A Psychologist Looks at Love
By Theodor Reik
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About this ebook
Reik presents a forceful criticism of traditional Freudian theory in this book. Freud had believed that love is always based on some form of sexual desire. Reik argues, to the contrary, that love and lust are distinct motivational forces.
Theodor Reik
Viennese-born psychoanalyst Theodor Reik became Sigmund Freud's pupil in 1910, completed the first doctor's dissertation on psychoanalysis in 1911, and received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Vienna in 1912. He lectured at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin and at The Hague. He came to the United States in 1938 and became an American citizen. Reik's lack of medical training led him to found the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in 1948, which accepts lay analysts for membership and has programs for their training. His Listening with the Third Ear (1948) is a stimulating discussion of Freud's development of psychoanalysis and describes in great detail his own cases during 37 years of active practice. Reik's books show great erudition and are written with literary skill; they sparkle "with insights and with witty profundities." He may properly be regarded as "the founding father of archaeological psychoanalysis," a branch of depth psychology dedicated to the probing of archaeological data from psychoanalytic viewpoints.
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A Psychologist Looks at Love - Theodor Reik
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FIRST PART
Love or Whatever It Is
Love or Whatever It Is
LOVE IS ONE of the most overworked words in our vocabulary. There is hardly a field of human activity in which the word is not worked to death. It is not restricted to expressing an emotion between the sexes, but also expresses the emotion between members of a family. It signifies the feeling for your neighbor, for your friend, and even for your foe, for the whole of mankind, for the home, social or racial group, nation, for all that is beautiful and good, and for God Himself. It is almost incredible that it can be equal to its many tasks. L’amour
in French comedies is obviously not the same as love
in the Holy Scripture.
Its diversity of meaning, its adaptability and its capability of quick change are astonishing. It is used to describe the infatuation of a boy and girl, and at the same time the noblest and most spiritualized aims of men. The word is used in psychology and philosophy, in religion, ethics, and education, in social fields of all kinds. It is indispensable wherever men live together. But time tells on it and it shows all the signs of the wear and tear to which it has been subjected.
The subject which is most talked and written about remains a mystery. It is experienced every hour everywhere on this globe and it is still unknown. That everybody has experienced it does not make its understanding easier. What happens every day often stays unknown, while rare events and extraordinary experiences disclose their nature more quickly. My contention at the outset of this book, is that love is an unknown psychical power, its origin not yet discovered, and its character not yet understood. If it is true that science is the topography of ignorance, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, then the region of love is a vast white spot on the map.
There is no doubt as to which science is qualified to give us the desired information and insight, but psychology seems to be extremely reticent on the subject. Why is that? Are the psychologists unwilling or unable to give the necessary knowledge? Can psychologists not tell us of what kind this emotion is, what is its nature, and what determines its power? Is the subject too vague, too elusive and beyond the reach of description? Love is perhaps intangible, but the incessant search and research of intangibles is one of the essential tasks of the new psychology. Where facts and figures are not available there lie the most important problems which psychology has to face.
Has psychology to quit the field and hand it back to philosophers and poets and prophets, to Christ and St. Paul, to Plato and Schopenhauer, to Shakespeare and Goethe? Or do psychologists think that the subject is not worthy of their attention? That is impossible. We certainly know that we cannot understand the hidden impulses of human existence until we have solved this problem. Even if we consider love as an illusion, is it not our task to examine illusions, to find out what they are and what are their origins and their dynamics? Psychologists discuss sex very fully nowadays, but there is a conspiracy of silence about love. They avoid the subject, they seem to be embarrassed whenever it is mentioned. Nevertheless I do not believe that there is a taboo on this particular theme among psychologists. If they keep us in the dark about the genesis and character of love it must be because they are in the dark themselves.
What is this thing called love? Bizet’s Carmen declares that its a gypsy’s child.
L’amour est l’enfant de Bohème, il n’a jamais connu de loi.
If there were no rhyme nor reason in love it could not be the object of scientific research. But is it so? There must be a method even in this madness. Love can as little escape the laws of psychology as a table can break away from the law of gravitation and float up to the ceiling. Many phenomena of a seemingly mysterious nature have become understandable when once their concealed laws have been discovered. We have come to understand the character of the strangest ideas of the insane, the secrets of hysterical and obsessional thoughts and actions, the mysteries of religions long dead, the habits and customs of primitive Australian tribes. And yet psychology is unable to discover the origin and nature of an experience which you and I and all men know. Must love remain a problem child of science and a stranger within the gates of psychology?
I assert that the last serious book which penetrated this secret domain was De l’amour by Stendhal. It was written one hundred and eighteen years ago—which is a long time when you consider the psychological import of the subject. Since then nothing of real value, revealing the origin and nature of love, has been brought home from the numerous voyages of discovery undertaken.
