Love feels unauthentic. “I love someone because I’m really in love with somebody else”. It seems that psychoanalysis underestimates love, reducing it to just a tool of information. To be in love is to get lost, through the paths of love you lose your own path, losing yourself. Yet, analysis follows this path, challenging it until something hidden is released.
There is no analysis without transference, the analyst must hold back from any interpretation until transference is established. Of course the analyst’s job emphasizes and exploits the natural aspect of love.
Identifying the patient’s desire and observing him fell love is one aim of analysis. Freud called this “the condition of love” (Liebesbedingung). “Liebe” is a term which overlays both love and desire, although occasionally we see the conditions of love separated from those of sexual desire.
This is how Freud isolates the type of man who cannot love where he desires and who cannot desire where he loves. In love at first sight, there, in an instant, a subject meets his condition of love as if this possibility has been suddenly intertwined with necessity.
One aim of psychoanalysis is overcoming resistances to love in the experience of the patient’s subjectivity. Sometimes controlling love brings out conflicts of dominance, submission, abandonment, separation and independence that play a big part in every relationship.
Transference love creates an emotional relationship, determined by the analytic situation, of which the object is the analyst; the task of the analyst in this circumstance is to trace the relationship back, without either satisfying or smothering it, to its primitive roots.
Freud found that we all have motives; reasons of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance. In analysis there may be a desire to destroy the analyst’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover and gain a hidden promise.
One aim of psychoanalysis is overcoming resistances to love in the experience of the patient’s subjectivity. Sometimes controlling love brings out conflicts of dominance, submission, abandonment, separation and independence that play a big part in every relationship.
Transference love creates an emotional relationship, determined by the analytic situation, of which the object is the analyst; the task of the analyst in this circumstance is to trace the relationship back, without either satisfying or smothering it, to its primitive roots.
Freud found that we all have motives; reasons of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance. In analysis there may be a desire to destroy the analyst’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover and gain a hidden promise.
A patient's passionate attachment to the analyst should indeed never be treated as evidence of the physician's personal irresistibility, but rather as an effect of the analytic situation itself.
Clearly, the analysis of the counter-transference is necessary so as to prevent the analyst's personal feelings, complexes or inner resistances from slowing down the progress of the treatment. The excitation provoked in the analyst by the patient's demands and transferential projections, and notably the erotization of the transference, certainly put the analyst's superego to the test, but at a more fundamental level they challenge their relational skills and capacity for symbolization as well as mastery over their own desire for reparation.
Resistance, on the other hand is acting as a provocation; it heightens the patient’s state of being in love and more empathically, by pointing to the dangers of this situation.
The transference follows the vicissitudes of love. When it is negative, hostile, or governed by repressed erotic impulses it constitutes resistance. According to Freud, the "transference of friendly or affectionate feelings" which are "unobjectionable and admissible to consciousness" can contribute to a successful cure. (1912)
Transference-love is provoked by the analytic situation; it is intensified by resistance and lacks the reality principle, less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more naïve. All of this resembles quite well to the feelings of being in love.
"It represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions" (Freud, 1914)
If we observe love as part of transference we must first give description to this concept. In Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria he defines the transference situation in the following way:
Clearly, the analysis of the counter-transference is necessary so as to prevent the analyst's personal feelings, complexes or inner resistances from slowing down the progress of the treatment. The excitation provoked in the analyst by the patient's demands and transferential projections, and notably the erotization of the transference, certainly put the analyst's superego to the test, but at a more fundamental level they challenge their relational skills and capacity for symbolization as well as mastery over their own desire for reparation.
Resistance, on the other hand is acting as a provocation; it heightens the patient’s state of being in love and more empathically, by pointing to the dangers of this situation.
The transference follows the vicissitudes of love. When it is negative, hostile, or governed by repressed erotic impulses it constitutes resistance. According to Freud, the "transference of friendly or affectionate feelings" which are "unobjectionable and admissible to consciousness" can contribute to a successful cure. (1912)
Transference-love is provoked by the analytic situation; it is intensified by resistance and lacks the reality principle, less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more naïve. All of this resembles quite well to the feelings of being in love.
"It represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favorable conditions" (Freud, 1914)
If we observe love as part of transference we must first give description to this concept. In Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria he defines the transference situation in the following way:
“What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the tendencies and phantasies, which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the physician at the present moment.” (1905)
Freud (1915) acknowledged, "We have no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes
its appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of a 'genuine' love." In fact transference love was no different from any other kind of love, for there is no such state [of being in love] which does not reproduce infantile prototypes"
What is repeated in transference love is frustration, a demand not heard, never answered, which leads the patient to reassume the position of a child with respect to the analyst. Behind the exacerbated demand for love and reparation that is seen in passionate transferences lie developmental deficits and failures of the primary environment that have distorted the patient's self.
According to Klein (1952), The comfort and care given after birth, particularly the first feeding experiences are felt to come from good forces. Objects entitled as “good” or “bad”. The infant directs his feelings of gratification and love towards the “good” breast and his destructive impulses and feelings of persecution towards what he feels to be frustrating, the “bad” breast.
Now, the Oedipus phase makes it a bit harder for the infant. For anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize bad figures and to internalize good ones; to attach desires, love, guilt, and reparative tendencies to some objects, and hate and anxiety to others; to find representatives for internal figures in the external world.
