A Natural History of Love (22 page)

*
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.

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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.

Freud was born poor and Jewish above a blacksmith shop in Freiberg in 1856, and given the name of “Sigismund Schiomo,” which as a teenager he shortened to the more Germanic-sounding “Sigmund.” His father, Jacob, was a wool merchant. His mother, Amalia, was a young, beautiful woman whom he remembers being astonished to glimpse naked when he was about four years old. It made him so uncomfortable, even thirty-seven years later, that he could only describe the event in Latin. A third wife, she was twenty years younger than her husband; and as a child Freud often felt she would have been a more suitable wife for his young uncle or half-brother. His complex, somewhat confusing relationship with his parents, siblings, half-siblings, and large extended family formed the foundation of his theories about everything from the Oedipus complex to artistic creativity. Bravely, he used himself as raw material. As biographer Peter Gay describes the situation:

Such childhood conundrums left deposits that Freud repressed for years and would only recapture, through dreams and laborious self-analysis, in the late 1890’s. His mind was made up of these things—his young mother pregnant with a rival, his half brother in some mysterious way his mother’s companion, his nephew older than himself, his best friend also his greatest enemy, his benign father old enough to be his grandfather.

In his twenties, Freud married an unexceptional woman, Martha Bernays, who raised their six children. She was not consulted in his intellectual life. He had been determined to marry her, and though they remained chaste for the four years they were engaged, he obviously richly desired her. Once, in Paris, he wrote her about his climb up the Eiffel Tower: “One climbs up three hundred steps, it is very dark, very lonely, on every step I could have given you a kiss if you had been with me, and you would have reached the top quite out of breath and wild.” Although he wrote Martha many tender, impulsive, revealing love letters while they were engaged, once they were married the love letters stopped. At one point he apparently had an adulterous affair with his sister-in-law. When he was thirty-seven, he wrote to a close friend about his worrisome troubles with impotence. A heavy cigar smoker, Freud was lavishly addicted to what he knew would kill him, and in time it did, abetted no doubt by his growing use of cocaine. Before he was married, he once wrote to Martha that “smoking is indispensable if one has nothing to kiss,” and he later claimed that all addictions were a replacement for masturbation. His was in many ways a typical bourgeois home, very tidy and orderly, in which Father ruled and everyone else served. He alone named his children, and he chose for them the names of his personal heroes, mentors, or friends.

In 1980, participants of the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association received a rare treat: Freud’s eighty-five-year-old daughter, Anna, narrated a thirty-minute film of her father, captured in home movies by several of his friends (who were also his patients). At times unaware of the camera, Freud seemed relaxed, an affectionate patriarch, playing with his dogs in the snow, looking for goldfish in a pond with his two grandsons, whom he tenderly embraced. “Here my father didn’t know he was being photographed,” Anna Freud explained, as the camera showed Freud sitting in a garden talking peacefully with an old friend. “He didn’t like to be photographed and often made a face when he knew the camera was on him.” Another, more formal, twenty-minute film followed, which included scenes of his fiftieth wedding anniversary, and his flight from Vienna and the Nazis. Freud posed with his brothers and sisters, some of whom would die in concentration camps, and his children, including little Anna, smiling proudly in an attractive dress. This latter film was made by his one time patient Philip R. Lehrman; Freud went along with the filming, but thought Lehrman’s need to photograph him probably qualified as a compulsion. Peeking through the keyhole of the camera, the APA members got a small, tantalizing glimpse into Freud’s private hours. It seemed a thoroughly conventional home life.