Love: Real or Imaginary? A Comparative Study of Love as Defined by Rumi and Lacan

The present paper is a comparative and interdisciplinary study on the notion of love in the works of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the famous Persian mystic, and Jacques Lacan, the renowned French psychoanalyst and philosopher. In this research, love is approached from two perspectives, namely, love in the view of Rumi, as one of the highest levels of mysticism which cannot be expressed through language, and love in the eyes of Lacan as an imaginary and illusory relationship, based on narcissistic desires. This comparison makes clear that the difference between the two views goes back to their difference on the definition of love. For Lacan, love is located inside the imaginary order, while for Rumi it belongs, in Lacanian terms, to the real order. This study tries to put forth a Rumi-Lacanian definition of love through translating Rumi’s ideas and expressions to the language of psychoanalysis, and see, in that case, what place love will occupy in Lacan’s thought, compared to his own definition of love.