I believe that it is one of the most important things in life not to lose anything of value that you have ever gotten, from the living or the dead, even from those who later forsook you, betrayed you, or bitterly disappointed you. Love, joy, and meaning can be resurrected from the most unlikely sources, from relationships saturated with sorrow, shameâeven hatred. While it is impossible to predict what will emerge as meaningful when you choose to search it out, the very effort creates the potential for discovery and gives you more of a say in your own life. I don't think it's possible or necessary to recover appreciation for everyone who has violated your trust, but when there is something meaningful to retrieve, celebrating it is a genuine compensation for loss. It sustains you from within.
If anything in your love was realâimperfect, ambivalent, obsessive, or selfish in part but tender and true at the coreâit is yours forever, even though the one you loved loves you no longer or never fully returned your devotion. The authentic core of love is eternal, even if the person who inspired it will never return to you. But you have to hold fast to it and fight through your despair, your disappointment, and your bitterness to find it, to resurrect it, to claim it. With work and with will, the consoling promise of Dylan Thomas's words comes true: “Though lovers be lost love shall not.”
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NOTES
2. Of Human Bondage
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1 . A study of 155 men and women (R. Baumeister, S. Wotman, and A. Stillwell, “Unrequited Love: On Heartbreak, Anger, Guilt, Scriptlessness, and Humiliation,”Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 3 [March 1993]: 377â394) found that only 2 percent of them had managed to avoid being on one side or the other of an unrequited love affair.
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2 . She did not speak or turn away
â“The End of Love,” by seventh- and eighth-century Indian poet Amaru, adapted from the Sanskrit
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3 . Compulsive disorder, which is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (now known popularly as OCD), is characterized by physical and mental activities that feel involuntary and aversive to the afflicted person, including intrusive thoughts and uncontrollable-seeming behavior (such as stalking, among driven unhappy lovers). Symptoms can range in severity from distressing to disabling. In contrast, addictions always involve physicalânot just psychicâdependency.
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4 . Since Freud's revelatory paper “Mourning and Melancholia” in 1917 (Standard Edition , vol. 14), it has been a basic tenet of psychoanalytic therapy that depression (the contemporary term for melancholia) is anger turned against the self.
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5 . Freud wrote a prescient paper about men who choose unavailable women: S. Freud, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love: A Special Type of Choice of Objects Made by Men,” inStandard Edition , vol. 11 (1910), 163â176.
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6 . I believe that overt or covert sexual passion is a sine qua non in obsessive love. However, sexual passion is what psychoanalysts call “overdetermined”; it has a multitude of meanings and complex origins.
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7 . Helen Fisher, Arthur Aron, and Lucy Brown, “Romantic Love: A Mammalian Brain System for Mate Choice,”Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 361 (2006): 2173â2186; Helen Fisher,Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: St. Martin's, 2004).
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8 . E. Hatfield and R. L. Rapson, “The Neuropsychology of Passionate Love and Sexual Desire,” inPsychology of Relationships , eds. E. Cuyler and M. Ackhart (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science, 2009), 1â26.
10 . Gestalt psychology (which is unrelated to Gestalt therapy) is a twentieth-century German school of experimental psychology that studies how people integrate and organize perceptual and cognitive information into meaningful wholes. The antithesis of behaviorism, which reduces behavior into discrete stimuli and responses, the Gestalt approach can be summarized as “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.”
11 . B. Zeigarnik, “On Finished and Unfinished Tasks,” inA Source Book of Gestalt Psychology , ed. W. D. Ellis (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 300â314.
12 . C. M. Seifert and A. L. Patalano, “Memory for Incomplete Tasks: A Re-Examination of the Zeigarnik Effect,” inProceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Chicago, 1991), 114â119.
13 . “[T]he suddenness and vehemence of the beginning [of] passion mark the great effort made to escape an intense psychical distress ⦠sometimes boredom or loneliness, a distaste or even dislike for oneself.⦔ Theodor Reik,A Psychologist Looks at Love (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1944), 43.Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 6 (London: National Press Agency), 196â97.
14 . D. Marazziti, “The Neurobiology of Love,”Current Psychiatry Reviews 1 (2005): 331â335.
15 . S. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” inStandard Edition , vol. 12 (1914).
16 . What is now referred to as “reenacting” used to be called “acting out,” a pejorative term that referred exclusively to the negative consequences of behavior that actually has multiple functions, some of them beneficial.
