for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands.
