The present article is a study on the notion of love in the works of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, one of the most influential poets and mystics, and Jacques Lacan, the renowned French psychoanalyst and philosopher. In this research, love is approached from two perspectives, namely, love from Rūmī’s view, which is considered to be one of the highest levels of mysticism that cannot be expressed through language and entails a wholesale renunciation of logical reason, and love from Lacan’s perspective, which is as an imaginary and illusory relationship, based on narcissistic roots. 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, as an optical illusion which gives the subject the false promise of unity and completion with the Other. However, for Rūmī love belongs, in Lacanian terms, to the real order, which is deemed as the only way to escape the chains and shackles of the bodily form and embrace the Other in the truest possible sense. As a result, love finds a highly negative place in Lacanian psychoanalysis, since it impedes the subject’s development from their imprisonment to images and objects, while in Rūmī’s perspective, love finds a positive status due to its ushering of the subject into a full jouissance of the Other’s presence. This study offers a Rūmī-Lacanian definition of love through translating Rūmī’s ideas and expressions into the language of psychoanalysis.
