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Return To ShopWhat kind of sexual desire, object relations and superego does mature love need? Love and Projective Identification Part 1
If someone comes to a therapist for love problems, many people might breathe a sigh of relief, believing that this is within the realm of counseling and that simple empathy and understanding can help. Indeed, love is a very high psychological function. If someone comes to a therapist solely for love troubles, we can reasonably assume that their ego function is good—they are likely a “simple” counselor.
However, we also have two reasons to worry and be anxious about this:
First, while the client may be truly “simple,” is the therapist also “simple”? In other words, the therapist must carefully consider whether they themselves have the ability to develop and enjoy mature love. Otherwise, counseling can unconsciously become a situation where a child, ignorant of love, guides a teenager with only a limited understanding of love.
Second, how many people come to the doctor simply because of “love problems”? Are love problems just a matter between a man and a woman?
Today’s lecture will explore some of these issues. First, we’ll briefly examine the importance of today’s content in clinical psychology research on love.
There are various studies on love in psychology, including personality psychology, neuropsychology, and social psychology. Many of these studies are very scientific, with various scales and data. Today, we will explore the field of clinical psychology and will not touch upon these studies.
Clinical psychology has several major schools of thought: cognitive-behavioral, humanistic-transpersonal, and psychoanalytic. Today, we will focus on psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis, there are various schools of thought: classical, object-oriented, self-oriented, Lacanian, Jungian, existential, ego-oriented, relational, and intersubjective. Today, I will focus on the object-relational school, inspired by four or five papers by Kernberg between 1974 and 1994.
Therefore, the psychoanalytic study of love discussed today is only the tip of the iceberg. Don’t expect too much; a single lecture cannot fully understand all aspects of love. A complete understanding of love requires nearly a lifetime of experience and learning. Since the time of Plato, humanity has been exploring the secrets of love for millennia, yet even today, the understanding of love remains elusive.
However, if you are interested in psychoanalytic love research, I think you can still pay attention to the works of several people: one is Freud of the classical school, and the other is Fromm and Horney who should belong to the new psychoanalytic school, especially Fromm’s “The Art of Loving”. Although it is a popular science book, it is still very wonderful. I often recommend it to patients to read.
Another is the work “Love and Will” by existential psychoanalyst Rollo May, which can help us understand a point that will be mentioned today – why sadness is the basis of mature love.
Freud did not recommend any particular works, because what Freud talked about throughout his life was teaching people how to love and work, so all his works should be read.
Freud believed that the process of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. Why is the unconscious made conscious? Because it liberates the power of the id. What does the libido in the id do with this liberation? Freud clearly stated: to do two things: love and work.
However, it seems that many people understand Freud as the release of the power of the ego, and then engage in sex and gambling.
There are many reasons for this substitution, one of which is a failure to understand that the id is a psychological energy, not a physiological one. Its source is indeed physiological instinct (including sexual instinct), which is transformed into libido through alpha action, forming the id.
After all, psychology is not physiology. Otherwise, what is the point of talk therapy? Wouldn’t it be enough for the therapist to take the patient to a brothel or a bar?
Frequent sexual intercourse, gambling, and other such activities do not actually liberate or release libido; rather, they damage the libido system, consuming and destroying the entire personality structure of the id, ego, and superego. This is an attempt to cut off the source of the id and return the mind to a state of infantile slumber.
Borderline personality disorder patients use this kind of self-“treatment,” which is actually an attempt to murder the soul, because where there is a “heart” there is pain. If you read Freud carefully, you will find that he is actually against excessive sexual activity. He said this as early as “Three Essays on Sexuality.”
He placed great emphasis on the significance of love and work to people. I believe the ultimate goal of psychoanalysis is to enable people to learn to love and work with energy. Since love is the driving force behind work, it’s no surprise that psychoanalysis has amassed such a significant body of research on love .
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Psychological prerequisites for establishing a romantic relationship
Simply put, love involves three components: sexual desire, object relations, and the superego. Establishing love requires working through fixations from the oral stage to the Oedipal stage, while maintaining love requires working through and integrating adolescent object relations.
