All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Within the annals of madness, love has long played its disreputable part. The first register of precipitating causes of lunacy in London’s great public asylum, Bethlem, ranks love high on its list. Love gone awry, hopes crushed in rejection by parental prohibition or by the appearance of a successful rival, can tumble the lover into a state of delirium or depression akin to mourning. A beloved has effectively died, but won’t die in us. In this state, suicide or its attempt is not infrequent. Back in the 1790s, the young Charles Lamb checked himself into a madhouse after an early love went awry. Arguably, his sister Mary was precipitated into madness when Charles’s affections left her. Goethe’s Werther commits suicide when it is clear that his beloved, Charlotte, can’t return his passion. A Europe-wide bestseller, based on an early unrequited passion of its author’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther precipitated copycat suicides in significant number. Even the courageous and redoubtable Mary Wollstonecraft attempted suicide when it became clear that her lover Gilbert Imlay, father of her first child, had rejected her.

  It is interesting to note that the tumultuous passions championed by the Romantic movement and its Sturm und Drang German precursor–passions arguably amplified in France by the Revolutionary decade–more or less coincided with the origins of psychiatry, or ‘alienism’. The French physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol ranked passion both as cause and symptom of madness. His distinguishing diagnosis of monomania mimics the obsessiveness of passionate love: a fixed unshakeable idea dominates the sufferer.

  Freud’s patients, too, fell ill of love, internalizing slights, glances, real or imagined seductions, and playing out conflicts spurred by love in neuroses or bodily symptoms–those coughs, loss of voice, limps, even paralyses, which went under the name of hysteria. The early-twentieth-century psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault gave his name to a syndrome of love gone awry: the journey of erotomania, a parody of love lived out in a shadowy fantasy world of delirium. His patients grew obsessed with strangers, usually grander than themselves, projected their own sexually charged desires for love or recognition on to them, tracked and stalked them jealously and obsessively, knew by distant signs that their love was returned, suffered from persecutory delusions–everyone, it seemed, was against the culmination of their love–and in a sudden vulnerability or moment of omnipotence hit out violently at the forces that they imagined impeded their love.

  The British analyst Peter Fonagy, using current professional terminology, draws parallels between the passionate lover’s experience of ‘impaired affect regulation’, compounded with ‘the lack of a sense of boundariedness’, ‘the wish to control and manipulate’ and ‘identity diffusion’, and the clinical picture of a patient suffering from borderline personality disorder. Indeed, psychiatrists have suggested that the so-called personality disorders are on the rise in part because parents, loving or negligent, find themselves unable to say no to their young and to establish necessary limits. Inside and outside, one’s own desires and the desires of others grow confused, sometimes irredeemably.

  If we grow sick of love, if part of its journey parallels morbidity, it is because love also loosens our established boundaries, the very limits of our self-definition. In love, we are no longer our known, delimited selves, but suddenly permeable. As vulnerable as a newborn. This very permeability, the new fragility of our once bounded state, can now only be bound once more in the presence of the other. It matters little if the beloved is a creature largely made of our imaginings, those phantasms that spring from body, heart and mind. ‘When the lover encounters the other,’ Roland Barthes writes in his brilliant A Lover’s Discourse, ‘there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself).’

  In that state of permeability to the other, transformation can take place. ‘Crazy about you’, ‘all shook up’, I can also become somebody else in a world newly rich in meanings and signs. Recognized by the loved other, in her potent gaze, another version of myself comes into being. Frogs turn into princes, kitchen maids into princesses, disabled war veterans into avatars. But this business of moulding a newly edited self in the image of another is painful. It needs the act of attention, of recognition. Absence becomes an agony of waiting replete with hallucination. The doorbell is ever about to ring, announcing his arrival. The next face in the crowd will be his. The next text on the screen will signal he’s thinking of me.