17 . “Abreaction” is a term from the early years of psychoanalysis (Studies on Hysteria was written by Freud and Josef Breuer in 1895), when Freud was experimenting with hypnosis to treat hysterical symptoms and noticed that reliving the full emotional force of traumatic experiences was therapeutic for his patients. Later on, he adopted interpretation as a preferableâand less explosiveâtechnique, with insight as the goal. In contemporary approaches to treating trauma, including attachment theory and the various relationship-oriented approaches to psychodynamic therapy, abreaction has been resurrected in new guises and has lost none of its curative power.
18 . According to the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896â1971), a founding member of the British Object Relations school in modern psychoanalysis, the “holding environment” of the therapeutic relationship offers the patient the same comfort and sustenance as a mother's loving arms give her child. D. W. Winnicott,The Child, the Family and the Outside World (New York: Perseus, 1987).
3. Vengeance Is Mine: The Dark Side of Rejected Love
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1 . It is intriguing that authors who have written about the pair have shown considerably more sympathy for Medea than for Jason. In Euripides's play, Medea never pays for her crimes and is conveyed in a dragon-drawn golden chariot sent by her grandfather, the sun god Helios, to Athens, where she remarries and has more children. Jason fares far worse. In Apollonius of Rhodes's third-century BC epicArgonautica , Jason is punished for breaking his vow to Medea by dying, miserable and alone, when his rotted ship,The Argo , falls on him while he sleeps, crushing him under its stern. Dante has him suffer an even more wretched fate: as a treacherous seducer, Jason inhabits the Eighth Circle of Hell inThe Inferno , where he is compelled to march about endlessly while being whipped by devils. Breaking vows was taken very, very seriously in the classical world and the Middle Ages.
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2 . All three networks made movies about the Fisher case, a first in television history.Newsweek rated them with garbage cans for trash content. The Harris case inspired only two made-for-TV movies, which were at least superficially more tasteful.
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4 . Kohut (1913â1981) was the founder of self psychology, a modern psychoanalytic approach focusing on the development and maintenance of a person's sense of self. With his emphasis on the centrality of the therapist's empathy in the analytic process, he has been a major influence on my thinking and my therapeutic stance. Kohut's most significant works areThe Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (New York: International Universities Press, 1971),The Restoration of Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1977), andHow Does Analysis Cure?, edited by Arnold Goldberg with Paul E. Stepansky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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5 . Heinz Kohut contrasts narcissistic rage with “mature aggression,” the more nuanced, less automatic, and not massively destructive response of a more integrated personality to damage inflicted by others.
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6 . The set of skills that underlie ego strength and other cognitive organizational and planning abilities has been located by contemporary neurophysiologists in the prefrontal cortex and is now widely known as “executive function.”
4. Betrayal
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1 . This delicious and profound observation is from Theodor Reik's autobiography in which this gifted therapist and writer on masochism and the criminal mind (he was one of the first psychologist/psychoanalysts without medical training and a forerunner of the current relational orientation in psychoanalysis) relates how he grasps a patient's reality through intuition, empathy, and self-exploration. Running from the Nazis, being rejected by the medical establishment in the United States, and his own temperament undoubtedly contributed to his understanding of the consolations of sadistic fantasy. Here is his interpretation of one of his own dreams:Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experiences of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 43.
5. Unrequited Love: My Golden One
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1 . Philip Bromberg's powerful paper “One Need Not Be a House to Be Haunted” in his bookAwakening the Dreamer: Clinical Journeys (Mahwah, NJ: Analytic Press, 2006), 153â73, presents a compelling clinical example of dissociation.
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2 . Sydney Smith, “The Golden Fantasy: A Regressive Reaction to Separation Anxiety,”International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 58, no. 3 (1977): 311â324. My relationship with Michael did not exactly replicate the fantasy Smith describes, but it had many of the same dynamics. Dr. Smith was for many years clinical director of the Menninger Foundation, a major American psychoanalytic training and treatment center then located in Topeka, Kansas. This paper is a classic in the field because it identifies a particular type of problematic relationship in a compelling, poetic way. Since I had independently used the same term to describe my own beloved, it had special significance for me.
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4 . Heinz Kohut, founder of self psychology, called “the gleam in the mother's eye” the essential act of delight and appreciation a mother gives an infant.
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5 . Psychoanalyst Leo Stone's term for the early role a mother plays in her child's development. Leo Stone,The Psychoanalytic Situation (New York: International Universities Press, 1977).
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6 . Martha Stark, “Transformation of Relentless Hope: A Relational Approach to Sadomasochism,” lifespanlearn.org/documents/STARKtranform.pdf, April 2006. Dr. Stark, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the contemporary relational tradition, teaches at Harvard Medical School.
