LOVE AND THE AMERICAN PSYCHE

R . CURTIS BRISTOL AND STEFAN A . PASTERNACK

It’s time to focus on strengthening the bonds of love and marriage

The ancient topic of love is ubiquitous in modern and traditional literature, drama, poetry, and art. The pleomorphic meanings of love are reflected in complex, unconscious fantasy that shapes all human relations throughout life. Love is meaningful to the individual and society alike in two forms: the first is normative and the second is in its many aberrations. The inexhaustible task for the professional is to tease apart one from the other since the psychological barriers to being loved and loving are fundamentally interrelated. The problem is that love gone wrong is commonplace for the individual and society, yet modern science has not sufficiently understood this dilemma or taken seriously its consequences.

Over the last 30 years as practicing and teaching psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, we have seen many men and women who have been deeply disappointed in their love relationships, their partners, and their lives. Disappointed and unrequited lovers are a part of our historic culture. But too little attention is paid to the plight of children and adults who are unable to love others and fail to attract and sustain meaningful partnerships, friendships, and work relationships.

Statistics demonstrate that the majority of those who comprise the 51 percent divorce rate in America once believed they loved and were loved in return and wished to share life together. Why does it go wrong? To answer this question, we must ask how love develops, what fosters it, and what wrecks it. Some researchers attempt to explain love on the basis of neurochemistry, while others try to explain it on the basis of psychosocial phenomena. They each present valid evidence about human sexuality, but neither can explain the dynamics of failed love, a unique human problem.

In the last half-century, there were many forces that “liberated” sexuality. A brief list includes the work of Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson; the wide availability of contraception; the sexual revolution and the likes of a Hugh Hefner “sexual philosophy”; women’s liberation; first-amendment rights and the bolder publishing world; the ubiquity of television; and the drug culture.

Along the way, though, we effectively uncoupled love and sex, in no small part by implementing the sexual education of our youth. Justified as a necessary prescription because of real ignorance, let alone unwed pregnancies and the growing AIDS epidemic, sex education set apart the less compelling education about relationships, feelings, and intimacy. We believed it vital to teach our children about sexual anatomy, contraception, and prevention of venereal disease, but failed to link sex education to the psychology of non-physical pleasure, or the complicated origins of love from birth on.

There always have been meaningful religious precepts about love. But when it comes to education about sex and love, modern science has proved unprepared. Love and sex are a duality; the one cannot explain the other. As clinicians, for example, we see many patients who have had abundant sexual lives, but long for involved, lasting relationships and greater levels of intimacy and commitment. As a society, we acknowledge the need for sex education, but the need for this exclusive approach has drastically changed. To function as healthy individuals, we need to know as much about love as sex, and must add this subjective sphere to the education of our youth and those of all ages.

Sex and sensuality are not fundamental to defining love. There are many love configurations and intensities: mother and infant love; puppy love; adult lovers falling in love; the feelings for parents, siblings and friends; and even the love of ideals such as love of country. Toward such love each individual male and female alike condenses, beginning at birth, numerous emotions, memories, and needs from their intersubjective attachment and intimacy with being loved and loving others. The manifest and hidden meanings of the experience of love at different stages of one’s life give it different expressions and possible responses from others. Because psychic life repeats in the present the motives from the past, many conflicted or unresolved childhood emotions unconsciously seek resolution in adulthood. Sigmund Freud first discovered the outcome of stage-specific childhood developmental tasks of love, which he termed “pre-conditions” to the adult choices that underpin both healthy love and its multiple pathologies. Incidentally, he also observed that without love, people became neurotic and society became chaotic.

That adult love has its origins in infancy and childhood surprises many adults who are unfamiliar with the unconscious mind. This is especially true for those falling in love, where the experience seems individual, unique, and transforming. This uniquely human and intersubjective emotion was first reported in the literature, letters, and poetry of the 12th-century Provincial troubadours. Before that time, love was not valued as spontaneous or equal. Marriage was the work of the church and/or family. Love played no role. Marriages were arranged by men to ensure wealth, status, power, and property. With the Renaissance, the concept and endless possibilities of romantic love blossomed. This set the stage for greater awareness of the complexities of love, as Shakespeare elaborated in “Romeo and Juliet” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The Freudian schema of developmental psychology clarify how internalized mental representations of love relations are determined in an unfolding ontology of love in the first years of life, and how these representations influence subsequent love choices. First is the adult who seeks another “to love,” primarily as a caretaker. This, Freud called “anaclitic love.” Another type of love relationship Freud dubbed “narcissistic love,” or the choice of a lover who represented what one once was or wished to be. A third form of love is “oedipal love,” where a child at the tender age of four to five years seeks the attention of the parent of the opposite sex and feels possessive towards them, often with a sexual intonation. The parent of the same sex is a rival and a competitor. This classic triangle of childhood passion is the basis for later pathological structure in adult romantic attachment, reflecting a need to repeat triangular passion through competition with a rival.