  Absent, the beloved awakens in the lover a time of utter dependence when he was a mere vulnerable babe at mother’s breast. Taking his cue from the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Barthes notes that as with the mother’s breast for the infant, ‘“I create and re-create it over and over, starting from my capacity to love, starting from my need for it”: the other comes here where I am waiting, here where I have already created him/her. And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.’Rejected, unrequited, abandoned, the lover becomes unbound, a frail skein subject to destruction. That new self, recognized only by the other, taking its shape from the other, is now subject to catastrophe–a disintegration akin to madness.

  Proust’s young Marcel spins an entire template of love out of the nightly ritual of awaiting his mother’s kiss, the only act that will offer him the peace that allows sleep. The kiss is at once benediction and confirmation of an identity secure enough to be broken up, tossed and turned in the fracturing world of dreams. But his mother’s kiss is so quick, so fleeting, so soon gone, that he would rather put off the assuagement of his wish as long as possible, since it already announces the subsequent pain of her absence. Worst of all, if there are guests present, his mother may not offer the kiss of fleeting solace. Jealousy spirals.

  Inherent in the Proustian understanding of love is the pendulum swing between anticipation and suffering. If he could, the Proustian child would be a cannibal, incorporating the beloved other on which his being is so dependent–eat her up like the big, bad wolf tries to eat Little Red Riding-Hood. But the other is free to come and go, can’t be eaten or controlled. There lies the maddening rub of love: the very separateness of the other who incites it, who keeps it alive, is what we want to make our own, merge with, possess, and in the process annihilate, thereby annihilating the desire that keeps love going.

  Freud’s grandchild, evoked in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), shares an affinity with little Marcel in his need somehow to come to terms with the presence and uncontrollable absence of his beloved mother. Like so many children, he does so by inventing and engaging in a game. He has a wooden reel on a piece of string. He thrusts this away from him, while uttering an infant version of the word ‘fort’ (gone), and then pulls it back to him with a gleeful ‘da!’ (here). Through the obsessive repetition of a game in which the toy stands in for the mother who is no sooner present than once more absent, he learns to master an absence which is also potentially the feared permanent loss of the loved one.

  If the obsessiveness that characterizes lovers bears a close kinship with its morbid enactments, it also has something in common with the process by which Freud’s grandson masters his situation. As the analyst Ethel Spector Person notes,

  obsessiveness is no mere appendage to love, it is the very heart of love; it is that which permits love to act as an agent of change. The working and reworking of the same ideational content is similar to the ‘working through’ that occurs in psychoanalytic therapies. The lover is written in, as it were, into every conceivable experience and dream. Such ‘obsessions’ are signs that a major psychic shift is occurring, with changes in allegiances, values, perceptions, goals, and the sense of self.

  Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence recounts the story of just such an obsessive love. Kemal, the book’s hero, on the point of announcing his engagement to Sibel, a woman of his own class, falls in love with his distant and poorer cousin, Füsun, who for a few brief moments which feel like f
or ever on the afternoon of 26 May 1975 casts him into a luminous state of perfect happiness, suffusing him with the deepest peace. Of course, he realizes it only when she has vanished. Obsessed with her, he spends a year tracking her through Istanbul. Finding her married, he convinces himself that he can win her back, if only he abjects himself sufficiently. For nine years he becomes a pitiable appendage to her family. During that time, he begins to pilfer objects connected to Füsun–underwear, bits of jewellery, cigarette butts–which he hoards in his growing Museum of Innocence. His self-abasement is punctuated by moments of morbid ecstasy as he licks and sucks his treasures, in them recreating the gesture or look of his beloved that each piece has been selected to memorialize.

  Pathological morbidity here rises to the heights of lyricism; but its obsessiveness is only overcome after years.

  Love as divine rapture or intoxication is our socially sanctioned form of madness. We may judge it severely when we’re not entrapped in its ways. But it carries on merrily, or painfully, whether we approve or not. Which is why our many attempts to control it, by averting risk, by filling in dating agencies’ questionnaires with our lists of preferred qualities, will rarely propel us into the ‘falling’ that passion entails. When the daylight of ‘reason’ returns and the socially confirmed nuptials can take place, they usually augur a falling-away of passion, if not of love in its other, more tender and affectionate guises.

