About Love And Cholera

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Love. I want to understand. And this is not an oxymoron, it can be rationalized. I declare not at all cynically disappointed, but with therapeutic hope. Love is not only a romantic concept, but also a psychological phenomenon, which would be a deviation, if not such a huge number of infected people in the population, turning it into the norm

"Love during cholera" is a stage-case of such a state, but it does not provide comprehensive answers to the question of whether love is a mental disorder or the highest manifestation of human feelings.

There is a widespread belief that love is a kind of "terrible force" that cannot be resisted. The mythical perception of love ascribes sacred and inviolable qualities to it, so that the desire to get rid of love is actually a taboo. Killing love is almost the same as giving a damn in the temple, the books-films-history-poems tell us. It is considered heroism to fight for love, even despite the protests of the object of love and reason. Divided love is also good, but as a rule, poetic fantasy breaks off on it, and a realistic genre begins, and it is good if not satirical. Shared love, or rather a mature relationship with an object, is far less disturbing to the minds. Maybe because there is nothing abnormal in her?

Or maybe because under one word "love" there are qualitatively different concepts, states of mind, and, I'm not afraid of loud words, different forms of psychopathology? Phenomenology is the same (someone strives to be with another), but the operational programs are significantly different.

The question of why such substantially different and rich manifestations of relations with an object in all languages familiar to me have the same label has occupied me for a long time, and sometimes it seems to me that the point is precisely that halo of holiness and magic that hovers over the universal "desire to be with to others ", and it is not at all important how and why, the main thing is to strive. Such a strong halo, as if it is designed to protect against a threat, that one day people change their minds, do not want to be with others, and humanity will disappear as a species. But that's not the point.

When teenagers describe love and its manifestations, I do not know how to react, because it looks more like pathology than anything else. The difference lies only in context. As a romantic nature, I understand everything, as a psychotherapist, I understand something completely different, and even more often nothing is clear. What evokes quivering emotions on the screen or on the pages of books in the office evokes a desire to rigidly interpret and deliver. Never before have I heard a love story that was not associated with suffering. This fact alone should have rewarded this phenomenon with a classification in a directory of mental disorders.

But I'm not talking about love "in general", but about the type of love that is romanticized for some reason. If you think about it (and generalize a little), then the most elevated qualities are attributed to love with obstacles, undivided love, or one that, for one reason or another, is not destined to be realized. "Love is evil, you will love a goat" - I would like to oppose this popular wisdom, which for some reason is designed to deprive a human being of control over his feelings and behavior.

The level of evil in love lies in the different level and quality of symptoms. There is the following classification of symptoms: ego-syntonic symptom and ego-dystonic.

An ego-syntonic symptom is a deviation that is not conscious of it. A manic attack is often not recognized by the patient as a manifestation of a mental illness, since he "feels amazing" and can move mountains. The bipolar patient in the manic stage personifies his personality with euphoria and does not realize that something is wrong with him. Anorexic patient on pain of death will not want to get better. The cessation patient is confident that he has not turned off the gas stove. Likewise, some personality disorders are ego-syntonic. The masochist is deeply convinced that he is supposed to be a victim. The hysterical woman accuses her friends of not paying enough attention to her. The manipulations of the border guard at a short distance serve to his advantage, and therefore it would never occur to him that in fact they are destroying his relations with those close to him. There is no motivation to get rid of the ego-syntonic symptom, therefore it is very difficult to create an alliance with a patient whose symptom is mistakenly perceived by him as an immutable objective reality of himself or others. Heavy smokers are familiar with this, as are antisocials.

The ego-dystonic symptom has a much better prognosis. This is something that interferes with life, because it causes suffering or does not dock with the perception of one's own "I". An ego-dystonic symptom is recognized when the patient defines it as: "Something in me interferes with me" (the key words "in me" and "interfere"). Depression is a prime example of this. The person sucks, and he wants to get rid of the oppressive melancholy and sadness. Anxiety disorders and ego-dystonic panic, because anxiety and fear seem to be unnecessary and interfering emotions that have got into a person as if from the outside, against his will, they are not a part of himself, not a part of his ego, and in this sense are distant from him.

Acute shyness, feelings of incompetence, and low self-esteem are usually ego-dystonic manifestations of narcissism. Whereas ego-syntonic narcissism reveals grandeur, belief in one's own omnipotence and cocky self-esteem.

