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- Title
מאהבת העברה לאהבה אחר הצהריים: גלגולי האהבה הארוטית בשלושה זוגות מנקודת מבט התייחסותית.
- Authors
חנה אולמן
- Abstract
In my paper I address the vicissitudes of love and desire in three different contexts: first, the origins of love and desire in the mother-infant dyad; second, their manifestations in the analytic relationship – that is, as experienced by the analytic couple in all kinds of gender combinations – and third, as manifested in the long term relationship of romantic couples, focusing in particular on Stephen Mitchell’s (1946-2000) famous question, and the title of his posthumously published book Can Love Last? (2002). My main argument in this review of the transitions of love and desire is that love is a matter for two, for a couple, even a psychoanalytic couple. This seems an obvious claim, and yet it is often obscured in psychoanalysis which has traditionally concerned itself with the lack of love, with the internal obstacles to love, or with love in psychoanalytic treatment as resistance, rather than an intense emotion experienced by two partners in a relationship. My focus is entrained upon the fusion of love and desire; namely, erotic love. I believe that erotic love provides a fruitful theoretical junction between the subject-to-subject relationship of the Relational perspective, and the Freudian drive model. Psychoanalysis remained for a long time divided and split between the theoretical and clinical emphasis on un-regulating powerful drives and the emphasis on formative influences of early object relations. In the following review of love and desire as illustrated by the three couples mentioned above, I demonstrate the constant movement and intertwining of desire and love and the attachment to an Other. In the classical tradition of Freudian psychoanalysis, the infant’s development is a lone journey. It is imbued by the struggle with the drives and between the drives and the environment, but the love for the other does not exist in this journey as an independent motive. Albeit emphasizing the mother infant relationship and the role of the environment, object relations theories, as well as Kohutian psychoanalysis, view the other as the “object” that can provide or frustrate the baby’s needs. On the other hand, the relationship with the other as an aim in and of itself and the idea of the couple as a unit inherent in psychic life, becomes central in Relational perspective. From the beginning of life, the other is experienced as exciting, fascinating, influential. I demonstrate how this perspective combines with the work of Laplanche (1987), Stein (1998), Benjamin and Atlas (2015) so as to chart a developmental trajectory in which desire and attachment are intertwined, forming the patterns in which sexuality and love appear throughout the life span. The discussion of the analyst/analysand couple begins with Freud’s seminal paper “On transference love” (1915) in which erotic love in the transference is interpreted as resistance, tracing it back in infantile sexuality and oedipal conflicts. In his complex writing, however, Freud described erotic love in the analytic relationship as explosive, potentially destructive, althought it is also the clue to a cure. My review of erotic love in analysis ends with Jody Messler Davies’ (1950- ) paper “Love in the afternoon” (1994), in which the focus is on the analyst’s desire and Davies’ radical claim that such love can liberate the patient from perverse relational patterns. Using clinical vignettes, I argue that the experience of erotic love in this couple, when embedded in the secure therapeutic attachment relationship, is an opportunity for aliveness and deep contact with dissociated self-states. Erotic love in psychoanalysis is partly an inevitable product of the power relations and paradoxes of “ethical seduction” (Shetrit-Vatine, 2019). If one can stay with the intensity and the intimate contact arising in the analytic couple, the “explosives,” as Freud called them, can lead to a revelation of a new agentic and alive self-state. Finally, I turn to the long-term relationship in the mature romantic couple. In Can Love Last? (2002) Mitchell examines the tension in long term relationships between dependence and the need for the other, and the immediacy and aggression inherent in sexuality and desire. His answer is clear: love can last as long as we are ready to recognize our efforts to defend against the vulnerability and fragility inherent in loving. Mitchell’s view is juxtaposed with Stein’s argument about the “darkness” of sexuality, which she views as inherently in contrast, split from love. The claim presented in this paper takes the position of the Third in this argument. Erotic love occupies the liminal place between the body, the subject and the other. A complementary rather than an opposing clashing relation between attachment, love and desire is possible in long term relationships in which a background of safety is constituted, by the history of breakdowns, ruptures and repairs, creating an “affective density” (Goldoner, 2004) that is unique to the couple, with the specific history of ups and downs they experience together. In this mutual living history attachment, trust and dependency can enhance and enrich desire. The challenge of mature couples, similarly to the psychoanalytic challenge, is to stay and trust this lived experienced history, even as we are engulfed with enigmatic otherness and the inevitable partiality of the relationship.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p341
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article