“We need to learn to understand our impulses”

A bright, all-consuming feeling for many girls seems to be the best thing to experience in life. But in passion there is little in common with love for another person – rather, love for oneself is manifested in it. Psychoanalysts Andrei Rossokhin and Michel Schneider reflect on what sexual obsession brings into our lives.

Psychologies: What is passion?

Andrey Rossokhin: Andrey Rossokhin: Passion is a vivid manifestation of the attraction to life. We associate the word “passion” exclusively with love. But there is also passionate hatred, and passionate devotion – all feelings, colored by passion, acquire their ultimate expression. Passion can become destructive.

Michelle Schneider: Michelle Schneider: This strong attachment to the other is not based on completeness, but on the lack or absence of something. We lack what we have (another, ourselves). However, not all love is passion, and, of course, not all passion is love. Love is a gift and self-forgetfulness, while attraction is an absorption and absorption. Love is always mutual: everyone who loves wants to be loved. And passion is asymmetrical: the person covered 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 mean passionately loving another?

A. R .: A. R .: A person obsessed with passion cannot deeply understand a partner: he is only interested in his own feelings and desires. He focuses not on a real person, but on his fantasy, an invented image, sometimes only on some part of him. Such a passion makes one endow the beloved with the properties of an ideal, and when he begins to behave differently than expected (he wants, for example, to meet friends alone), this can cause aggression: “You must be the way I want to see you.” Passion isolates a person from life, from interaction with other people.

M. Sh .: M. Sh .: Passion is that form of manifestation of love where the breath of death is most tangible: a person seeks to devour another and renounces himself. Like madness, passion depersonalizes the one who experiences it. And since my partner takes away my individuality from me, then I 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?

M. Sh .: M. Sh .: Passion, unlike love, is inseparable from bodily sensations. Today, there is very rarely a unity of hearts without a unity of bodies. 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.

A. R .: 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.” Gradually, passion can develop into a deeper, loving relationship, when the other person becomes important in itself. The image of a loved one finds its place in the inner reality, and if a loved one is not around, you can think about him, maintain internal interaction with him. Unlike passion, love can wait. 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.

But why do most of us in our youth dream of experiencing passionate, crazy love?

A. R .: A. R .: Our desire to experience it is connected with the need to feel 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 merger, when we seem to be a single whole – and in this case, passion parasitizes not on the relationship of woman and man, 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 lover may be too painful, and he will strive to keep the illusion of merging at all costs. If a partner refuses such a relationship and “breaks free”, this can cause the same passionate anger and aggression in a passionate lover – up to the desire to kill him or commit suicide, because he sincerely believes that without an object of passion, he can only die.

M. Sh .: 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, in essence, is never fully present. We lack one person, and the whole world turns out to be empty … But the one we lack is, in fact, ourselves. The very word “passion” is related to “suffering”. So, for example, we use the word “passion” to describe the sufferings of Jesus 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? And can each of us experience it?

M. Sh .: M. Sh .: The one who thinks that love-passion will not touch him is much more insane than the one who knows its abyss. 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.

A. R .: A. R .: Passion is important as the energy of life, which can not only destroy a person, but also build him – if it does not become a wild beast, but remains a kind of force with which he is able to live in harmony. Passion can be crushed in oneself, but then we will 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 depriving others of their freedom.