£6
At the core of human love - in its very essence - is it's opposite: absence. Those who promise to fulfill our expectations of love give us hope for eternal bliss, but in doing so they deprive us of this core of love itself.
At the moment of being disappointed by the promise of another’s love, we face the fact that love is in fact an illusion covering its absence. At this moment we see that this absence has always been there, just before, before the instant of disappointment, when we still had the ability to believe in the illusions of love.
Negative psychoanalytst Julie Reshe explores the relationship between love, dispointment and pain in this short pamphlet, arguing that Edvard Munch's painting The Vampire (alternatively titled Love and Pain), painted in 1893, captures this tragic essence of human intimacy.