A Natural History of Love

by Diane Ackerman

  For Proust, human love is not a cameo of divine love. Rather, it is a conscious, deeply creative act of communion with the beloved, reaching into and through that person to all of life. As he says, “The fact is that the person counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions, of agonies which similar mishaps have made us feel in the past in connexion with her …” Each time the narrator looks at Albertine, he summons his full powers of taste, smell, and touch, using her as the vehicle of his senses. She is merely “like a stone round which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense structure which rose above the plane of my heart.” Albertine becomes a means to extend himself, a magnifying lens that widens and refines his sensitivity. We do not love people for themselves, or objectively; quite the contrary, “we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears … they are only a vast and vague place in which our affections take root…. It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.” It is only because we need people in order to feel love that we fall in love with people.

  For that matter, the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. That love was genuine, since I subordinated everything else to seeing them, keeping them for myself alone, and would weep aloud if, one evening, I had waited for them in vain. But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it. And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the kindness of these women was entirely distinct. As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves, I have lived them, I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities. It is they whose good will is necessary to us, with whom we seek to establish contact without finding any positive pleasure in it. The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses.

  But love is also a titillating bout of agreed-upon suffering. If love requires difficulties to thrive, and torment is its dynamo, how could it be otherwise? “Love is a reciprocal torture,” Proust concludes. Proustian lovers tend to be tragically insecure, clinging and masochistic, as Proust was himself. They don’t start a love affair to avoid suffering; a state of privileged suffering is what they seek. It’s what we all seek, Proust says, because it makes shamans of us, allowing us to peer into life’s sacred and hidden heart.

  Insecure about how likable he really was, Proust used to overtip waiters, give embarrassingly large presents to friends, and generally try to buy affection and win acceptance from people. He did it with such wit, intelligence, and style that people thoroughly enjoyed his company; but love was another matter. His parents kept telling him that he was “weak-willed” for not overcoming his illness and taking a serious job. They thought this tactic of severe criticism would inspire him to prove them wrong, but it had the opposite effect—in time he simply came to believe what he was told. Was it his low self-esteem that caused him to be such a snob? One of his biographers, Ronald Hayman, thinks so:

  If snobbery is defined as addiction to the pleasure of associating with an elite, Proust was undeniably a snob. His desperate need for love made it impossible for him not to envy the aristocrats whose birth ensured them a place at the centre of other people’s attention and admiration.

  A related compulsion was

  the lifelong habit of trying to buy good will. Even when making love or when having love made to him, he couldn’t believe he was lovable.

  So, as he aged, to play it safe, he forged

  liaisons with footmen, waiters, and male secretaries, but in his friendships with young men who were socially his equals or superiors, jealousy was integral to the pleasure, even when sexual intimacy wasn’t integral to the friendship.

  These were useful emotions for a novelist. “Even while living it,” Hayman points out, “Proust was developing his possessive jealousy into a work of art.”

  In later years he enjoyed frequenting a brothel, where his habits were jotted down in a notebook by one of the young men who worked there. He preferred for the man to stand naked beside the bed and masturbate. Watching him, Proust would also masturbate. If Proust had trouble reaching a climax, the man was obliged to bring in two savage rats in cages, and “Immediately the two starving animals threw themselves at each other, emitting heart-rending cries and tearing at each other with their claws and teeth.” Proust once told André Gide about this sexual peculiarity of his, explaining it simply as his sometimes needing intense sensations to achieve orgasm, including watching warring rats. In any case, repeatedly wounded by rejection, he grew to prefer his sex partners anonymous and emotionally unappetizing, who made no demands on his heart. Otherwise he knew he’d be launched into a stratosphere of possessive jealousy, where the air was thin and unbreathable. Through a lifetime of illness and facing an early death, believing that his masturbation would shorten his life even if his asthma didn’t, lamenting the loss of his mother and others he loved, he understandably wondered if time was irrevocably lost.

  Proust’s outlook on love is so negative and masochistic he finally concludes that only love of one’s art is worth the heart-wrenching effort, and it was in this way, in the closing years of his life, that he tried to sublimate his doting and insatiable passion. No doubt he would have agreed with Baudelaire’s definition of love as “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” But he replayed love voluptuously in his mind, caressed the memories with his pen.