When a person realizes that the reason for the continuous washing of floors is in some problem in himself, and not in the state of sex, his symptom changes its quality from ego-syntonic to ego-dystonic. From this, he does not pass right away, but he finds an opponent in the person of a personality. Now you can fight with him. When the symptom becomes dystonic, it means that the person has gained a new perspective and has been able to look at himself from the outside. He and his illness are not the same now. The task of the psychotherapist, if he has an ego-syntonic symptom, is to help the patient understand that the disorder is not in the world, but in the patient, or to distance the symptom from itself, to distance it so that the symptom becomes a target for attack.

The first period of love usually takes place in an ego-syntonic form. The man is in love, and he feels good. So good that he sees no flaws in his own perception of himself or the object. A person at this stage incorrectly evaluates reality and is often deeply mistaken in his judgments, conclusions and, therefore, is not competent in making decisions. How many times did each of us hear about how serenades were sung under the windows, how millions of scarlet roses were given and life-threatening acts were performed, while the object of love closed the shutters, sent roses to the return address and twisted his finger and temples, having learned about unsuccessfully cut veins … In such cases, we tend to identify with the lover and blame the object for cold insensitivity, when in fact we should give our sympathy to the object, which has become a victim of an obsessive ego-syntonic symptom, somewhat similar to the obsessive, but also having comorbidity. with a hypo-manic state. Just try to explain it to the lover. Doomed to fail as much as trying to explain to the perfectionist that a score of ninety-eight out of a hundred is not a colossal failure that threatens the integrity of his self. Logically, attempts to achieve reciprocity should have stopped at the third refusal at the most. But no, they do not stop, because the pursuit of the object turns out to be much stronger than the agitated self-esteem. By the way, this is one of the reasons why narcissists are less prone to love disorder than other individuals - their desire to maintain self-esteem prevails over the desire for an object. A person mistakenly thinks that something incredibly positive will happen as soon as he gains access to an object and merges with it. Practice and common human experience show that no, in such cases of love disorder, nothing out of the ordinary will happen, in the best case - euphoria will last for some time. Likewise, washing the floor again will not relieve the obsessive individual of anxiety. "True love" that excites the imagination of poets, in other words, is an insatiable desire to merge into one with another being, but since the other being is a separate and individual subject, with its own outline and contour, any such desire is doomed to failure, even if the acquired reciprocity is given. The ego-syntonic symptom does not allow observation of oneself, and the accompanying blindness is essentially a temporary loss of the ability to reflect. At this stage, the patient is unable to talk about anything other than the object. It is as if he himself does not exist in this dynamic. The all-powerful and ideal object either mocks him or shows signs of mercy, and all the patient's thoughts become obsessed with attempts to understand the object, analyze and see through its strange and contradictory behavior. At the same time, the only purpose of these endless monologues is to convince themselves that the object does meet halfway, only, probably, it is very shy / scared / acting out hymen in order to fill its own worth. Self-conviction almost always occurs and everything starts all over again. And the floor is always dirty enough to be washed again. But if it is possible to rationalize an outright rejection, then why is it impossible to rationalize love itself? And why does a person tend to resist it so violently? As a rule, only the pursued object suffers at this stage.

In the second stage of this type of love, the patient’s suffering is known to enter the scene. A person already understands with his head that nothing shines for him, or that this relationship has no future, but does not accept this fact with his heart. In other words, there is a conflict with reality. Here endless attempts begin to bargain for a little more denial of reality and a different quality of rationalization appears, namely Dostoevism: "it is worth it," "if I am persistent enough, I will achieve my goal," "I am ready to suffer, because suffering purifies the soul," etc..d. The striving for the object is frustrated many times, and as a result, tears come. tantrums, impotence and blessed depression. Blessed because only true and conscious suffering provides a chance to combat the symptom. In this sense, suffering does purify the soul.

