Is love a psychic disorder?

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".