So, what kind of sexual desire, object relations and superego are needed in mature love?
First of all, it can integrate the physiological impulses of the sexual area and establish a complete object relationship.
Second, this sexual desire is a comprehensive sexual pleasure that includes early body-surface eroticism and complementary, reciprocal gender identities, and this sexual pleasure occurs in the context of complete object relationships.
Third, the mature superego has individual metaphysical sexual ethics and moral embodiment, thus transcending the morality of infants and establishing the ethical values of adults.
To achieve the first point, one must work through the primitive mechanisms of splitting and projective identification, establish a sense of self-identity, and develop the ability to establish deep object relationships. To achieve the second point, one must work through the Oedipus complex, particularly the unconscious taboos surrounding antagonistic relationships. To achieve the third point, one must also work through the identity crisis of adolescence.
However, even if people have the above abilities, it does not necessarily mean that they can maintain the stability of love. In addition to the socioeconomic and cultural factors that we all know may affect the stability of love, other psychological factors can also affect the stability of love.
Let’s look at each of these aspects separately.
(1) Object relations
While establishing a complete object relationship with one’s partner may sound simple, truly understanding and perceiving the loved one as they truly are (both good and bad) is a truly daunting task. It requires transforming infantile physical pleasure into adult tenderness, transforming a child’s craving for “my needs met by you” into a stable interpersonal dependency. It also requires the ability to mourn the past, possess a loving conscience and concern, and develop understanding for others. All of this requires a shift from complete or over-identification with the object to a sublimated partial identification.
Balint (1948) proposed that true love (mature love) must have three characteristics: idealization, tenderness, and genital identification. At the same time, he agreed with Freud that idealization is not absolutely necessary and that some mature love does not have idealization.
Balint believes that tenderness is the most important. The need for tenderness comes from the tender love of the oral stage. Humans often need to regress to this stage and may not be able to get rid of this need throughout their lives.
Rollo May similarly believed that care is essential for mature love. He also borrowed Balint’s terminology of reproductive identification, arguing that complete identification with one’s partner without losing one’s own identity is central to love. It’s also worth noting that May also argued that sadness can occur in love.
The reason why sadness appears in love is that entering into mature love requires people to be able to mourn many past fixations and object relationships, especially to work through the depressive states at various stages of development, and to repair the psychological trauma at various stages of childhood development.
Of particular importance is the ability to mourn the separation from the mother and to deal with the issues of the separation-individuation period (which consists of a series of sub-stages).
What prevents people from developing a full object relationship? Technically, it is the inability to mourn the separation from the mother.
We know that the earliest relationship an infant establishes with their mother, before they can sit up, is a partial object relationship. At this point, the infant internalizes and identifies with the mother as fragmented objects, such as the breast, face, and milk. Due to the effects of an imperfect nervous system, the infant’s perception of themselves is also fragmented and fragmentary.
The object relationship during this period is a partial object relationship, and the dominant psychological state is the split-paranoid state.
When people begin to fall in love, they are also in a paranoid-schizoid state. Simply put, when the mind is troubled, fear arises; fear breeds perverted dreams, which distance us from eternal bliss and pure self. The reason people cannot enjoy love is often because they yearn for the caress, tenderness, and security of childhood, and even use their perverted dreams to force their lovers.
When people fall in love, they often do not fall in love with each other because they have a comprehensive understanding of each other. Just a look, a gesture, a pretty face, or some expression of care can make people imagine things.
These fantasies about lovers are idealized defense mechanisms.
Three forms of idealization need to be distinguished here.
The first is primitive idealization, which is based on splitting. This is often seen in the early stages of love among people with borderline personality traits. Primitive idealization is often unable to sustain the progress of love.
The second type is depressive idealization, which often occurs in what Klein calls the “depressive state” (guilt, empathy, compensation for the injured object). It has a certain degree of reality and is also a prelude to sadness and concern in love, but this idealization still prohibits sexual characteristics in love.
