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There is an emptiness that does not arrive with absence, but after the encounter. One seeks a connection, one obtains it —in the club, on the app, in a one-night bed— and, as soon as it fades, a diffuse sense of lack returns. The other leaves, and something goes on resonating. It is usually read as bad luck or as the other’s fault. I propose to read it otherwise: that emptiness is proportional to the number of fantasies that inhabit it.

The fantasy is not a specter

It is worth being precise about the term. When psychoanalysis —in Lacan’s manner— speaks of the fantasy (fantasme), it does not mean an apparition or a fear, but an unconscious script: the scene, almost always mute, from which a subject desires. We do not choose whom we desire with the freedom we believe we have; we desire according to a montage assembled early on, with images, prohibitions, and promises we no longer recall having received. The fantasy is that frame. It sustains desire and, at the same time, encloses it.

Why the ephemeral repeats

If the scene repeats itself —the same kind of encounter, the same ending, the same disenchantment—, it is not by chance: it is the fantasy doing its work. It stages, again and again, one and the same unresolved question. At times the subject seeks, without knowing it, to confirm that the other will leave; at others, to revive a figure that left its mark; at others, to maintain a distance that protects him from something feared. The concrete other matters less than it seems: he comes to occupy a place that was already written. That is why changing partners does not change the scene. The faces change; the script insists.

Emptiness as a measure

Hence the formula with which I began: emptiness is proportional to the fantasies that inhabit us. Each unelaborated figure —a father, a demand, a humiliation, an ideal— goes on claiming to be staged. The more scripts operate in the dark, the more the encounter that does not fulfill repeats, and the deeper the emptiness that follows. Not because people are lacking, but because what is sought is not on the side of the other: it is on the side of a question the subject has not yet asked himself.

It is not a matter of exorcism

It would be dishonest to promise that analysis eliminates the fantasy. It does not eliminate it —nor should it: without a scene of desire, there would be no desire. What is at stake is coming to know it: to pass from being governed by a script that goes unread, to being able to read it —to recognize its origin, its logic, its cost. When the fantasy ceases to operate blindly, the subject regains a margin —small but real— to choose differently. It is neither quick nor linear, and there is no formula: it is a work of elaboration, done with time and without judgment.

Emptiness, then, ceases to be an enemy. It begins to be a text: the measure of what still asks to be looked at. And to look at it —not to fill it in haste— is what opens, at last, the possibility of a bond that is not exhausted in the same old scene.

Carlos Hernán Arango Botero — Psychologist