But Freud? Did not psychoanalysis deal fully and penetratingly with love? It did not. It dealt with sex, but that is something quite different. Freud’s great contribution to our knowledge is the discovery of the laws determining psychical processes, the dynamics of unconscious thoughts and impulses, and the psychological method which enables us to discover what happens in the depth of the human mind. Freud’s libido theory is a magnificent mistake. There are many such fruitful and productive mistakes in science and life, as there is an abundance of sterile truths. Columbus was mistaken in thinking he had discovered a new route to the Indies and he found America. He believed until his death that the former was the deed for which posterity would be grateful to him.
Later research leads to a revaluation and rebuilding of most theoretical and practical parts of the analytical doctrine. This new development differs from psychoanalysis as a colony differs from its mother-country, as Australia from England for instance. It is not psychoanalysis with a difference, but a different kind of psychoanalysis. An essay now in preparation will indicate the nature of this new scientific development in order to differentiate and separate this newly created form from the old, as well as from other schools of thought. I call it Neo-Psychoanalysis. My last two or three books mark the transition from the old shape of depth-psychology to the new one. This book is the first that shows Neo-Psychoanalysis in the making. It is not accidental that it attempts to deal with the problem of love and to furnish a new concept of it.
Love and Sex Are Different
BEFORE DISCUSSING Freud’s view about love I must correct a mistake that is quite common in analytical circles. It should be remembered that his opinion about the subject did not remain the same during forty years of psychoanalysis. There was a remarkable change in his view. At the beginning it was simple and consistent. At that time it was presupposed, although never explicitly formulated, that love was identical with sex. Freud then spoke of the love object when he meant sexual object, and of love choice when he meant choice of the sexual partner. He came from the study of medicine and he used the expression libido in the original sense of the energy of the sex urge. He assumed, so to speak, that this urge includes affection as well as attraction. I cannot state when and under what influences he passed on to an intentional enlargement of these two terms. Later on he explained and defended his new use of the words frequently; most clearly in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He states there that libido is the quantitative expression for the energy of all those tendencies which we sum up as love. Thus the pith of what is called love, is love between the sexes. Freud does not distinguish between this love and that of parents and children, of friends, or of charity.
The justification for this is that all of these tendencies are the expression of the same instincts whose aim is sexual union between the sexes. They have merely been diverted from their sexual goal, or inhibited in reaching it, but have kept enough of their original substance to make their identity easily recognizable. Psychoanalysis aroused a storm of indignation by its enlarged concept of love, although it did not create anything new thereby. The Eros of Plato is exactly the same as the libido, says Freud, and so is the power of love which Paul the Apostle praised in his famous epistle to the Corinthians. These love tendencies are in psychoanalysis called sexual instincts, "a potiori and on account of their origin." Freud then adds pointedly:¹ The majority of cultured people felt this terminology an insult and found revenge by hurling the epithet of ‘pansexualism’ at, and blaming it on, psychoanalysis. The person who considers sex to be a shameful and humiliating aspect of human nature is always free to make use of the more distinguished expressions of eros or erotics. I could have done so myself from the start and spared myself much opposition. But I don’t like to make concessions which seem to me to show a lack of courage. You don’t know where such a road may lead. At first it is only in words, but in the end you have made concessions in the subject matter itself.
In another passage of the same work Freud repeats that the tender feelings which we call love are turned aside from their original sexual aims but keep some of them even then. Even the person who is affectionate, the friend, the admirer, wants the physical nearness and sight of the object loved, only in the sense in which Paul the Apostle uses the term. What we generally call love is a synthesis of those aim-inhibited tendencies and the sexual ones, a coexistence of direct and indirect sexual tendencies. Aim-inhibited love, Freud never tires of emphasizing, was originally utterly sensual love and is the same still in the unconscious life of men.² Even when those love tendencies are in contrast to the purely sexual ones, it remains clear that their descent can be traced back to sex.
Later on Freud built the great hypothesis of Eros which really has the same meaning as Plato’s idea, but is expressed in biological terms: Eros is the great power that creates life, keeps united that which is separated, and secures its renewal against the powers of destruction. At about the same time that Freud developed this concept he wrote in answer to a French magazine asking for his view on love beyond the realm of sex the following:³ Up to the present I have not found the courage to make any broad statements on the essence of love and I think that our knowledge is not sufficient to do so.
He never found the courage, and at the end of his life confessed, We really know very little about love.
I grew up with this view, and I grew out of it. My critical estimate of Freud’s opinion is expressed in his own words, which I have just quoted. At first it is only in words, but in the end you have to make concessions in the subject matter itself.
