Fink, B. (2015). Lacan on Love An Exploration of Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference. Cambridge: Polity.
The father’s intent may be to convey to his son that he must seek out a woman of his own, yet the son may take it as a prohibition of all love for women or even as a prohibition of all love, period.
This possible explanation of the cleavage between love and desire clearly involves no fall on the mother’s part. The great divide arises owing to the father’s perceived castration threat, which may be understood by the child literally or figuratively — that is, as a loss of the real, physical organ or as a loss of the father’s esteem and love. 22
[…]
If we bring together several of Freud’s formulations, then, a man’s love and desire can converge on one and the same woman, perhaps even durably, if and only if
(1) his feeling of having been betrayed by his mother has been worked through;
(2) He is no longer shocked that he might be inhabited by sexual desire for his mother and sister(s) and has seen through the incest taboo insofar as he realizes there is something incestuous involved in his relations with every woman; and
(3) has come to grips with castration, that is, has allowed himself to be separated from his primary source of jouissanc as a child without constantly striving to get it back. How any of these, much less all three, could be accomplished, without a thoroughgoing analysis is hard to imagine! 24