As a psychoanalyst, one knows that all stories ultimately speak of love. The lament of those who stammeringly recount their tales in my presence always stems from a lack of love – whether in the past or in the present, whether it is a real or an imagined deficiency. Our society no longer has a code of love. We are compelled to decipher the traces of that suffering in every private, intimate narrative. As idealization, as shock, as exaggeration, passion, the need for union and immortality, love forms the configuration of insoluble contradictions; it is the laboratory of our fate. Philosophy, religion, poetry, novel? All love stories. From Plato to Thomas Aquinas, from Romeo and Juliet to Don Juan, from the minnesingers to Stendhal, from Raphael's Madonna to Baudelaire and Bataille. The great artists.