The torments associated with the feeling of love, anchored
in our culture, would seem to be amplified in our time.
It is a psychoanalyst who says it: "The psys do not
like love". And patients, often, confirm. Caroline, 39, in analytic
psychotherapy for two years, remembers the angry look of her therapist when she
told him in full session, with unbridled enthusiasm, to have met "the man
of his life": "He looked at me, eyebrows in the air and wrinkled
forehead, then asked me a series of questions like: what really seduces you at
home? Have you taken the time to speak well together? Etc. It looked like a
worried parent, "laughs the young woman. Although this suspicion was
undoubtedly inspired by this patient's family and emotional story, it seems
generally that psychotherapists have many reasons to be wary of love.
Forcibly painful?
Of this noble sentiment universally hoped for, venerated,
fantasized, they most often see only the throes: poisonous couple installed in
the dependence, obsession towards an inaccessible person, melancholy diving
after a rupture, exacerbation of the feeling of abandonment, inability to leave
an abusive partner, destructive jealousy .... The words about love reported in
session seem to illustrate Freud's thought that "we are never as badly
protected against suffering as when we love". This vision of an inevitably
painful love existed well before the invention of psychoanalysis, as the
philosopher Olivia Gazalé aptly tells us in his essay Je t'aime à la philo
(Editions Robert Laffont). She explores the subtle links between our affective
lives and the thought of a Spinoza or Sartre, and answers in depth questions as
essential as "the disenchantment is it inevitable?" Or "chooses
to be love?".
Son of Ares and Aphrodite
For her, this risk of "love-suffering" is based
first and foremost, in each of us, on a "culture of passionate logic"
that has been dominant for centuries: "In love, we suffer even before know
it, "observes the philosopher. And to invoke the three great founding
myths that haunt our unconscious: Eros, a god of love born of sensuality
(Aphrodite) and war (Ares); the Passion of Christ, which mixes love and
suffering; finally, the secular myth of Tristan and Yseult, which forever seal
in our minds the image of lovers so excited by passion that they die.
The philosopher then joins the psychological approach of
love when it describes the suffering to which it, in its very essence,
constrains us: desire for fusion, lack of the other and jealousy, awareness of
our ontological loneliness .
"Everyono love"e wants t
Dr. Richard Meyer, somatoanalyst and author of the New
Psychological Pathologies (Éditions Dangles), notes daily the durability of
these "symptoms" generated by the love sentiment. He acknowledges,
however, that over the past decade, the desolation of patients in this area
seems to have increased. "Initially, of course, love is the purest and
most beautiful emotional feeling," the practitioner admits. But it tends
to become pathological when we want to register emotions, behaviors in the
reality of the couple ... Then appear the problems of communication, management
of everyday life. Today, everyone wants to love, many have sexually liberated,
but we stumble on the experience of the couple ... And we are quickly
separated! "
As part of a psychotherapy, the way of loving is also a red
thread to clarify a diagnosis, such as "tell me how you like, I'll tell
you who you are": "The narcissistic personalities do not know not
experience it, are unable to empathize, says Dr. Richard Meyer. Borderlines
attract love but do not believe that another can love them; Dependent
personalities accept anything from a loving partner as long as they are kept
... "
To awaken the emotional feeling to make it live already
inside of oneself, like a treasure that one would have to make grow before even
sharing it with another, to learn to really feel the love in his body
(sensations, emotions ... ), is the first step in a therapeutic process that
can be lengthy. "A real work on love can only be done during a
psychoanalysis of several years," says Dr. Richard Meyer. A demanding
exploration, certainly, but that would be worth it. For the psychoanalyst, love
"is the new frontier of the modern citizen, and, in our society of control
and control, as a last grace that still allows us to abandon ourselves".
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