The third stage of love is to become ego-dystonic, and this is the only way to relieve suffering. This painful process is essentially a deromantization of the object. He is agonizing because everything in the patient, from his own I to the social myth rammed in him, opposes such violence against a bright feeling. But it can be treated successfully. As it was told, for example, in the ending of "1984". Such aggressive operant methods are naturally not ethical, and no one will show the patient scary pictures, coupled with a photograph of the object, in order to induce an aversive reflex. But this is the very stage in which romantic empathy for longing and suffering ends, and the higher parts of the brain are called into allies. A person begins to recover from a love disorder when he is ready to agree with the non-romantic fact: love can be rationalized. In other words, the "terrible force" can be dominated by the ego. The main thing here is to convince the sufferer that 1. something is wrong with him 2. it is not fatalism and not providence that they mock him, but his own unconscious. That is, the time has come to stop talking about the object and look inward. What got you so hooked on him? Is he really that perfect and beautiful? What are the pros and cons? What about this pimple on your forehead? his past relationship history? her manners to be rude? (details play a big role as they are agents of reality). Maybe he is still not as perfect as you think? Can you imagine a future with him? What will this future look like? Why do you need such a future? And the main question: are you ready to continue in the same spirit? It is trite, but if a person is ready to sincerely answer these questions, he already begins to master the sympathy.

But how rarely does this happen! Resistance is especially pronounced at this stage. "No! You don't understand me! You are cruel and soulless! The floor is really dirty! If a man in shoes walked on it, the floor objectively gets dirty, and therefore it must be washed!" I'm really in love, and that's a fact. I am in love with the only person most suitable for me in the world. I've never felt this way. I will always love him. Nobody else suits me. All these "really", "always" and "never" are the worst enemies of the people, because they turn a symptom, according to the myth of love, into something beyond the control of consciousness.

No love lasts forever unless you are near the object, everyone knows that, so why not just cut it off? Oh, you say, only a person who is not in love can reason this way. The anguish associated with distance from the object of love is unbearable. Bluff, of course. No torment is worse than the torment caused by constant frustration. But, as a rule, it is useless to try to convince the desperately in love of this.

In a Hollywood film (or in a Shakespearean drama), such a psychologist (friend or parent) trying to reason with the hero in love is exhibited in a funny and vulgar light, often even acting as the main enemy of the hero, standing in the path of love. The positive outcome of this drama is the triumph of the symptom, and the dead Romeo and Juliet turn into the archetype of the victory of love over … And over what, in fact, and for what? Is that over mental health. Well, the truth is, the psychologist rises in me, is it really easier to kill yourself than to rationalize love?

Why are people so reluctant to try to turn painful love (be it unrequited or unrealizable for one reason or another) from an ego-syntonic state to an ego-dystonic state? They resist with all their being, although they suffer greatly. This question may have many answers, but Feerbern at one time gave the most, in my opinion, exhaustive. It may sound metaphysical, but the meaning is huge. Attaching to a missing object is better than not having an object. This type of love must be replaying an old scenario in which someone once loved you so much. Lacking. To survive psychologically in childhood, we are content with what we have. More precisely, those that do not exist. Love is someone who is not good enough, who constantly disappears, who does not reciprocate, but at least he exists, sometimes even feeds. Too often, relationships with people are an exact copy of the relationship of the internal, with the internal object. The only possible, others are simply not familiar. It is impossible to rationalize the missing good internal object. This hole is probably destined to remain half empty. But it is possible to learn not to reproduce in adulthood the type of relationship that causes pain and suffering. You can learn to avoid them. To begin with, by observing the symptom.

Therefore, there is nothing romantic about such love, and it is nothing but cholera. She is deliberately doomed to collapse, if only because the lover enters into a relationship exclusively with himself, not at all seeing or noticing the object of his love. He is replaying his old script, perhaps keeping the hope that this time things will turn out differently. But it will not be otherwise. As long as the symptom is ego-synthonic and unaddressed, the floor will always appear dirty.

The symptoms are really terrible forces. We cling to them, because we do not know how to live differently, we do not know how to live without them, we do not even suspect that there are other options for being, free from symptoms, other types of relationships. It seems to us that there is a vacuum on the other side of the symptom. And very rarely we dare to change our mind. After all, if there is no vacuum, then why the hell did we live this life the way we did?

How to distinguish mature love from cholera love? Is it possible to distinguish them, or is it not for nothing that different phenomena have the same name? If, throughout his life, a person loves the same woman, although he does not stay in a real relationship with her, a person has an ego-syntonic symptom, because he loves not a woman, but an object within himself. The non-romantic conclusion is that mature love never clings to a person with a magical and fatal certainty of his uniqueness, she is free to choose him.

Go explain it to the teenagers.