  Although he claimed that Remembrance was not autobiographical, most scholars believe it is, and that the narrator’s entanglements with Albertine echo Proust’s doings with his lover, Alfred Agostinelli, for whom he bought not a Rolls-Royce but an airplane. It was one of the first, and Alfred died in it, spinning into the Mediterranean where he drowned, which gave him the dubious honor of being one of the first people to die in an airplane crash.

  Despite Proust’s pessimism, he contributed profoundly to our understanding of the psychology of love. He traced the patterns of relationships, and showed how each fresh heartache resonates with past ones, making our “suffering somehow contemporaneous with all the epochs in our life in which we have suffered.” We long to be loved in earnest, he argued. Otherwise we are as alone in life as if we were walking upon an empty beach. Otherwise the world would seem as flat as a postage stamp. Once the beloved is gone, through death or abandonment, grief fills all the seams of one’s life. But ultimately, if we wait long enough, grief will become oblivion. How should one wait? It’s best to develop a passion for the world itself, a revolving rapture that is both poetic and scientific. Natural and manmade objects can anchor one to the world, where we seem to have so little mooring. We enter into them, pathically, lovingly, and grow sturdier. Indeed, one can lose one’s self and become an Everyman, an artist who is powerful and keen-eyed and full of joy. Waiting for love to emerge, waiting to rendezvous with a lover, waiting for the lover to feel the same love in return, waiting jealously when the lover is out of one’s sight, waiting for the ex-lover one hopes will reappear. For Proust, each stage of love bridges time and is colored by a sensuality all its own, especially the final stage—waiting through grie
f for oblivion—which is perhaps the most welcome of all, since it restores one’s sanity until the next emotional uprising. As Virgil wrote in the Eclogues, “Time bears away all things, even the heart.”

  *The accepted English translation of the title (which Proust hated) comes from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A more accurate translation would be something like: In Search of Lost Time, but even that fails to catch the subtleties of the original: À la recherche du temps perdu, which implies a sense of study and capture.

  *Freud thought it was a carryover from the infant’s wishing to merge with its mother, or, indeed, a memory of being one with its mother in the womb.

  FREUD: THE ORIGINS OF DESIRE

  A few years ago, a neighbor of mine was summoned to a frightening scene. Jack, a Presbyterian minister and one of the founders of Suicide Prevention and Crisis Service, learned that a man was holding a loaded gun on his family, threatening to kill them and himself and anyone else who got in the way. Jack hurried into the man’s house, sat down beside him, and said quietly: “Tell me your story.” Ten hours later, the man gave him the gun. The truth buried in this drama gets to the very heart of Freudian thought: each of us has a story, each of us has a loaded gun that we aim at ourselves. After hours, or years, of guided talking, the story can at last be told in its fullness, and the gun can be laid down.

  Freud was trying to map the war zones of the heart, where air-raid sirens wail and bombs blast, and furtive souls scurry around in the half-light, frantically searching for a way back home, to where loving parents wait with food and open arms. In a world filled with psychological land mines, he thought, any step might trigger a memory that explodes one’s self-esteem, and a small trip in the psychic rubble may lead to badly sprained emotions. We belong to our past, we are its slave and pet, though the leash is invisible.

  But we also belong to our time. “The key to the period,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the era he and Freud shared, “seemed to be that the mind had become aware of itself…. The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anaromizing of motives.” Freud first was drawn to medicine and actual knives, but in time he became more and more fascinated by the workings of the mind and the scalpel of persistent talk. Although he was confident in his discoveries relating to dreams, sexuality, and neurosis, he was less comfortable delving into love. “I do not think,” he wrote to Jung, “that our psychoanalytic flag ought to be raised over the territory of normal love.”

  But he did tackle the problem, and his intuitions sparked a world of strong opinions. Before Freud, people thought of love as something that evolved at puberty, when the body busily roused itself for courtship and mating. Freud searched for clues to love in the unexpected—even taboo—reaches of early childhood. At once provocative, influential, and shocking, much of his theorizing was based on the idea of infantile sexuality. He didn’t mean that babies want to have sexual intercourse, but that they feel pleasure in all their sexual zones, especially around the mouth and anus. The height of infantile sexuality occurs in what he called the Oedipus complex, when a baby longs for one of the parents and wishes to murder the other, who is seen as a rival. In a knot of ambiguity, the baby loves both parents and hates both parents, and its heterosexual and homosexual instincts clash. A helpful amnesia takes over later in childhood, and the child represses its sexual feelings. When the child reaches adolescence and begins looking for a nonincestuous love partner, it unconsciously chooses one that reminds it of the parent with whom it was so smitten, the first love of its life. This isn’t a conscious awareness, or it would be short-circuited by the incest taboo. Adult lovers, indulging in kisses, caresses, oral sex, and other forms of foreplay, Freud saw as recapturing the pleasure of nursing at Mother’s breast. As he wrote in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

  At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that the infant loses that object, just at that time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual instinct then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it.