The third type is normal idealization, achieved during late adolescence or early adulthood. It is based on a stable sexual identity and an honest awareness of the object of love. Idealization of the other person takes into account cultural and social factors, rather than being an unrealistic fantasy. This type of idealization can imbue life with meaning and possess transcendental significance for the individual. Kernberg even argues that the word “idealization” should not be used to describe this state.
Idealization is one of the normal functions of love. In general, although idealization in love comes from the structure of the superego and culture, in normal love, people will not project their entire self-ideal.
However, under pathological conditions, especially pathological narcissism, this idealization will become primitive idealization. At this time, the person who is hit by this narcissistic projection identification will naturally feel that he is the “king of the world” and be intoxicated. In fact, he is just identifying with an exaggerated self-object of the other person. It will not take long for him to find that there is no place for himself in this paradise-like love myth.
A classic example of a male narcissist’s love pattern is the “playboy” or “romantic” relationship. This type of relationship stems from the fact that a boy, already in his pregenital stage, already has some differentiation in his sexual orientation. He becomes concerned with whether his little boy (penis) can satisfy his mother. If the mother inappropriately reinforces this, making the boy feel that he is the center of his mother’s life and the source of his existence, he will unconsciously believe that his status as a little boy is sufficient to satisfy women, denying his distinction from the adult man (father), thus failing to form a sexual identity with the adult man and suppressing castration anxiety. In adulthood, he will adopt a playful, seductive attitude towards women and be irresponsible in love, while also becoming extremely dependent on them.
Therefore, the mother’s regular departure from the little boy and return to her husband is actually beneficial to his formation of a positive Oedipus complex, especially in enhancing his sense of competition in love.
It’s important to note that normal romantic relationships not only increase the love drive for the object but also heighten the individual’s narcissism, allowing them to experience a sense of self-esteem and self-worth. Therefore, normal narcissism possesses a reality check. In this sense, the saying “healing with love” does have some truth—love can indeed heal the damage done to narcissism. However, being used as a band-aid for someone else’s narcissistic wounds is anything but pleasant.
As people transition from primitive idealization to normal idealization, they mourn the loss of many early object relationships. Revelations like, “It turns out he has his own needs that need to be satisfied; it turns out he has his own independent personality, not under my control; it turns out he has sexual desires, too, but they’re not so pure” are often discovered only after a bitter cry. Tears in love often signify the shattering of a person’s illusions, but also the ability to truly and truthfully perceive the other person.
The transition from primitive idealization to normal idealization is a process of moving from splitting through projective identification to empathic understanding. When people are able to free themselves from their inner concerns, they can extend tenderness to all aspects of their sexual lives, and their superego can mature enough to allow them and their loved ones to develop a love relationship that conforms to moral ideals.
However, establishing a complete object relationship is only half the journey to mature love; the Oedipus complex still needs to be worked through. The primary impact of working through the Oedipus complex on love is that both partners can develop a mutually compatible, relatively stable, and non-rigid gender identity. Gender identity is a component of self-identity (sexual identity). In other words, a person must resolve the crisis of identity confusion during adolescence before they can savor the sweetness of mature love, transforming the intoxication and anxiety of repeated “falling in love” into the tranquility and joy of long-term “being in love.”
(2) Comprehensive sexual desire
Love has two material foundations: one is the social values that promote the value of love and individual freedom; the other is the brain that produces sex hormones during adolescence.
The foundation of love is sexual desire, which seems to require no argument. However, sexual desire is not the same as sexual instinct. The psychological basis of sexual desire is reproductive identification. In short, reproductive identification is the fusion of reproductive satisfaction and the tenderness of the pregenital stage.
Reproductive identity is the basis of a normal love relationship. It includes two aspects of identification: on the one hand, complete identification with one’s own gender role; on the other hand, identification with the gender of the person one loves (complementary to one’s own gender role).
Generally speaking, reproductive identification means that homosexual and heterosexual identities, which originated from the conflict between the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal periods, have reached a compromise. People with reproductive identification will regard the other person’s feelings, emotions, desires, and sensitivities as being as important as their own and need to be satisfied in their sexual lives.