  While cynics and realists may denounce this mad version of love, it is clear that our lives would be poorer without it, our imagination depleted and our ability to live in a world of others much reduced. As Stendhal, at once a realist and prone to bouts of ever unrequited passion, noted: ‘Half–the most beautiful half–of life is hidden from him who has not loved passionately.’ Or, as André Malraux wrote almost a century later in Man’s Fate (1933), his novel set in China during the failed Shanghai insurrection: ‘It is very rare for a man to be able to endure… his condition, his fate as a man… There is always a need for intoxication… Perhaps love is above all the means which the Occidental uses to free himself from man’s fate.’

  The Lure of the Forbidden

  The intensity of passionate love, its transformative potential, gains much from prohibition, which, before the more liberal regime of the Western present, was often a generalized prohibition against sex itself–certainly, for women, sex before marriage. Shakespeare’s ‘star-crossed lovers’ Romeo and Juliet live out a ‘death-marked love’, doomed by the warring families from which they stem. Their passion feeds on defiance. So too does Humbert Humbert’s for Annabel, lived as it is against parental vigilance. His later love for her reincarnation, Lolita, gathers its obsessive power from the very fact that it is a transgressive passion, lived out in the breach of taboos.

  Outside the bounds of fiction, first love follows suit. The ever protean young must rebel, break away from parents and indeed their circle of friends, in order to forge a new bond.

  Why do prohibition and the consequent need for secrecy, sometimes self-imposed, augment passion? Freud links this, first of all, to the incest taboo and the way we re-experience early moments when our sexual and affective instincts had an unobtainable incestuous object. Whatever weight we attach to his arguments, it is clear that the forbidden often doubles attraction, and that rebellion against prohibition is part and parcel of first love, and indeed in many cases, later loves, too. Sex, after all, is in the first instance about overcoming difference and distance.

  For the young, this may be linked to a growing and insistent sense that separating oneself off from parents who can only designate one as ‘child’ is a dangerous and often messy business and needs radical enactment to be successful. Only with the impetus of a parental ‘no’, spoken or already understood and internalized, can a push away from Mum and Dad be strong enough to propel one into the distance of separateness and adulthood–and into a sexuality which is more and other than imaginings. Lurking, too, in the recesses of the mind is that fluttery sense that all fully desired ones are somehow forbidden, caught up in an incestuous family romance where Mummy and Daddy are coupled and close the doors on the child’s omnivorous wishes. So passionate love is always already an experience that in fantasy exists within the realm of transgression. This may be why people so often find themselves so forcefully attracted to love objects of different ethnicities, class, or simply met on distant holidays–their unfamiliars.

  After the advent of the pill in the sixties, when sex even for young women became generally permissible and a cohort of parents arrived who prohibited less systematically, it didn’t take long for new self-generated prohibitions and rules to slot into place, particularly in the US. Fleetingly ‘liberated’ by the women’s movement of the 1970s and the pill, momentarily free from the later plague of STDs, female desire was quickly enough again shackled by fear: men were not only exposed as power-mongers and oppressors, but increasingly subsumed under the category ‘rapists’. Sexuality, briefly and freely ‘fun’, a site of open exploration, once more became dangerous. The sexuality of gays was no sooner out in the open than it was tragically shadowed by Aids. Regimes of ‘safe sex’ came into play and were often enough rebelled against: again, sex seemed to lose some of its lure without the impetus of transgression. Increasingly through the eighties and nineties, dating and love rules made their way on to American campuses in a flurry of political correctness: desire, love and sex were re-bound within a set of strictures that demarcated the limits of the permissible or the socially acceptable.

