Passion is one of the stages of love? Or is it something contrary to love? Reflections on the topic.
Recently, a lady psychoanalyst told me that she was preparing a seminar on the topic of love. “What a great idea!” I answered. What could be more important than love, which occupies all our thoughts all the time, those who tell you that they don’t think about it are lying, they don’t realize it themselves, or they are depressed.
I’m certainly not going to write notes about love. It’s a very broad topic! For two thousand years, novels have been written about her, and new ones appear every year. Not to mention the songs… No, the thing is, when my friend and I were discussing her seminar, we mentioned passion, and I found that we define it differently. And I would like to share my thoughts on this with you.
It seems to me that two concepts are opposed to each other here. The first (which my interlocutor adhered to) implies that passion is just one of the special moments of love that happens at its beginning. You know, this is the first time when we are mad, when we are on fire, when the whole universe is so erotic, when we smile at everyone and feel sympathy even for the sullen controllers on the bus. No matter how strong it is and how it develops over time, love is an election. I love you because you are you, unlike anyone else, because everything about you is interesting to me, because, without even imagining you clearly, I was waiting for you, although you are completely unexpected … In general, a miracle began.
Some believe that the longevity of the pair that has arisen depends on what the beginning was like – maybe. But passion is something else. It seems to me that it often happens to us when we are in trouble (whether we realize it or not) or when we do not like our life, when we are threatened with sadness. Then passion is that inner movement that drives out the forces of death that have taken possession of us and desperately pushes us towards sexual desire, towards Eros. Melancholy was approaching us, and then suddenly another or another, like an obsession, fills the entire space of our thoughts.
We do not think about anything but him (her), we carry him (her) in ourselves, and there is no place for sadness in us anymore – we have escaped from the embrace of Thanatos for a while. This I call the distracting function of passion. And that object of our passion, that man or woman whom we so passionately desired, may turn out, as it often turns out later, when the passion has passed, “not at all to our taste.”
So it seems to me that if love is altruistic (in the sense of “turned to another”), then passion, the violent assertion of living desire against deadening forces, is precisely narcissistic: it is aimed at self-preservation. Passionate words are not really “I love you” at all. The one who is seized with passion asserts something else: “I will not die.”