We all dream about it, but when it comes into our lives, few can bear it and keep it. Why is this happening? Statements by psychotherapist Adam Philips on why love inevitably brings pain and frustration.
We fall in love not so much with a person as with a fantasy of how a person can fill our inner emptiness, says psychoanalyst Adam Philips. He is often called the «poet of frustration», which Philips considers the basis of any human life. Frustration is a range of negative emotions from anger to sadness that we experience when we encounter a barrier on the way to our desired goal.
Phillips believes that our unlived lives—those we construct in fantasy, imagine—are often far more important to us than the lives we have lived. We cannot literally and figuratively imagine ourselves without them. What we dream about, what we crave are impressions, things and people that are not in our real life. The absence of the necessary makes one think and develop, and at the same time disturbs and depresses.
In his book Lost, the psychoanalyst writes: “For modern people, who are haunted by the possibility of choice, a successful life is a life that we live to the fullest. We are obsessed with what is missing in our lives and what prevents us from getting all the pleasures we desire.
Frustration becomes the fuel of love. Despite the pain, there is a positive grain in it. It acts as a sign that the desired goal exists somewhere in the future. So, we still have something to strive for. Illusions, expectations are necessary for the existence of love, no matter if this love is parental or erotic.
All love stories are stories of unmet need. To fall in love is to receive a reminder of what you were deprived of, and now it seems to you that you have received it.
Why is love so important to us? It temporarily surrounds us with the illusion of a dream come true. According to Philips, “all love stories are stories of an unmet need… To fall in love is to be reminded of what you were deprived of, and now you think you got it.”
Precisely «seems» because love cannot guarantee that your needs will be met, and even if it does, your frustration will be transformed into something else. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the person with whom we really fall in love is a man or a woman from our fantasies. We invented them before we met them, not out of nothing (nothing comes from nothing), but on the basis of previous experience, both real and imagined.
We feel that we have known this person for a long time, because in a certain sense we really know him, he is flesh and blood from ourselves. And because we have literally been waiting for years to meet him, we feel like we have known this person for many years. At the same time, being a separate person with his own character and habits, he seems alien to us. A familiar stranger.
And no matter how much we waited, and hoped, and dreamed of meeting the love of our life, only when we meet her, we begin to be afraid of losing her.
The paradox is that the appearance in our life of the object of love is necessary in order to feel its absence.
The paradox is that the appearance in our life of the object of love is necessary in order to feel its absence. Longing may precede its appearance in our lives, but we need to meet with the love of life in order to immediately fully feel the pain that we can lose it. Newfound love reminds us of our collection of failures and failures, because it promises that things will be different now, and because of this, it becomes overvalued.
However strong and disinterested our feeling may be, its object can never fully respond to it. Hence the pain.
In his essay «On Flirting,» Philips says that «good relationships can be built by those people who are able to cope with constant frustration, daily frustration, the inability to achieve the desired goal. Those who know how to wait and endure and can reconcile their fantasies and the life that will never be able to embody them exactly.
The older we get, the better we deal with frustration, Phillips hopes, and perhaps the better we get along with love itself.