Freud did not deny, indeed he emphasized, the fact that he extended the meaning of the word sex. He considered this the first great step in the foundation of his theory of instincts. In a paper on Wild Psychoanalysis Freud reproaches a physician who, in treating a neurotic widow recommended a lover to her as a cure. This colleague was especially criticized, by Freud for misunderstanding the teachings of psychoanalysis and for thinking that sex meant merely sex in the usual sense. The idea of sex,
says Freud in this connection,⁴ contains in psychoanalysis much more. It surpasses the current meaning on both sides. This extension is justified genetically. We include in ‘sex life’ all activities and tender feelings which originated in the primitive sexual drives, also those impulses when they were subjected to an inhibition from their original sexual aim, or when they have exchanged this aim for another one, no longer sexual. Thus we prefer to speak of psychosexuality, emphasizing the fact that the psychical factor of sex life should not be neglected nor misunderstood. We use the word in the same extended sense as the German language uses the word ‘lieben’ (love).
The physician stands corrected and justifiably so, but is Freud innocent? Is not he too responsible for the mistake or misjudgment? The young physician was wrong, but only because the word sex means one thing to Freud and something else to the man in the street or to the average physician in his consulting room. It is my conviction, although I cannot prove it, that at first Freud used the word sex unpretentiously and without premeditation. There was of course the idea that a primitive, sexual urge is the origin of love, but this was a biological prejudice rather than a psychological insight.
Then he met the moralistic resistance of his opponents and the pretensions of those who did not want to acknowledge the fact that sex is important. But another fact appeared to him very clearly, one much more serious, and gained by psychological insight and experience. There is not only sex. There is also love, which is as important—at least in human relationship. Now he had to prove to himself and to the world that love is only sex turned away from the original sexual aim, an appendage of sex.
From that time on, every critic appeared to him a moral hypocrite. Every honest and serious judgment was considered a resistance.
What had been taken for granted before, now had to be argued about. What had appeared obvious to him, now had to be very carefully made clear. The essence of love was of course sex. At first the identity of both seemed to be a fact. Now that identity had to be manufactured. Yet in spite of all assurances there remained the uncertainty as to whether these two really belonged together, an uncertainty that went deep down, leading at last to the concept of Eros on the one side and on the other to his admission, We really know very little about love,
which came late in his life.
Superficially regarded: is the name for the idea appropriate? More deeply seen, the question is whether the idea itself, which this name has been chosen to express, is correct. Freud repeatedly stresses the fact that he extends the meaning of the word sex to include affection, friendship, love. Is he justified in using the word this way? I think this use of the word is neither just nor justifiable. The word sex has always meant the urges and activities that spring from the biological need to release a particular tension in the organism, an instinct common to men and beasts. The word libido was applied long before Freud, but only to express the energy of this instinctual need. Freud stretched the significance of both words so that they are overextended.
Is it really due to a general hypocrisy that people reject the term sex in its meaning of friendship, love, affection, or is it that they sense the fact that sex and love are different? Is it really only prudishness that leads them to reject the theory of the identity of these two needs? Or is it not rather the vague but profound feeling that the assumption of such an essential identity is wrong? I surmise that they feel somewhere that the thought is not conformable to the facts. I do not shrink from calling a spade a spade, but I am reluctant to call a rake a spade, even if they stand side by side in the same barn. Freud does just that. It sounds like one of those eccentrics whom Alice encounters on the other side of the looking glass. When I use a word,
says Humpty Dumpty, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.
But Alice is somewhat skeptical. She replies, The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.
Exactly! That is the question here.
Freud has said that he uses the word sex with the same meaning that Plato used the word Eros. It can be proved that this is not so, and even if it were it would be wrong. If sex were used in this sense it would not have been necessary to conceive the idea of Eros as Freud did later on, and to differentiate it from sex. In a paper written about a year before his death (the summer of 1938) Freud said:⁵ The best we know about Eros, thus also about its component the libido, is obtained by the study of the sex function which coincides in the current conception, although not in our theory, with the Eros.
Thus Eros is not identical with sex, even in Freud’s later view. It dawned upon him late in his life, although he never recognized and clearly acknowledged it, that love is a psychical power in its own right.
But even if Freud had used the word sex with the same meaning as Plato, would it therefore be more justifiable? Plato was a philosopher. Freud was a scientist. We make allowances for Plato who lived twenty-three hundred years ago which we are not willing to make for a psychologist of our own day. The one wanted to solve the riddles of the universe in a broad, metaphysical speculation, while the other wanted to solve very definite, psychological problems in a scientific manner. When an ancient Greek philosopher speculates about the nature of a substance, it is very different from the inquiry made by a modern chemist about the same substance. In Plato’s grandiose and beautiful speculations, Eros is in its place; but it cannot have the same place when identified with the sex urge in a modern analysis of psychical processes endeavoring to give a scientific picture of what goes on in the deepest region of the human mind. What Plato thought and said is different in its meaning from that which a modern psychologist thinks and says. The one sees in visions and describes images. The other sees analytically and in detail, and describes psychical facts. To sum up: the theory of Freud that sex and love are of the same substance is not only founded on a preconceived idea; it is as fanciful as any poetical concept of love, but more fanciful and less poetic. Simply calling love aim-inhibited sex does not make it sex.
