Bright, all-consuming passion seems to many to be the best thing that can be experienced in life. But it has little to do with love for another person — rather, it manifests love for oneself. Psychoanalysts Andrei Rossokhin and Michel Schneider reflect on what brings passion into our lives.
Psychologies: What is passion?
Andrey Rossokhin: Passion is a vivid manifestation of the attraction to life. We often associate the word «passion» exclusively with love. But there can be both passionate hatred and passionate devotion — all feelings colored by passion acquire their ultimate expression, every person who has achieved success in life is passionate. But at the same time it is also a drive to death, passion can become destructive, as in Roman Polanski’s «Bitter Moon», where the only way out for the heroes struck by passion was self-destruction and death.
Michelle Schneider: It is an attachment to another, based not on completeness, but on the lack or absence of something. We lack what we have, the other, ourselves. However, not all love is passion, and, of course, not all passion is love. Love is a gift and self-forgetfulness, while desire is absorption and absorption. Love is always mutual: everyone who loves wants to be loved. And passion is asymmetric: the person seized by it in the depths of his soul likes not to love, and especially not to be loved.
It turns out that loving passionately does not necessarily mean passionately loving another?
AR A person obsessed with passion cannot deeply understand and perceive another: he is only interested in his own feelings and desires. He is not focused on a real partner, but on a certain invented image, and sometimes only on some part of him. Such a passion makes a person endow his partner with the properties of an illusory image, and when the beloved begins to behave differently than expected (he wants to go for a walk alone, meet friends), this can cause aggression and a desire to squeeze him into the given framework: “You must always to be near and be the way I want to see you. Passion isolates a person from life, from interaction with other people, and if relationships develop further according to this logic, then fixation on the object of passion and the desire for isolation become stronger. This is well shown in Adrian Lyne’s film Nine and a Half Weeks, where Mickey Rourke’s hero said: our names, our stories are not important, there is only passion, and the real world should remain outside our love.
M. Sh. Of all the manifestations of love, passion is the one where the breath of death is most palpable. What manifests itself in two ways: we seek to absorb the other and refuse ourselves. Like madness, passion depersonalizes the one who experiences it. And if the other robs me of my individuality, then I, in retaliation, reduce him to the level of an object, a thing. While the relationship lasts, the passionate lover resorts to blackmail in order to obtain the presence of the other and his attention. «Do you love me?» It’s always a cover question. The interrogative form hides the imperative: «Love me!»
«Passion» and «love» — how are these concepts related?
A. R .: At the very beginning of a relationship, passion is almost always present. A person can say to his partner “I love you”, but it rather means “I want you” — “I want you not only sexually, but also so that you are constantly near me and share my life.” But gradually, passion can develop into deeper, loving relationships, when the other person becomes not an object of passion, but a subject, when he begins to be important in itself. The image of a loved one settles in the inner reality, and if a loved one is not around, you can think about him, fantasize, maintain internal interaction with him. Unlike passion, love can wait. But the emergence of love relationships does not mean the disappearance of passion: there is no longer that flame that raged during the first meetings, but there is a fire that warms. Partners begin to think about life together, about children, about how they will maintain trust and intimacy, what their relationship will be like in old age … This is the conversion of passion into love.
M. Sh .: In love, we feel the presence of another, even if he is far away from us. In passion, the other always slips away, even if he is nearby. Self-giving love can become conscious, but passion always remains in the dark about who is embracing whom. Another point: passion is inseparable from bodily sensations. In our time, there is very rarely a unity of hearts without a unity of bodies.
Mad love turns us into madmen, takes us away from reality?
A. R .: Our desire to experience passion is linked to our desire to experience the fullness of life. For this, a passionate person needs a partner — not to recognize him, to love him, but to feel that his own life is not meaningless. And in this case, we perceive the refusal of reciprocity very hard: the other gave, and then took away — not love, but the hope that in relations with him you can find the meaning of existence. Passionate relationships are often experienced as a complete fusion, when people think they are one, and in this case the passion parasitizes not on the relationship of man and woman, but on the more archaic relationship of infant and mother, who were once completely merged with each other. One of our deepest unconscious desires is to return to that state, and in this sense, passion makes it possible to satisfy this need. But just as a child eventually becomes interested in other people and objects, gradually separating from the mother, so the partners return from passionate merging into reality. For some, such a separation from a partner may be too painful, and he will strive to keep the illusion of merger at all costs. If a partner refuses such a relationship, wanting to “break free”, this can cause the same passionate anger and aggression in a passionate lover — up to the desire to kill a partner or commit suicide, sincerely believing that without an object of passion he can only die.
M. Sh .: Yes, passion causes a break with reality, and even with the very fact of the reality of the one you love. Passion is an addiction when the whole world is reduced to the presence of one who is in essence never fully present. You are missing one person, and the whole world turns out to be empty … But the one you are missing is actually yourself. The very word «passion» is related to «suffering». Thus, for example, we use the word “passion” to describe the sufferings of Christ on the cross. Love passion is a passion for suffering, love for suffering, the cause of which is constantly another. This is where this trap arises, in which there is no logic: the beloved becomes the only means of getting rid of the suffering that he himself is the cause of.
Why do we need passion in our life?
A. R .: Passion is important as the energy of life, which can not only destroy a person, but also create him — in the event that passion does not become a wild beast, but is a kind of force with which he is able to live in harmony. Passion can be crushed in oneself, but then we lose the energy of life. And if we follow her lead, we destroy ourselves and others. And only the ability to understand our impulses and manage them will allow us to burn and love, while remaining free and not taking away freedom from others.
M. Sh .: The one who thinks that love-passion will not touch him is much more insane than the one who knows its abyss. The desire to do without passions, to do without others is called «death». Love is not always a disease, but there is always something hurting in it, some kind of affect. After all, to love someone means to give him the right to cause us suffering. Why do you need to love to the point of madness? The fact of the matter is that it is not necessary for anything. But this allows us to go beyond our own personality, causes a desire to lose — the mind, time, ourselves. Relationships that lead to nothing and are not needed for anything may be the only relationships that allow us to stay alive.