For romantics, a relationship is the ultimate feeling of having someone by our side that makes us feel alive, a one-in-a-lifetime experience that is full of emotions, which can even include jealousy and hate. For others, a relationship is just a social construct that allows two people to combine their income and improve their economic situation.
But maybe it could be easier to agree that the concept of love can be divided into the external and internal, between what fulfills social norms and what entices our minds. This ultimately proves how love is the ultimate contradiction and one of the most complex concepts to understand. Love is happiness and sadness; it makes us feel warm while also being responsible for spurring the coldest emotions.
Carl Jung believed love to be an incredible paradox. Sigmund Freud believed in a unique way to find the right love match, as well as how to balance passionate and rational impulses. Meanwhile for Michel Foucault, love implied loneliness, and our goal should be to find passion.
Jung
Love is one of psychoanalysis’s most discussed subjects. It’s what drives us to do just about everything we do. Jung once claimed love to be a problem that did not discriminate its victims by age. As a child, the problem of love revolves around the parents’ affection. At an elderly age, a person can reflect how much or how little have they loved. It’s an extremely large mountain to climb up, and it only increases in size once you think you’ve reached the top. Jung says that nobody should be ashamed of having been struck down by love.
True love perpetually establishes a responsible and lasting attachment. It requires the freedom of sacrificing other possibilities, like the illusion of all the other people we could be with. If we don’t part with the idea that there are several other people who can make us happy, our romantic illusions will not allow us to establish deep committed feelings, which will also lead to us not being able to experience true love.
Love has more than one similarity with religious conviction. Love behaves in a similar way to a deity, since both will only come to their bravest servant. Someone who turns their back on love because of the difficulty it entails is not worthy of reaping its rewards. The world is only empty for the person who cannot direct their libido towards the people and things that can be made beautiful.
Free love would be possible if every human being was capable of maximum moral effort. But the concept of free love was not created for that purpose, but to make something difficult appear to be easy. Love is made from depth and sincerity; without them, the emotion would only be a whim.
Freud
For Freud it’s all about basic instincts. Anyone who’s read the works of the famous psychoanalyst knows that, to him, everything is based on sexual impulses that can be observed in our unconscious acts. Just like the love we experience with another person, on a subconscious level love is a purely animal-like instinct we rationalize through the Ego.
Love emerges like a magnet; the Ego begins the work of getting the person we’re attracted to, while the Superego analyzes if that person meets the social constructs we have inherited from society. However, despite the Superego’s efforts, Freud would say that love is blind, deadly, and even stupid, because it comes from our instinctive side. Love is guided by our subconscious, our Id, that which we cannot control.
The ideal situation would be to find someone who captivates both the desires of the Id and the Ego. For that to be achieved, a particular look and great conversation is required, so that both the primitive and the conscious desires are satisfied. If we match impulsive spirit with great common sense, the other person will most likely fall in love with us.
Foucault
Is passion a phase, something that happens to us, takes over us, has no beginning, and that’s impossible to control? Truthfully, we don’t know where it comes from; it has a way of just appearing. It’s a state in constant flux but with no clear direction. There are moments of strength and weakness, even ones of total incandescence. It’s an unstable trance that perpetuates for purely mysterious reasons. Unlike love, passion is not blind. However, everything we perceive seems to get twisted in its favor.
Passion also has a quality that encompasses both suffering and pleasure, not in the same vein as desire or BDSM. It’s not the result of two properties that come together, but just one strange occurrence. None of it relates to love. It can perfectly accept the other party, not reciprocating the feeling. It’s something that originates from loneliness. Whereas love cannot exist without one person constantly asking the other for something, and that might be its greatest flaw. Passion inherently contains a great communicative force while love is an isolated state.
Translated by María Suárez