The rigidity of identity has a significant impact on a couple’s sex life. For example, it is often difficult for men to transition from the dominant male role of conquering women and providing sexual satisfaction to the child role of being loved and cared for by women and feeling grateful for the sexual satisfaction they provide.
Orgasm reflects unconscious identification with the partner and, in heterosexual intercourse, also expresses sublimated homosexual identification. Sexual foreplay also involves identification with the partner’s fantasies and desires about the partner’s own sexual object.
The orgasm experience generally includes several components: temporary identification with the sexual partner; transcending one’s own boundaries and entering into an alliance with the imaginary Oedipal parents; abandoning the above-mentioned integration into the parental relationship and creating a new object relationship, confirming autonomy and independent identity.
During the orgasm experience, the old object relationship is broken and a new object relationship is created, so orgasm is often a barometer of the love relationship between partners.
However, it is important to note that there is no linear causal relationship between the ability to orgasm and emotional maturity. People with severe personality pathology and emotionally mature people can both achieve orgasm during sex. This is because people with personality pathology, lacking a mature superego, can express their sexual desire more “freely.”
However, his orgasm is indeed different from that of healthy people in that: it is based on a partial object formed by splitting, so in his orgasmic experience, the integrity of the sexual partner is not taken care of; it often has the characteristics of pre-Oedipal sexual perversion; the transcendent experience component in the orgasm is insufficient, and there is a lack of the generation of new object relationships.
Orgasm is a psychosomatic phenomenon, the psychological precursor of which is passion. Passion is the most common factor that can transcend established romantic relationships. During moments of passion, a person often transcends their own limits and boundaries to identify with another person. This passion is often a source of transcendental sexual experiences.
There is a difference between the transcendent experience in orgasm and the primitive fusion in the symbiotic period. It is based on the confirmation of personal individuality, especially the existence of mature sexual identity, while in primitive fusion, the self is often lost, so we generally call primitive fusion “madness.”
The difference between passion and madness lies in that in passion, the boundaries of the self and the sense of self-identity remain intact and unified, but the boundaries of the self begin to expand and hope to merge with the loved one while maintaining a sense of reality. In madness, the boundaries of the self and others will be confused or completely disappear.
The basis of passion is the ability of the individual to experience his or her own loneliness and reflect on this loneliness, which is not possible for the insane. For psychopaths and those with severe narcissistic pathology, their sex life may not lack crazy physical orgasms, but they often lack the ability to develop and share sexual passion.
We know that it’s internalized and externalized object relationships, not anything else, that keep sexual life vibrant. Thus, drugs like Viagra can help an impotent penis erect, but they can’t save a dying relationship. The popularity of aphrodisiacs perhaps illustrates, from another perspective, the withering of love in this frenzied world.
It’s important to note here that transcendental sexual relationships between couples are possible. It’s said that in transcendental relationships, such as religious couples, intimacy actually increases. These couples avoid sexual relations because they experience a transcendental pleasure that transcends sexual intercourse. It’s said that Gandhi and his wife shared this kind of relationship, but no professional research has been conducted on this topic, so it remains to be confirmed.
We know that reproductive identity is essentially gender identity, and a stable and open gender identity is the foundation of a well-rounded sexuality. Let’s take a closer look at the process of gender identity formation for men and women.
Because men and women develop different paths of identification, women are more courageous than men in romantic relationships to assume responsibility and identify with heterosexuality. This is because, during their psychological development, women are more likely to internalize their mothers and resolve separation anxiety from them, whereas men often remain unable to break free from their mother’s dependence and separation anxiety throughout their lives, even perpetually searching for an ideal mother figure. This is a relatively modern psychoanalytic perspective, differing from the popular Freudian view. However, those who have read Freud’s “A Family Romance” may find that Freud also held similar views.
For women, overcoming the Oedipus complex requires identifying with their mother during the Oedipal period and establishing their own female identity. However, the characteristics of women’s sexual identity, determined by their culture and psychological development, often maintain a dependence on their mother. However, compared to men’s dependence on their mothers, this dependence is less likely to cause problems. This is likely related to culturally defined roles for women, which is why women’s dependence is called “coquettish” and men’s dependence is called “soft.” Women often project their motherly image onto the men they care for, so men are destined to let women act coquettishly in their arms. During sex, men’s gentle caressing of women’s skin is actually an identification with the mother’s role.
