WHAT IS LOVE??2

Hi friends..

From a psychoanalytic point of view, love is the investment in, and ability to be loved by, another without experiencing this love as a subjective threat, such as that represented by the Thing (das Ding) which Freud described in the Project of 1895. For psychoanalysis the genesis of the love investment must be taken into consideration and the very different modalities through which it manifests itself must be identified.

It is important to differentiate love from infatuation or being in love (Verliebtheit), which is associated with a pathological feeling (Leidenschaft): "That the state of being in love (Verliebtheit) manifests itself abnormally can be explained by the fact that other amorous states outside the analytic cure resemble abnormal rather than normal psychic phenomena" (1915a). Being in love is essentially marked by an overestimation of the love object and a devaluation of the self that resembles the condition of melancholia (1921c).

The genesis of love begins with the oral relation of the infant's mouth and the mother's breast: "The picture of the child at the mother's breast has become the model of all sexual relations" (1905d). Also, in choosing an object later in life, the child will attempt "to reestablish this lost happiness" (1905d). But this happiness, even if it is marked by this choice of a primary infantile object, must later reunite and conjoin two libidinal currents, the tender current arising from infantile cathexis and the sensual current that appears during puberty, "The man will leave his mother and father—as the Bible indicates—and will follow his wife—tenderness and sensuality are therefore reunited" (1912d). This can only occur through the loss of the infantile object choice: "The individual human must devote himself to the difficult task of separating from his parents," as Freud indicated in the twenty-first of the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-1917a [1915-16]). Yet, in "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love" (1912d), Freud recalls the difficulty of loving and the numerous splits that remain: "When they love, they do not desire, and when they desire, they cannot love."

In "Instincts and their Vicissitudes" (1915c), he examines the different splits and oppositions in which love plays a role; these are: loving/hating, loving/being loved, and loving and hating together in opposition to the state of indifference. The pair loving/hating is related to the pleasure/unpleasure polarity; the ego interjects pleasure and expels unpleasure, which is transformed into the opposition ego-pleasure/exterior world-unpleasure. Thus, hatred and the rejection of the exterior world emanate from the narcissistic ego. The pair loving/being loved originates in the reversal of an impulse into its opposite, of activity into passivity, and corresponds to the narcissism of self-love. The pair love/indifference is associated with the polarity ego/exterior world. We love the "object that dispenses pleasure" and we repeat "the original flight before the exterior world" (1926d) in the face of an object that does not dispense pleasure. In this way the intellectual economy of love is profoundly affected by these different forms of ambivalence.

WHAT IS LOVE??

Hi all..........
In Greek thought, eros connotes desire, longing, disequilibrium, and is generally sexual in nature. However, in Plato (especially the Symposium and Phaedrus), although eros may start with a particular person as its object, it soon becomes transferred from the particular person to their beauty (a characteristic that in principle another person could possess to the same or a greater degree), and finally it gravitates towards immaterial objects such as the form of beauty itself. The desire for immaterial beauty is a kind of recollection of the vision of forms (such as those of justice, wisdom, and knowledge) that the soul was able to perceive on the ‘plains of truth’ in its previous life. Bodily beauty induces remembrance of this state, anamnesis, and enables the soul to begin to climb the ladder back to spiritual truth. The philosopher, the poet, the lover, and the follower of the muses (or creative artist) are all inspired by the divine power of eros, which dictates the passionate pursuit of the truly real, pure intellectual light, through beauty, wisdom, and the arts of the muses. It is not often recorded how persons who believe themselves to be beloved are supposed to react to these fleshless rivals, although Dante's Beatrice is the principal example of a beloved person both initiating and then conducting a spiritual ascent of this kind. Unfortunately, however, before conducting Dante up to the highest circles of Paradise, she has to be dead. The idea of beauty as the visible trigger of a spiritual ascent was transmitted to the medieval world through Neoplatonism, and especially the City of God of Augustine.

Philia in Greek thought is more akin to friendship, and includes fondness and desire for the good of another. In Aristotle, quite stringent conditions are required for reciprocal and recognized philia: familiarity, virtue, and equality. Agapē is the Christian addition to the forms of affection here recognized, and suggests a less focused, universal benevolence that pays little or no regard to reciprocity.