Love and hatred dominate since early infancy, there’s a connection between positive and negative transference and by exploring love and hate the analyst and the patient can understand more the origin of the patients wishes.
What about narcissistic love? The self, according to Kohut (1966) may expand far beyond the borders of an individual, or it may shrink and become identical with a single one of his actions or aims.
The antithesis to narcissism is not the object relation but object love. Idealization plays an important part in love, mostly in narcissistic love, it may be actually an aspect of narcissism, of the original bliss, power, perfection, and goodness which is projected to the parent figure during a phase when there qualities become gradually separated into perfection pertaining to pleasure, or power, or knowledge, or beauty, or morality.
The idealized parent imago is partly invested with object-libidinal cathexes; and the idealized qualities are loved as a source of gratification to which the child clings tenaciously.
During the preoedipal period there is a gradual loss of the idealized parent imago, while the massive loss during the Oedipal period contributes to the formation of the superego.
Now, the Narcissus myth gives us an idea of autoerotism. Some emotions are lost in self-admiration; it is an ordinary stage of sexual development that is now commonly associated with erotic feelings aroused in a person by his own body and personality. Also, a sensation of exclusiveness coming from the mother makes the child feel omnipotent and powerful.
Spotnitz (1961) mentions “The person whose development is favorable behaves only briefly like someone in love with himself”. But even after he has formed good object-relations, he persists in narcissistic activity to some extent and generally increases it late in life.
Love does not prevent hatred and other negative emotions from invading a relationship, Spotnitz says. There is a clear denial of “bad” emotions when it comes to a relationship because it’s a constant reminder of failure and weakness. Attempting to conceal them is always destructive to the relationship.
Unrecognized hate can easily diminish love and sometimes kill it but a certain amount of battling between a man and a woman is always involved in the normal sexual relationship.
Bion (1958) would agree that a patient feels obstructed by the presence of feelings of impotence together with feelings of hatred and envy towards the sexual parents who are thought by him to possess, and to deny him the use of, the potent breast or penis that makes the possessor potent in the expression of love.
This picture is further complicated because, although it is true to say the patient feels free to love, at least in intention, the violence of the explosion leaves him denuded also of his feelings of love. It is important to be aware that a relationship will be a replica of the infantile love, which is the prototype of the valid love object in puberty when the release from the parents should take place.
In “General Theory of Neuroses”, Ferenzci (1920) states that
…The neurotic cannot effect this release; the son remains under the authority of the father the whole of his life and cannot transfer his libido from his mother to a strange sex object.”
There are two kinds of love regression, the reoccupation of the libido with the first incestuous love object and the return of the entire sexual organization to an earlier stage.
In hysteria, the primary incestuous love object shows the repression of the libido, the sexual organization of the hysteric continues undisturbed to the full development of the genital zone, but this last function is repressed.
On the contrary, in compulsion neuroses, the libido regresses to the anal-sadistic stage and at the same time regression of the love object takes place. The amount of ungratified libido that a man can endure has its limits; the more incomplete the sexual organization is, the stronger and more numerous will the fixations be on love objects. (Ferenzci, 1920)
An adult love, or a “later object” love has always a threshold stage, the narcissistic, when all libido belongs to the Ego, and where the Ego itself is the object. Falling in love creates an aim for the libido to grow; the object is filled with it while the Ego is practically empty.
Freud’s article on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) states that the disposition to melancholia predominates in the narcissistic type of love object, and that the refusal of food that is a characteristic of the complaint can be traced back to a regression to the oral stage of the libido.
Self-reproaches actually are reproaches against persons with whom the patient feels identified. There is an undoubtable pleasurable self-torture in melancholia that is a gratification of sadistic and hate impulses against an object, but by inversion it gets directed against the self.
It seems like all psychology schools understand each other in terms of a primary caretaker being the educator of what love means. Love is safety and emphasizing on love and those first moments of life means that we all need to feel close to someone in order to start creating a functional ego structure that can resist future traumas and rejection.
Love is a very complicated subject to hold on to because it is constantly changing within objects. It’s important to acknowledge that even though primary caretakers didn’t do the best job in giving the child what he needed at that point that nothing is written in stone, there are many ways to re educate this person and become more productive when it comes to love.
“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”
Gautama Buddha.
Embrace our Madness.
References.
Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, 157-171.
Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33:433-438.
Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and Transformations of Narcissism. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 14:243-272.
Spotnitz, H. (1961). The Narcissistic Defense in Schizofrenia. Psychoanal. Rev., 48D:24-42.
Spotnitz, H. (1977). Problems of the Marriage Parnership. Mod. Psychoanal., 2:4-14.
Bion, W.R. (1958). On Hallucination. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:341-349.
Ferenczi, S. (1920). General Theory of the Neuroses. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1:294-296.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258
Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis III). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works, 157-171.
Klein, M. (1952). The Origins of Transference. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 33:433-438.
Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and Transformations of Narcissism. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 14:243-272.
Spotnitz, H. (1961). The Narcissistic Defense in Schizofrenia. Psychoanal. Rev., 48D:24-42.
Spotnitz, H. (1977). Problems of the Marriage Parnership. Mod. Psychoanal., 2:4-14.
Bion, W.R. (1958). On Hallucination. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 39:341-349.
Ferenczi, S. (1920). General Theory of the Neuroses. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 1:294-296.
Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258
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