We feel love for someone who, as it seems to us, understands our essence, says psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller. So, the partner helps us to accept ourselves as we are.
Psychologies: Does psychoanalysis reveal anything new to us about the essence of love?
Jacques-Alain Miller: Yes, a lot, because in analysis it is love that is the driving therapeutic force. I mean that involuntary feeling that the patient has for his analyst, the so-called transference. This, of course, is not real love, but it has the same mechanisms, and they are revealed in psychoanalysis sessions: we feel love for someone who, we think, understands who we really are.
And what is it like to truly love?
To truly love is to believe that by loving someone, we learn the truth about ourselves. We love someone or someone who holds the answer (or one of the answers) to our question: “Who am I?”
Why do some people know how to love and others don’t?
Some men and women know how to arouse love for themselves: they know which “buttons” to press in order to be loved. But at the same time, they themselves do not necessarily fall in love, rather they play cat and mouse with their prey. To love, you need to admit that your life is not complete, that you need another person, that you miss him. Those who believe that they are self-sufficient and can be completely alone simply do not know how to love – they are not familiar with either the risks of love or its pleasure. Sometimes they themselves notice this in themselves and suffer from it.
“The fullness of life in solitude” – only a man can imagine such a thing …
Exactly! As Jacques Lacan said, to love is to give to another what you don’t have.1. In other words, to admit that you are missing something, and to give this “something” to another, “to place it in another”. This does not mean giving him what you own – things or gifts; it means giving away something that you do not own, something that is outside of yourself. And for this, one must admit one’s incompleteness, “castration”, as Freud said. And this, in essence, is characteristic of a woman. And in this sense, you can truly love only from the position of a woman. Love feminizes. That’s why a man in love is always a little funny. But if he is embarrassed by this, afraid to seem ridiculous, this means that in fact he is not too confident in his male strength.
In this case, it is more difficult for men to love?
Oh yeah! Even a man in love can experience bouts of hurt pride, show sudden outbursts of aggression towards the object of his love, since this love makes him “flawed”, dependent. This is why he may be attracted to women whom he does not love: in this way he again finds himself in a position of power, from which he partly moves away in love relationships. Freud wrote about this, speaking about the splitting of a man’s love life into love and sexual desire.2.
And what about women?
They tend to have a split in the perception of a male partner. On the one hand, he is a pleasurable lover, they are attracted to him. But he is also a loving man, feminized by this feeling. More and more women prefer the male position: one man, at home, for love, others for physical pleasure.
Why are there more and more women like this?
Ideas about the social role of men and women in general are constantly changing, and this contrasts sharply with the inviolability of the past. For men, the expression of emotions and love becomes the norm. For women, on the contrary, a “shift” towards the male is to some extent characteristic. “Love becomes a fluid substance,” says sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Each of us has to come up with our own lifestyle, find our own way to love and enjoy.
“Love is always mutual,” said Lacan. Is this true even today? And what does it mean?
This phrase is often repeated without understanding its meaning. This does not mean that it is enough to love someone to love us in return. It means: “Since I love you, you also participate in this, because there is something in you that makes me love you. It is a mutual feeling, because there is a movement in both directions: the love that I feel for you arises in response to the reason for love that is in you. My feeling for you is not only my business, but yours too. My love says something about you that perhaps you don’t know yourself.”
Why do we choose Him or Her? After all, this is not accidental?
There is what Freud called the condition of love, the cause of desire. This is a certain trait (or a combination of them), which for a given person determines his love choice. Sometimes the subtle things matter. For example, such a reason for love in one of Freud’s patients was a ray of the sun falling on the nose of a woman he saw!
It’s hard to believe that love is born from such little things!
The way our unconscious actually functions surpasses any fiction. You can’t even imagine how much everything in our life (and especially in love) is built on trifles, on “divine trifles”. Indeed, especially in men, we more often find such “reasons for love” necessary to start the love mechanism.
For women, details that remind them of their father, mother, brother, sister, or someone from childhood also play a role in their choice. And yet, the female form of love is closer to erotomania than to fetishism: it is important for a woman to be loved. Another’s (or perceived) interest in her is often a necessary condition to arouse her love, or at least consent to intimacy.
But what about erotic fantasies?
A woman’s fantasies, conscious or unconscious, rather determine not the choice of a partner, but what she will receive sexual pleasure from. For men, it’s the other way around. Their fantasies well illustrate stories of “love at first sight”. Lacan cited an example from Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther: the hero falls in love with Charlotte at the first meeting, seeing how she feeds the small children around her. Here the manifestation of the maternal qualities of a woman immediately evokes love.
Another case from my practice: a 50-year-old director selects a secretary for himself, a 20-year-old woman appears among the candidates, and he immediately confesses his love to her. Later, during an analysis session, he discovered the trigger: he noticed something in her behavior that reminded him of his own first job interview at the age of 20. It turns out that he, in a sense, fell in love with himself. In these examples we find two types of love noted by Freud: we love either the one who protects us (in this case, the mother), or the narcissistic image of ourselves.
It’s like we’re just puppets!
No, nothing is written in advance in the relationship between a single man and a woman, there is no guide, no preliminary installations. Their meeting is not programmed, like the meeting of a spermatozoon and an egg. Men and women talk, they live in the space of words, and this is what is decisive. Features of love are also highly dependent on the cultural context. Each civilization structures relations between the sexes in its own way. Right now we are witnessing the process of displacement of the “single” by the “multiple” in the West. The ideal model of “great love for life” is gradually giving way to “hurried” relationships and various love scenarios: alternative, sequential and simultaneous.
But what about eternal love?
Balzac wrote in The Human Comedy that any passion that is not perceived as eternal is vile. But is it possible to experience the intensity of passion in a love relationship throughout life? The more a man devotes himself to one woman, the more likely it is that she will eventually acquire maternal status for him: the more he loves her, the more he deifies, puts him on a pedestal. And when a woman becomes attached to a single man, she “castrates” him. Therefore, it turns out that the path of ideal relationships is very narrow. Aristotle, for example, believed that the best continuation of marital love is friendship.
But the problem is that men, by their admission, do not understand what women want; and women do not understand what men expect from them.
Yes. The realization of Aristotle’s model is hampered by the fact that dialogue between opposite sexes is impossible: each of the lovers, in fact, is doomed to forever comprehend the partner’s language, acting by touch, picking up the keys to the lock, which is constantly changing. Love is a labyrinth of misunderstandings from which there is no way out.
1 J. Lacan “Seminars” (Gnosis, Logos, 1998-2008).
2 Z. Freud “Psychoanalysis of children’s fears” (ABC, 2008).
About the expert: Jacques-Alain Miller is a psychoanalyst, student of Jacques Lacan, founder of the World Psychoanalytic Association.