A mother’s identification with a woman’s sexual identity has a significant impact. If a mother has a negative attitude towards her own female identity, it will affect the little girl’s identification with her own female identity, thus stimulating so-called penis envy. Therefore, “unfeminine” women often like to compete with their partners and attack their partners.
For men, identifying with their Oedipal fathers and establishing sexual relationships with women is not the only way to achieve this. They also need to work through their identification with their mothers, cultivating traits like generosity and caring to elevate their dependence on them. One way men work through their Oedipal complex is to recognize that figures of authority, such as fathers and teachers, are not simply those who issue demands and rules, but also those who provide generously, thus enabling them to identify with adult men. The difficulties men face in love are often related to a lack of identification with their parents’ roles. For example, stingy men often lack identification with their fathers, which in turn makes it difficult for them to find a partner. Furthermore, men who lack identification with their generous fathers tend to have more frugal sex lives.
This is why in daily life we find it difficult for men to refuse women’s requests, and if men refuse women’s requests, they often feel very guilty. For women, it is easier to refuse men’s requests.
In other words, it’s difficult for men to say no because, in the process of saying no, their aggression toward their mothers is activated, and they also feel guilty about this aggression. For women, however, the guilt they feel in love doesn’t primarily come from rejecting the object, but from accepting a man’s sexual demands. Therefore, we can see that women’s guilt often arises after sex.
Many women, especially those who haven’t worked through their pre-Oedipal sadistic superego, often create taboos in their sexual relationships. Men’s sexual restraint is often related to their father’s failure to acknowledge their Oedipal sexual desires.
In addition, if a man’s father divorced his mother because of an affair during his childhood, such a man is often prone to being vigorous in informal sexual relationships but impotent in formal marital sex, especially when his mother repeatedly instills bad things about his father in him.
Most psychoanalytic scholars agree on a “sexually free” sexual orientation. However, it’s important to point out that sexual freedom and sexual indulgence are not the same thing. According to psychoanalysis, sexual indulgence is precisely not “freedom.” Instead, sexual freedom often refers to the ability to break free from the influence of childhood sexual identity and morals, forming a stable sexual identity and mature morals. This is why I believe that various indulgent and impulsive sexual behaviors are “anti-psychoanalytic.”
For men, sexually free women are unsafe, which is related to the projection of men’s internal parental relationships. During adolescence, this projection becomes the value of the teenage male group. This projection also exists for women, so female adolescent groups will project sexually free men as a source of aggression.
The power of love and hate both have a significant impact on romantic relationships. However, people often prioritize the power of love over the existence of hate . In fact, what we now call “aesthetic fatigue” and boredom with love are often caused by activated aggression that hasn’t been properly channeled.
There are two main sources of aggression between partners: one is the narcissistic conflict of the pre-Oedipal period, which manifests primarily as unconscious jealousy of the opposite sex; the other is the guilt that comes from complete identification with parents during the Oedipal period, which manifests primarily as a resentment of any sexual activity. Of course, sibling rivalry and Oedipal jealousy of the same-sex parent can also manifest in a relationship, but they generally do not play a dominant role.
Men with narcissistic traits are often jealous of their mothers (breasts), leading them to be extremely derogatory towards women. Similarly, women with high narcissistic traits tend to be derogatory towards the men they love. If a woman experiences a difficult early relationship with her mother but receives affection from her father, she may feel guilty about maintaining sexual intimacy with men, indirectly reinforcing her sadomasochistic tendencies.
This discontinuity in the mother’s role will cause the child a certain degree of frustration and pain, and he will gain the ability to withstand separation and loneliness by identifying with the two roles of the mother. Masturbation is a manifestation of this ability (the initial masturbation begins in the Oedipus period of 3-6 years old).
