She colors our lives with the brightest colors. Is there a greater pleasure than the opportunity to love and be loved! However, it happens that this feeling brings not joy, but pain … Psychoanalyst Mikhail Romashkevich tells how our ability to love is formed.
This feeling can bring great spiritual and physical pleasure. In a state of love, we gain the ability to see new opportunities where we did not notice them before. We are overwhelmed with a sense of happiness that we are ready to share with others, it makes us more responsive to the condition of other people. This feeling can become – and for a long time – the meaning of our life and illuminate its darkest sides. But the same feeling can deprive you of rest and sleep, give rise to jealousy, despair and leave a deep wound in your soul. So why are some of us able to experience all the joys of love, while for others it turns into mental anguish?
School of love
“If a person is able to enjoy love, it can be assumed that he was born and raised in a family where he was provided with unconditional acceptance, and his mother enjoyed taking care of him, from satisfying all his needs and requirements,” explains Mikhail Romashkevich. – After all, a loving mother intuitively understands exactly what her baby needs at the moment. And the child learns love through the process of identification with the mother, with her care, tenderness, responsiveness, the ability to accept him not only obedient, but also capricious, stubborn. If our relationship with our mother was colored with positive emotions, we gain the ability to respond to any state of a loved one, take care of him, “give” ourselves and enjoy it. In a broader sense, such experience translates into creativity, into fruitfulness, productivity and the ability to enjoy life in general.
Vladimir Nabokov
“Here Martyn felt how, breaking through the locks, a radiant wave gushed, he remembered how excellently he had just played, he remembered that everything was settled with Rosa, that in the evening there was a banquet in the club, that he was healthy, strong, that tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and much more , many days – a life crammed full of all kinds of happiness, and all this swooped in at once, swirled him, and he, laughing, grabbed Sonya in an armful, along with the pillow that she clung to, and began to kiss her wet teeth, in the eyes, into a cold nose, and she kicked, and her black, violet-scented hair climbed into his mouth, and finally he dropped her with a loud laugh on the sofa … “
“FEAT”. AZBUKA-CLASSICS, 2005.
* Mikhail Romashkevich is a full member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Head of the Psychoanalytic Department of the Institute of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis.
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Love and revenge
It happens that a person, falling in love, every time gets into a relationship that brings pain. How to explain such a fatal repetition of the same scenario, when hope alternates with hopelessness, jealousy, resentment?
“Feeling rejected, abandoned, irritating his mother, the child will not be able to enjoy love, because this feeling is mixed in him with a large share of negative emotions: resentment, aggression, envy, guilt, shame,” continues Mikhail Romashkevich. – His relationship with people and the world as a whole will be painted predominantly in dark, gloomy tones. For such a person, an act of love coexists with an act of revenge. When lovers torment each other, their relationship unconsciously plays out both the repetition of their own childhood pain and revenge on the person who caused this pain. However, there is one caveat. Sigmund Freud, describing the “pleasure principle”, included in it both obtaining pleasure and getting rid of displeasure. And when people enter into such painful relationships, they unconsciously seek not to receive pleasure, but to get rid of past childhood pain.
EACH OF US UNCONSCIOUSLY CREATES ONLY OUR OWN, INDIVIDUAL “LOVE PROFILE”
love drawing
Many of us, of course, are familiar with relationships in which love was colored by unpleasant experiences. However, most often this happens in youth, when we are just forming the image of the most attractive partner. With age, we become more aware of what kind of person we want to see next to us, what qualities he should have, what we expect from him, what we need to enjoy, and what we want to avoid.
“Fortunately, for most of us, the early experience was not very traumatic,” says Mikhail Romashkevich. – Almost every one of us experienced disappointment, resentment towards parents in childhood. However, these feelings were not so intense as to cause irreversible damage to our psyche, and we still have the ability to find partners with whom we can enjoy various aspects of the relationship. And each of us creates an individual drawing in love.
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love drug
Whatever our previous experience, falling in love again, we again become reckless, open, ready to experience tenderness and affection. We feel an irresistible attraction, emotional dependence on a partner, and we behave as if we are striving to preserve these experiences by all means. Why? “Love, like any pleasant activity (watching a good movie, reading a fascinating book, enjoying a gourmet meal and, of course, experiencing an orgasm), causes an increase in the percentage of dopamine in our brain,” says psychophysiologist Alexander Chernorizov. This neurotransmitter is a natural stimulant to our senses. It “turns on” the feeling of euphoria and encourages us to strive for maximum pleasure, for passionate excitement.”
Research into the chemistry of the brain in love helps us understand why we behave the way we do*. Neuroscientists have found that the same dopamine is “involved” in the formation of drug addiction. It is this fact that gives reason to argue that love is also a drug. “When we are in love, we share the fate of drug addicts, the only difference is that our drug bears the name of the creature we love,” says Helen Fisher, anthropologist at Rutgers University (USA), author of the world bestseller Why We Love. The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love”**. It’s hard to come to terms with this idea, but it seems that we really fall in love not only because the object of our passion has some kind of merit. Behind this is also a purely selfish desire to get maximum pleasure.
* The Journal of Neurophysiology, 2005, vol. 3.** H. Fisher «Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love». Peperback, 2005.