Freud, following Plato, regarded the object of adult love as love refound in the choice of a love object representing the original model of maternal-infant love, often referred to as “dyadic love.” Intense and intimate romantic love is most often a lover dyad. The lived experience of the initial dyad is refound and reenacted in the lover dyad, and includes measurable elements as rhythmic patterns of movement, touch, speech, and timing of gestures. Thus, lovers talk to and touch each other much as their mothers did to them as infants.

This trend in psychoanalytic research demonstrates that adults are sexually and intimately attached to one another based upon primordial lived experiences in the original mother-infant dyad, followed by the triangular oedipal configurations. These are variously internalized, creating the need for many diverse intimate attachments laid down in the brain structure and function. This developmental view of unfolding potentialities represents the interface of mind and brain in the prefigured capacity to love.

THE MANY TWISTS AND TURNS

Observational psychologists, romance writers, and poets share the view that adult love is a dyad, a religion of two. About a couple in love, Freud observed that the boundary between self and other melted away. His insight persists. Passionate romantic love is an intimately co-constructed mutual belief system to satisfy intimacy, sexual desire, and longing for union with the other. Shakespeare observed that the course of love did not run smoothly. Those enthralled by romance and passion do not act with precision or objectivity. They are captured by the beloved, but the next moment are doubting, critical, and dismissive; and yet, just as quickly, seek to recapture the object of love by renegotiating their terms to protect against loss. Passionate love takes an irregular course and otherwise appears foolish, with ridiculous eruptions and misunderstandings.

Love takes many forms. The heat of passionate romantic love soon fades into the afterglow of a more enduring form of love defined as affectionate companionship. Sexual passion and romantic intensity optimally remain a regular feature in the life of a couple, enabling continual reaffirmation and the repair of injuries due to misunderstandings. We also identify sublimated, non-sexual love in religious, familial, and patriotic forms. Infatuation, sometimes a preamble to love, often ends suddenly when the complex fantasies that drive it are refocused on another. Loveless sexuality occurs when a person feels entitled only to sexual gratification, but does not feel worthy of love. Some 15 additional types of love can be identified, including hermaphroditic love, “pygmalion” love, and sadomasochistic love. There are at least as many varieties of problems in love as there are types of love itself.

Commonly encountered love problems originate in derailments of development and/or traumatic experiences in childhood. They disrupt the pathway to love or its preservation. Those who are deprived of an adequate early dyadic experience with a mother or surrogate may be unable to love. Those who were emotionally deprived, over-controlled, or sexually over-stimulated are disturbed by conscious and unconscious fears of new trauma or disappointment; they often cannot remain in love, or can only love fearfully.

Some lovers may be capable only of an endless series of shallow, superficial relationships, and grow weary of “the endless chase.” Others can love only a certain type of person or under special circumstances. A child in the early dyadic phase is intensely preoccupied with his or her mother’s face and seeing it causes pleasure. As adults, some lovers can only be attracted to someone with a certain “look.” During the dyadic sub-phase known as “rapprochement,” at about 18 months, the toddler wanders away from the mother but needs her to be there for “refueling.” If she is unable to respond to this need, the child grows up to be a nervous lover who needs to leave and return, only to leave again and again. When adults relive rapprochement stage departures, labeled then as a “need for space” or “time to find myself,” they may drift into love affairs. The love partner may be subjected to an endless number of “waiting tests,” much like Penelope in The Odyssey.

To be able to fall and remain in love, a person must pass through the earliest stages of separation and individuation and enter the later oedipal phase with a sense of self. Each person also must be able to distinguish clearly separate, outside love objects from himself. Without a secure sense of self and the capacity to distinguish self from others, the sought-after intimacy and merger of romantic love is impossible. Someone with an insecure sense of self will not be able to tolerate the essential paradox of love. We seek the bliss of merger, but also must preserve individuality and autonomy. When an insecure person feels love, he or she may also experience a flare-up of primitive fears, and retreat from the relationship. When the emotional pendulum is forced by their needs for closeness to swing back, this “need-fear” oscillation causes emotional confusion. This may be an impetus for an affair.

The oedipal, triangular stage of development also is a fertile source of later love conflicts. Those who have a sense of guilt over unresolved and incestuous oedipal feelings may engage in impossible or self-defeating and sadomasochistic relationships. Here, the motive is to punish one’s self for irrational guilt because one does not deserve the bliss of true intimacy. This explains the impossible scenarios of a lover engaging in the unhappy pursuit of love with such unavailable people as their priests, therapists, or someone much older. The rivalry and eventual defeat of the oedipal phase may foster an attachment within triangles and a pre-disposition to triangular affairs as a means to eventual triumph—or a compulsion to repeat the original trauma.

Gender differences in the way men and women love also lead to relationship problems that trigger affairs. For women, the experience of love may be more central to their sense of femininity and meaning in life. For men, masculinity and meaning are often first sought through career success and a sense of power, with love delayed until these are achieved. Women are taught to place greater value upon relationships, mutuality, and reciprocity than are men. And men often fear dependency upon women, as if tenderness and closeness would again render them helpless infants under the domination of their mothers. This “symbiosis anxiety” causes some men to separate love from sexuality and view intimacy as a trap.