This ability to withstand separation and loneliness—the capacity for discontinuity—is often reflected in men’s sexual relationships. For example, after sex, men maintain a suitable distance from women, less intimate than before. This is actually an unconscious narcissistic reaction to the mother’s absence. Men need to preserve their autonomy through temporary separation from their sexual partners.
This behavior just shows that men and women are just as dependent rather than the opposite, but men and women deal with dependence differently – perhaps reverse formation is a method that men use more often.
For women, this ability to interrupt is often demonstrated in their interactions with infants. Women can actually leave men and are not as dependent on them as people imagine, especially after having children. Many women’s interactions with children often have erotic elements, which can often leave men (husbands) feeling abandoned.
Furthermore, women are often able to discontinue sexual relations with a man once they realize they no longer love him, maintaining a clear distinction between their former lover and their current partner. Men, on the other hand, can still maintain sexual relations with their former lover even after their affections have shifted. In other words, men appear to have a greater tolerance for discontinuities in their emotions and sexual desires than women, who simply cannot tolerate such discontinuities.
At the same time, men’s sexual desire for women is more persistent than that of women, even if they have lost contact with each other on a real level.
Through projective identification, people induce their partners to behave like childhood objects, toward which the projector is ambivalent and aggressive. If the conflict is severe, the projection may be a representation of the parental union object that has little consistency with the real object.
Generally speaking, when projective identification occurs with a partner, the identifyer often exhibits complementary identification, particularly unconsciously identifying with the partner’s dominant parental object representation. In such cases, we often observe an element of “madness” in the relationship. The communication patterns between the partners appear illogical to outsiders, leading to a state of infatuation.
One of these characteristics is the inability to tolerate separation.
Adults’ ability to withstand separation and loneliness also comes from childhood. Sooner or later, children will understand that their mothers have two roles: one role is to accompany them and meet their physical and mental needs; the other role is to accompany their fathers and meet and enjoy their physical and mental needs, especially the needs of sexual life.
Therefore, a man can never forget his first woman, and a woman can never forget her last man. Men are not so afraid of loneliness but they are afraid of death, while women are very afraid of loneliness but not so afraid of death. Men are not afraid of ghosts but hunger, while women are not afraid of hunger but ghosts.
Faced with the discontinuity between a woman’s sexuality and tenderness, some men often resort to a defense pattern of splitting her into a “Madonna” and a “whore.” Freud’s so-called “brothel complex” is based on the unconscious content of men’s forbidden sexual desire for their mothers, which they never give up.
Women, on the other hand, tend to use introjected identification (narcissistic identification) to cope with discontinuity. Consequently, men tend to experience more paranoid-schizoid anxiety, while women tend to experience more depression. However, why women are less narcissistic than men remains a mystery. Perhaps narcissistic identification actually reduces narcissism?
In addition, men’s pre-Oedipal conflict with their mothers will also prevent them from having a deep object relationship with women. Therefore, we often see many men shying away from love on the surface, but when they really fall in love, they show boundless dependence and infatuation. This actually comes from men’s unconscious commitment to entrust themselves to their mothers.
Women, on the other hand, do not have the problem of developing deep object relationships with the opposite sex because they have already transferred this unconscious commitment from their mother to their father in early childhood. The main issue for women is whether they can allow themselves to enjoy sexual freedom in sexual relationships.
Of course, severe narcissists don’t fall into this category. Narcissists often turn their partners into self-objects, creating a twin relationship. In homosexual twin relationships, there can be jealousy of the other person’s independent sexual identity. While heterosexual twin relationships are often strong, they can also be characterized by idealization.
(3) Superego
Establishing a deep love relationship will also release aggression towards parents. At this time, further development and integration of the superego is needed to neutralize these aggressions, especially to transform the repression and guilt of aggression into attention and protection for the partner.
Early paraphilic fantasies, such as sadomasochism, homosexual fantasies, exhibitionism, and voyeurism, often enter heterosexual relationships through splitting and projection, and may even be partially expressed during sexual foreplay. If both partners have a sufficiently mature superego and ego to accommodate these fantasies, they can bring a greater sense of freedom to the relationship, especially the sadomasochistic elements. However, these sadomasochistic elements can sometimes be projected onto third parties, leading to some extramarital affairs.
