The heat of love that we look forward to brings more than pleasure. When we fall in love, we begin to ask ourselves a lot of questions and experience deep existential anxiety, explains psychoanalyst Monique Schneider.
Psychologies: What happens the moment we meet our love?
Monique Schneider: I’m not sure if we can know from the start what exactly is going on. But then, in hindsight, we notice that we were attracted to someone by an irresistible force. Until this meeting, we imagined that we were in charge of our own lives. We wanted to maintain the illusion that our fate is in our hands. Such an «incident» as falling in love shows our weaknesses. Our «I» collapses because the other is so unexpected, so wonderful and so important to us. This makes us feel like we are losing ground…
This is what is called «falling in love without memory» and «losing your head» … But still, the lover is still focused on himself, isn’t it?
M. Sh .: No, in love we constantly think about something else — so mysterious, elusive. This state is always connected with anxiety: is this other attached to me? Is it long? We are entering a fragmented time in which every moment is unpredictable. We want love to last, but we can’t believe it. Moreover, sometimes our feeling remains undivided. This is the tragedy of love, and it is at this moment that the feeling of falling into the abyss is especially strong, because only we have lost our heads, and the other is firmly on the ground and therefore far from us.
Maybe the fear of experiencing this loss of support sometimes makes us avoid love?
M. Sh .: Yes. We are constantly confronted with this fear of forgetting, the fear that the other will leave us. In fact, we are afraid to relive the feeling that comes from childhood, which Freud called helplessness: when a child feels deeply alone, when he needs something, and he himself does not necessarily know what he needs, and there is no one around, and now he waits and despairs. At any age, we need this friend who will be able to understand what we lack and respond to our need.
When are the feelings mutual?
“Most often we imagine that we are giving our loved one what we ourselves lack, what we have been deprived of”
M. Sh .: Then we re-experience birth. We meet again with someone who will assure us that we need to live. We give birth to ourselves, and the other becomes a kind of catalyst for this process. «I feel like something is moving in me.» Women often feel this movement as a break, men as overcrowding. We simultaneously experience our own “otherness” and feel that we have become inner richer. Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas says that at a physical meeting, love does not satiate, does not satisfy hunger, but, on the contrary, whets the appetite*. The further we go, the stronger we feel this hunger. Freud believes that an encounter with love can be compared to an encounter with a work of art: it «evokes in us emotions that we may not have thought we were capable of.» We discover in ourselves a being endowed with power, desires, feelings that we were not aware of.
The state of being in love never lasts long?
M. Sh .: It all depends on the distribution of roles in the relationship. For the most part, one of the two is a mirage, the hero of the novel. He can be, for example, the one who humiliates, and the other then plays the role of a person, of course, interesting, but a little boring. As if we have to play a game for two, in which one will be the master and the other the subject. Don’t expect equality. This is not a meeting of two «I» — this does not happen. In the dynamics of love, there should always be an exaltation of one of the two, worship of him, and not necessarily fullness. One reigns, and the other acts as a suppliant: «Make me exist, make me be born.»
How do these roles come about?
M. Sh .: We tend to play the role that is the opposite of our main need. If we want to be saved, we will try to seduce the other and defeat him; if we ourselves seek to save, we will act as those in distress. Being in love needs such an inversion, when we can imagine that we are giving to another what we ourselves have been deprived of. In love, everything changes its scale and significance, and the distribution of roles too. Over time, this distribution becomes either more rigid — and then the couple slips into a sadomasochistic relationship — or simply becomes fixed. Roles can then change, but not in the same pair. And each one will be inclined again and again to assume either a weak, defensive position, or a defender position, depending on what he saw in childhood or from someone who influenced him. But in any case, no matter what role we play in a relationship, the task of this role is always the same: to hide the feeling of possible own insignificance.
Are you looking at love too gloomily?
M. Sh .: Not! Love does not always turn into a drama — although, of course, such a risk is very great, as we return to a state of childish helplessness. The moment we are in love, we have a chance to free ourselves from this childhood feeling: “I am just another child, my birth was not so necessary.” Love cancels (and it also exposes) the fear of one’s own insignificance, «recorded» in each of us. Jean-Paul Sartre beautifully expressed this feeling when he said that the greatest joy of love is to feel that my existence is justified. In ordinary life, we exist without really thinking about why. In love, we suddenly become indispensable in the eyes of the other. We need him to reassure us, encourage us, show us that he needs us. When Esther faints in front of Artaxerxes in the tragedy of Racine, he does not turn away. He says to her: «Live, mistress» **. This scene is so beautiful because we are waiting for the order to be reborn from the other. And with his love he gives us this order.
* E. Levinas «Totality and Infinity» (E. Levinas «Totalité et Infini», LGF, 2009).
** J. Racine «Esther». Works. Vol. 2 (Art, 1984).