Psychoanalytic Understanding Of Love

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

"Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings, from which there is no way out." Each of the lovers is essentially doomed to eternally comprehend the language of the partner, acting by touch, picking up the keys to the lock, which is constantly changing.

They say that everything is said about love, but it's not so much in words, but rather in meanings, which, like love, arise only in contact with others …

As Jacques Lacan said, to love is to give to another what you do not have *. In other words, to admit that you lack something, and to give this “something” to another, “to place it in another”. This does not mean giving him what you own - things or gifts; it means giving something that you do not own, something that is outside of yourself.

The essence of love and psychoanalysis.

In analysis, it is love that turns out to be its driving force. I mean that involuntary feeling that the patient has for his analyst - the so-called transference. This, of course, is not true love, but it has the same mechanisms, and they are revealed in psychoanalysis sessions: we feel love for someone who, as it seems to us, understands who we really are.

To truly love is to believe that by loving someone, we will know the truth about ourselves. We love the one or the one who is fraught with the answer (or one of the answers) to our question: "Who am I?"

Some men and women know how to evoke love for themselves: they know which "buttons" must be pressed to be loved. But at the same time they themselves do not necessarily fall in love, rather they play cat and mouse with their prey. To love, you need to admit that your life is not complete, that you need another person, that you miss him. Those who believe that they are self-sufficient and can be completely alone simply do not know how to love - they are not familiar with either the risks of it or pleasure. Sometimes they themselves notice this in themselves and suffer from it.

As Jacques Lacan said, to love is to give to another what you do not have *. In other words, to admit that you lack something, and to give this “something” to another, “to place it in another”. This does not mean giving him what you own - things or gifts; it means giving something that you do not own, something that is outside of yourself. And for this you have to admit your incompleteness, "castration", as Freud said. And this, in essence, is characteristic of a woman. And in this sense, you can truly love only from the position of a woman. Love feminizes. This is why a man in love is always a little funny. But if he is embarrassed by this, is afraid to seem ridiculous, it means that in fact he is not too confident in his masculine strength.

Even a man in love can experience bouts of injured pride, show sudden outbursts of aggression towards the object of his love, since this love makes him “defective”, dependent. That is why he may be drawn to women whom he does not love: thus, he again finds himself in a position of strength, from which he partly departs in love relationships. Freud wrote about this, talking about the splitting of a man's love life into love and sexual desire **.

Women tend to have a split in the perception of a male partner. On the one hand, he is a lover who gives pleasure, they are attracted to him. But he is also a loving man, feminized by this feeling, essentially castrated. More and more women prefer the masculine position: one man, at home, for love, others for physical pleasure.

Ideas about the social role of men and women are constantly changing, and this is in stark contrast to the inviolability of the old days. For men, the expression of emotions, love, feminization is becoming the norm. For women, on the contrary, to some extent, a "shift" towards the masculine is characteristic. “Love becomes a fluid substance,” says sociologist Zygmunt Bauman *. Each of us has to come up with our own lifestyle, find our own way to love and enjoy.

"Love is always mutual," said Lacan. And this phrase is often repeated without understanding its meaning. This does not mean at all that it is enough to love someone to fall in love with us in return. This means: “Since I love you, you also participate in this, because there is something in you that makes me love you. This is a mutual feeling, because there is a movement in both directions: the love that I feel for you arises in response to the reason for love that is in you. My feeling for you is not only my business, but yours too. My love says something about you that, perhaps, you yourself do not know.

The reasons why we choose this or that object are what Freud called the condition of love, the cause of desire. This is a certain trait (or their combination), which for a given person determines his love choice. Sometimes subtle things are important. For example, such a reason for love in one of Freud's patients was a ray of the sun falling on the nose of a woman he saw!

How our unconscious functions in reality surpasses any fiction. You can't even imagine how much everything in our life (and especially in love) is built on trifles, on “divine trifles”. Indeed, especially in men, we often find similar "reasons for love" necessary to trigger the love mechanism. For women, details also play a role in their choice, which remind them of their father, mother, brother, sister, someone from childhood. And yet the female form of love is closer to erotomania than fetishism: it is important for a woman to be loved. Another's interest in her (or perceived) is often a prerequisite to arouse her love, or at least consent to intimacy.