The mature superego is the guarantee of love, commitment and loyalty to the partner. When the mature superego is formed, the primitive idealization of the partner is transformed into a mature idealization. In this way, people will feel satisfied with their partner, which in turn strengthens the satisfaction of love and sex life.
A mature superego is one that has the ability to establish individuality, metaphysical moral principles, and the embodiment of morality within it, thereby transcending infantile morality and establishing adult ethical values. Only by achieving this final point can one assume responsibility in romantic relationships, uphold commitments, and develop and maintain love.
It sounds complicated, but in short it is as follows:
• You know what to do and what not to do in love;
• You know what an achievable ideal of love looks like;
• You know what love means to life;
• You are willing to unilaterally and proactively start practicing these love ethics, rather than waiting for the other person to react first;
• You are willing to work with your partner to create an achievable ideal of love.
An unupdated superego often leads to childish moral values, which are then projected into the relationship, resulting in the inability of partners to enjoy intimate emotional communication and sexual life.
In the process of building a deep romantic relationship, primitive aggression is released into the relationship. At this point, a very pronounced projection-identification often emerges. Projection-identification can both strengthen and threaten a romantic relationship. If the aggression in projection-identification is excessive, a more mature superego is needed to regulate and control it.
The function of the superego in love is also two-sided: on the one hand, it can prevent excessive aggression and thus promote sexual relationships; on the other hand, it can also destroy and suppress sexual relationships.
In some partnerships, the activation of superego functions often takes the form of projective identification, such as setting various taboos on one’s partner— by setting various imaginary taboos between partners and blaming each other, one attempts to project one’s guilt onto the other.
One thing we need to remind everyone is that mature love is not a love without conflict or aggression, and it is not a love that remains loyal even in the deep unconscious. This is the love of gods and saints. Having such an illusion about love itself is not mature.
Mature love still has conflict and still confuses childhood and adult emotional patterns, but it is more inclusive and objective. Moreover, mature love is not a static state, but a continuous process of maturation and transcendence.
Speaking of this, we need to break two fantasies, otherwise we will not be able to embark on the path of mature love.
One fantasy is that love is eternal.
Actually, this isn’t the case. While numerous literary works extolling love existed as early as ancient times , love has only become a common pursuit in relationships between men and women in modern times. The emergence of love is a product of humanity’s material development reaching a certain stage. Specifically, true, unselfish love becomes the primary purpose of a relationship only in a communist society. Therefore, historically speaking, human society’s experience with love is relatively limited, far from comparable to its experience in politics.
Another fantasy is that the ability to love is innate.
This narcissistic fantasy naturally has many roots, as Fromm clearly analyzed. In fact, the ability to love, like artistic ability, while there’s a certain element of innate talent, is more fundamentally dependent on cultivation and learning. Even if the genius Leonardo da Vinci were reborn, he couldn’t have created the Mona Lisa without learning any drawing techniques. Similarly, no one is born with the ability to fall in love. Humans are naturally endowed with the capacity for dependence and sexual intercourse, not love. Proponents of the “innate love” theory often confuse these abilities.
Historically speaking, Confucius and Laozi basically didn’t know how to fall in love. There was no love in their time. There was only women’s dependence on men as slaves.
In Freud’s time, free and equal love truly began to become the mainstream of relationships between men and women – especially the mainstream of petty-bourgeois values.
In China, love only began to become a value in partnerships after the May Fourth Movement. But as we all know, our country subsequently endured war, natural disasters, and man-made calamities, with even food a struggle, so how could we even dare to talk about love? It’s only in recent years, thanks to government policies to enrich the people, that we can finally talk about love.
In fact, in our country, there has always been a lack of a relatively stable cultural superego to give value and meaning to love.Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were things that existed in ancient society when there was no concept of “love.” Marxism-Leninism, however, does indeed impart values to love, which I personally think is quite good. It’s a pity how many people truly believe in it? ( To be continued )
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