I believe that sex and love are different in origin and nature and I shall endeavor to prove it in this book as far as psychological statements of this kind can be proved—which is very far.
What Freud called sex in the enlarged sense is an alloy of metals of very differing natures and values. Let me here make the provisional statement that it is a mixture of the biological sexual need, of certain ego-drives, and of the yet unknown substance, love. In another book which I am preparing, I shall try to demonstrate the nature of the crude sex drive and how love entered its realm; and which psychological and social conditions have to be fulfilled, in order that sex, the ego-drives and the youngest need, of loving, can meet and melt. I shall restrict myself here to one region, but first the lines of demarcation must be drawn.
Freud’s concept of love as sex which has been arrested or diverted from its aim, but which is essentially the same as the crude sexual desire, gives us the impression that here is a homogeneous material, that love and sex are of the same kind. Freud’s theory here amounts to a decisive retrogression when compared with Stendhal’s, which already distinguishes various kinds of love between the sexes. These he called passion, sympathy-love, sensual-love, vanity-love. This part of Freud’s theory constitutes one of the few occasions on which he is neither original nor imaginative. The identity of love and sex had already been stated, from Plato to Schopenhauer, from the ancient philosophers to the psychologists of our own day. This identification has been especially stressed in our own time not merely under the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis, but because of an increasing reluctance, I suppose, to admit that no one knows what else love can be than sex. If no one can prove its origin and nature, you must consider love an unknown element, an X.
But is not the view of both ancient and modern psychologists that love is somehow a changed form of sex—sex in disguise, say—justified? Does not every passion of a young couple, every infatuation, bear witness to the fact? No. The most convincing cases only prove that sex and love are frequently united and directed to the same object. We are accustomed to associate love and sex in our thoughts, but that does not demonstrate their identity. It proves only that they are often found together, that they exist together, that they often coincide; but coincidence is not evidence of identity. Two emotions can be co-mingled so intimately that they are felt as one, but that does not make them one nor does it bring about the disappearance of their specific qualities.
Whisky is usually taken with soda, but the mixture of the two does not change whisky into soda nor soda into whisky. Some people are incapable of imagining soda without whisky, but even they will not deny that both substances have an independent existence, different characters and tastes. Whisky can be enjoyed without soda and soda can be poured into quite a number of different liquids. All kinds of mixtures of both are possible. It is the same with love and sex. There exist different kinds of proportions of both in their fusion. (It is a pity that we are never asked to say when.
) A confusion between whisky and soda is unlikely, except of course when you have already had too much of them. Likewise it is possible to confuse love and sex in a state of intense infatuation. What astonishes me is that such a mistake is possible in the sober spirit of scientific research.
It seems that there is no doubt amongst psychoanalysts that there is sex without love, sex straight.
What they vehemently deny is that there can be love without sex. Their view has never been disproved. It is the same as assuming that a delinquent is guilty until he is proved innocent. No doubt there is a communication between love and sex, a connecting link, as everyday experience shows. The gulf between them is spanned by an arch or bridge, but I believe that there are two separate domains, which must be distinguished.
¹ Civilization and Its Discontents.
² Compare many passages in Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Contributions to the Psychology of Love-Life and so on.
³ Published in my book From Thirty Years With Freud, 1940.
⁴ Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
⁵ Abriss der Psychoanalyse
in Schriften aus dem Nachlass, London, 1941.
Quite a Few Differences
WE RETURN TO Freud’s assumption that sex includes love, tenderness, charity, and sympathy. This assumption takes in a lot of territory in the psychoanalytical view. To say that love is aim-inhibited sex is a sweeping statement; indeed it sweeps the truth away. What superficially appears to be of the same kind shows profound differences upon finer analysis. The situation can be compared with that of chemists who for a long time thought a certain substance to be homogeneous, until a new examination showed this not to be so. The substance turned out to be a mixture of two different substances, a fusion of very dissimilar components.
I choose a very simple instance: our common table salt. The example is not at all inappropriate.
Was not salt considered a precious and sacred substance through the ages? It was the symbol of friendship, loyalty and affection. The Arabs say, There is salt between us,
when they mean an affectionate and loyal friendship. The covenant of salt
which you find in the Bible was recognized as full of sacredness and deep meaning. For almost two thousand years salt was considered a coherent and homogeneous substance. We know now that it is chemically a mixture of sodium and chloride. Any high-school pupil today knows that these two compounds are different, and he would be able to demonstrate to you that salt is a fusion of both. He also knows that these two