LOVE TRIANGLES

The Western world has long been fascinated by love triangles. Homer’s Iliad narrates the war caused when Paris abducted Helen, the wife of Menelaus. In the age of chivalry, the prototypic love affairs of knights and their ladies were chaste, as the knight strove to keep his love in the realm of the ideal and preserve fidelity to his king. Later, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina dramatized the acting out of adulterous wishes and the need to transgress social taboos. The fascination with love affairs also has been fueled in recent times by the drama of Princess Diana and the publicized affairs of presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Clinton. Popular films also dramatize love triangles as seen in the Oscar-winning “American Beauty,” with Kevin Spacey. When there is a need to violate convention or defy authority, adultery may be a precondition for a love involvement, rather than a by-product of a love or marriage gone wrong.

In the clinical setting, it is possible to study the underlying dynamics that are only alluded to in novels and film and in the lives of celebrities. Love triangles both express and rework earlier conflicts from the dyadic and triangular phases of development. There appear to be two major types of love triangles, each expressive of different underlying psychological issues. The first is a “split object triangle.” In this form, the person has split his attention between two love objects. The main problem he faces is the division of his time and emotional life between two people. The primary emotion felt is usually guilt.

Split object triangles may derive from many motivations. The split may be necessary in order to fend off the threat of intense intimacy with total dependency upon another person, or insure against the fantasy of loss of love by having a “backup” lover on hand. Sometimes the motivation is dissatisfaction with the spouse, with the disgruntled partner seeking to heal an old wound.

The many vicissitudes of love affairs reflect a fluctuation between dyads and triads. For some, there is the need to rekindle a marriage grown cold by provoking jealousy through an extramarital involvement. After a shattering blow to self-esteem because of a financial, career, or health setback, a person may seek new sources of bolstering and encouragement in a new love interest. For some husbands or wives, the motive for a split object love affair may be what is called a “reverse triangle.” In this scenario, the person is motivated to divide his or her love interests and have a love affair as an attempt to undo the humiliation of once having lost a love struggle to the more powerful rival in the form of the same-sexed parent during the oedipal phase. The lingering resentment at having been a loser compels the person into love affairs to obtain delayed triumph over a substitute rival of the same sex, and force two people to compete over him/her.

Among Freud’s many contributions to the psychology of split love triangles is the concept of “those wrecked by success.” Men and women are vulnerable to feeling guilty over the sexual pleasures and happiness they enjoy in life and in marriage. A good example of this is shown in the film “Shoot the Moon,” where Albert Finney plays a writer who engages in a destructive affair just as he wins a literary prize. His misery wrecks his success. Affairs also may express a person’s need to debase the love object. When men cannot combine sex and love in one relationship, they may split their love according to the “Madonna-whore” complex. As Freud wrote, “Where they love they cannot desire; where they desire they cannot love.”

The second form of love triangle is called a “rivalrous triangle.” From the standpoint of the “other person” in the love triangle, the affair may stem not from a need to split his or her love interests, but from a need to compete with someone for a love object. Some lovers can fall in love only with someone already claimed by another. Erotic longing, competition, and guilt are the major emotions. Rebecca, the heroine of Ibsen’s Rosmerholm,is an example of the mistress who cannot replace the wife out of a sense of oedipal guilt.

Despite all the patterns that emerge, clinicians learn not to be too quick to presume to understand the underlying motivation for an affair, or predict how it will turn out. Unfortunately, most people in affairs tend to rationalize or deny their behavior and are blinded by intense emotion.

Denial and rationalization also operate at a national level, and have blinded our society to the consequences of love gone wrong. We believe there is a connection between the de-linkage of sexual education from broader instruction on relationships, the increasing divorce rate, and other individual and societal problems. Sadly, many people have not had secure experiences with love and intimacy during their formative years. Too many people settle for just sex, and are unsuccessful at achieving love, intimacy, and relationship security.

How then can we reconnect sexuality with love and relatedness? It is not enough to make people aware of their unconscious motivations for self-destruction and affairs. While this is critical on a case-by-case basis, we believe it is time for a shift in American thinking from the “Playboy philosophy” back to “family values.”

To address these pressing issues, it is time to establish a National Commission on Love and Marriage. A first priority would be to make a detailed study both of love relationships and sexuality, much like the work undertaken by the National Commission on Causes and Prevention of Violence. The next step would be to popularize the results of the new National Commission and use them as a basis for revised love and sex education programs. Finally, after a period of time, a new survey of national behavior could be conducted to assess the impact of the new educational programs aimed at improving relationships by linking love and sex.

R. Curtis Bristol (CC ’96), left, and Stefan A. Pasternack (CC ’98) are clinical professors of psychiatry and co-directors of the Advanced Studies Program in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

Return to COSMOS 2001 Table of Contents
Return to COSMOS Journals
Return to COSMOS Home Page