  Outside the campuses, particularly in America, religion returned with a vocal evangelicism, again wrapping sex and love into the safe bundle of marriage. Where more liberal regimes were in operation, say in Britain or France, dating rules began to prescribe a kind of strict serial monogamy which forbade the casual infidelities of the brief moment of liberation.

  In other quarters today, particularly amongst the urban very young, commodified, off-the-shelf, almost anonymized sex has become de rigueur, and the taboo is against linking it with any form of intimacy or love, any sense of commitment or continuity. Women as well as men are in play here. In a reversal of older romantic codes, to be ‘cool’ is to fuck, to perform sex in any position except the one that engenders feeling or sometimes even talk. This contemporary libertinage, seemingly transgressive, is itself as rule-bound as the older one that made virginity or purity the boundary which needed to be broken through for love to flourish.

  Overcoming barriers in the self, catapulting inner defences and inhibitions, can be as potent as external prohibitions when it comes to falling in love. Traditionally, a father’s forbidding ‘no’, internalized as a rule, could act as a stimulus. Today, it may be the equally forbidding ‘no’ to engaging fully with another human being as more than a body, a mere breathing version of a porn-site image, habitually revisited.

  To love entails breaking through the secure, established, fixed boundaries of the known self. For some, particularly young women, this can mean conquering the disgust which the carnal–with its link to generation, to the dying human animal–can elicit. In one of their guises, this was the purpose of those old arts of seduction: the older man charmed the innocent maid into taking the bodily leap. For others, particularly boys, it can mean having to engage in aggression, where one might wish to be tender; tangling with power, where one might rationally prefer being equal. Love, in short, means violating inner defences: even that ideological defence which so-called sexual empowerment and its tally of casual sexual partners can today supply. A young woman who has had any number of sexual partners may well find herself ‘in love’ with the one man who won’t sleep with her.

  A breaking-away from the old, encased self into a new one forged through the link with another is what falling in love is all about. Risk is involved. So, too, is the adventure of finding oneself newly vulnerable, and despite this, hurtling towards the unknown who is the other. Without obstacles, without difficulties in the path to sexual satisfaction, Freud once wr
yly noted, ‘love becomes worthless and life-empty’. In our permissive age, we grapple with new obstacles to re-infuse life and love with meaning.

  The appeal of Stephenie Meyer’s hugely popular young teen Twilight series and its accompanying films owes something to the way in which fantasy prohibitions stand in when society fails to provide real ones. Child of divorcees, no sooner has the heroine, Bella, been shipped away to the paternal home from the maternal one (while her mother holidays with her new husband) than she falls into romance with moody teen vampire, Edward. Now vampires really are more dangerous than the boy next door (who in this case anyway happens to be a werewolf). Thus there are substantial prohibitions for Bella to overcome so that the course of love may run deep and true–even if Edward’s family has substituted a diet of animal blood for the traditional human one. The ‘True Love Waits’ pro-abstinence movement of its author has far fewer attractions in its prescriptiveness than the seductive danger of falling in love with a vampire–the daunting prohibition of supernatural exogamy. And when Bella in the last book of the series finally marries her vampire, she really does undergo that transformation that true love promises. She becomes an immortal. Heaven, it seems, comes with fangs, though Edward’s have been whittled down and his teeth merely glow pearly white.

  Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four provides a more radically textured instance of forbidden love’s dangerously metamorphic potential. In this totalitarian dystopia where all life and thought outside the reach of the state are forbidden by the omnipresent surveillance of the Party, Orwell’s hero Winston Smith acquires an inner existence, a sense of vital individuality which also means the ability to think for himself, through his secret and rebelliously risky love affair with Julia. ‘If a right to a secret is not maintained, then we are in a totalitarian space,’ the philosopher Jacques Derrida has written. Winston Smith’s dawning secret and inner life, sparked by love, constitutes a revolt against the totalitarianism of Big Brother. The grave hazards he and Julia run in their love affair not only reshape them, but define a resistance to the state. Love is the ultimate challenge to an annihilating conformity which would stamp out the heart of individual life and the very language in which it thinks.