  If one extends Freud’s image, from Mother’s breast to many of her attributes, then his devastating conclusion that “all finding is a refinding” makes fuller sense in terms of current psychoanalytic thinking. This could not be more Platonic, or more Proustian. Love is a remembrance of things past, a refinding of lost happiness. According to Freud, in order to love freely and unneurotically one must retain a strong attachment to one’s parents, but cast one’s net elsewhere when it comes to passionate love. If this doesn’t happen, it is difficult to focus all of one’s desire on a romantic partner, and neurosis ensues. Freud wrote epigrammatically of such people: “Where they love they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love.” They may become obsessive about unobtainable people who don’t return their love, or they may feel the need to humiliate and debase a sexual partner. Why does this happen? Freud argued that an overly (or overtly) seductive parent could awaken a child too early to genital sexuality, as a result of which the child becomes completely fixated on that parent. Unable to loosen its grasp on the parent, it cannot find someone else to love. Freud saw problems at both extremes—excessive sexuality leading to perversion; repressed sexuality leading to neurosis. Some people can become aroused only by unusual love partners—men in uniform, much older women, other men’s wives, for example—and Freud explains such behavior as a compulsive desire for reunion with one’s father or mother. Such a specific, rigid search leaves no room for free will. One carries an old, worn family photograph in one’s unconscious, and is attracted only to people who resemble that yellowing image.

  This notion—that we have a preconceived image of the person we mean to love—also comes from Plato, who said that there are perfect universal forms, and humans are constantly searching for facsimiles of those forms. Just as airplane designers first build prototypes, people spend their lives building and rebuilding relationships according to one set of blueprints. But can we find peace and satisfaction loving what are, essentially, surrogates? In Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), a brooding, disillusioned Freud thinks not. Freud’s idea of “refinding” has spoken to many people, as have Plato’s ideal forms. There is something deeply human about the need to believe in landmarks, ancient figures, and fundamental laws and attachments.

  When people fall in love, Freud said, they regress to a childish state and idealize their partner in much the same way they once idealized their parents. Their self-esteem lies in the other’s hands. If the love is returned, they feel like the adored child again, majestic, prized, and reassured; and they experience the head-over-heels, swept-away, cloud-nine bliss of love. The nature of this theory is essentially economic—the lovers transfer self-worth to the person they love, who is seen as an ideal self. The beloved, in turn, feels richer, nobler, finer.

  Some of Freud’s best ideas were not wholly original. Nietzsche had already written that “Every man keeps in himself an image of the woman deriving from that of his mother, and according to the image he will be prone to respect or despise women.” Schopenhauer had written of the symbolic relationship between the womb and death. Indeed, the Elizabethans often used the euphemism “to die” to mean feeling sexual pleasure. The ultimate reunion with one’s mother would have to carry one back to the perfect safety of the womb, which would mean not yet being born. Plato had written about prototypes, sublimation, resistance, and merging. Many philosophers and poets had written about the meaning of dreams. But it took Freud to amplify such ideas, explain
their underlying mechanisms, draw general conclusions, and devise a workable therapy based on them. Freud was also a ruthless analyzer of his own past and motives. (Allowing the one to stand for the many, the part to imply the whole, was also an ancient Greek idea.) His theories were based on sometimes painful personal experience, and delivered in the context of nineteenth-century values about women, and the fin-de-siècle revolution in culture and ideas that lasted for about twenty years into the twentieth century. A self-proclaimed philistine when it came to the talents of Picasso, Braque, Schiele, and the many other cubists and expressionists popular in the Vienna of his day, he was nonetheless working in a parallel vein, dealing with interlocking planes of experience, and the warping and distorting of images to better express one’s emotional state and the role people play in one’s life. Relativity theory had begun to subtly influence novelists like Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy, linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf, and a host of poets and painters, philosophers and theoreticians. Its verdict, that perception was relative, and the world freshly minted by each pair of eyes, began seeping throughout society and contributed to Freud’s deterministic outlook. Above all, he believed in chance and choice. The world was full of accidents; the mind was not.