april 29, 2025 (freud on love, part 1)
when i was in college, i started a newsletter. and then as now, it was meant to be a place for me to put forth my ideas tentatively, to see how they felt on the page and in the world. this is meant to be the same, though with a bit more of a critical bent, let’s say.
the first piece i am including here is, unfortunately, reuse. but i remembered it today because I mentioned it to my psychoanalyst. it’s meant to excavate something of Freud’s understanding of love. this is the first part, citations and all. i’ll include the next part later (perhaps next week)
“A man who doubts his own love”: Doubt, Love, and Risk
I. Introduction
It took me a year and a half after my first relationship to understand that risk inheres in love. It is not only in the moment of disclosure, the high drama of confessing one’s love and the resultant comedy or tragedy of having the confession returned or not. It is in each gesture and moment spent together that one is asking whether I am still worthy of love, of your love in particular, whatever high price you think it demands. It is only the freedom to leave and the risk of your leaving, after all, that makes the decision to stay by my side worth noting.
I have made a habit of understanding my life in economic terms; this may be why I came to understand love as having a price, and of the profits of love as like those of any investment, wherein it is only because of the risk that love is any prize at all. If this is the case, then Freud’s claim that “[a] man who doubts his own love may, or rather must, doubt every lesser thing,” strikes me with its suggestion that love can be anything but doubtful, fraught with risks and the potential for loss (Freud, 1909, p. 241). Or is the problem with my understanding of what it means to doubt? Or even with my understanding of love itself?
The result is that this paper tries to excavate Freud’s claim without claiming to know too much in advance, but rather, to approach the claim as a pessimistic romantic—one who hopes Freud is right, but fears this isn’t the case. Is this, then, a paper that partakes of psychoanalysis or of philosophy? I am reminded of Jean-Luc Nancy’s suggestion that the “intimate connivance between love and thinking is present in our origins: the word ‘philosophy’ betrays it. Whatever its legendary inventor might have meant by it, ‘philosophy,’ in spite of everything—and perhaps in spite of all philosophies—means this: love of thinking, since thinking is love” (Nancy, 1991, p. 81). Put rather differently, love’s relationship to the thought (the philosophical) and the still-unthought (the psychoanalytic, and in particular, the pre- and unconscious) is not merely one of identity, but might be one of mediation, that understanding love and making it possible are the aims of philosophy and psychoanalysis alike.
II. Approaching Love
A. What love is.
It is true, in our time as in Freud’s, that “[w]e know too little of the nature of love to be able to arrive at any definite conclusion here,” on love’s appearance or limits, but it is useful to try and understand what Freud himself might have meant by love, or how he understood what love does and makes possible. I am rather more interested in one form of love, that between a single ego and an object, than in the broader civilizational forms of love of which Freud theorizes. I also set aside Freud’s critique of universal love, not least because Freud does not seem to understand it as real love.
Freud writing in 1914 struck an optimistic note—"The highest phase of development of which object-libido is capable is seen in the state of being in love, when the subject seems to give up his own personality in favour of an object-cathexis” (Freud, 1917, p. 76). That is, love is a developmental achievement, requiring that one be able to project one’s energies outward, toward outside objects other than the ego (in the Strachey translation, these are the “object-cathexes”) (Freud, 1917, p. 75).
Here, I might take a moment to point at the language of cathexis, the Strachey translation of the German Besetzung; cathexis being a Stracheyian invention, I am rather more interested in Freud’s own translation of Besetzung to “interest,” which he put forth somewhat tentatively in a November 20, 1909 letter written in English to biographer Ernest Jones (Jones, 1953, p. 63). An interest, in the frame that Freud writes in, might be taken legalistically—a legal right or entitlement in something, or an investment of money into an object. In framing Besetzung as a kind of interest, Freud admits of an economistic view of love, too: an interest in land might be sold to yield profits, just as an interest in a person might be deposited or withdrawn (turning the love-object into a bank might be revealing too, of how much trust we place in our love-objects, and how devastating it would be to lose access; think only of the global financial crises set off by bank collapses). Without making too much of the metaphor—Freud’s or mine—we might consider Michael Hardt’s observation that “[t]he expression ‘for love or money’ is generally used to indicate the two extremes, which cover between them the entire spectrum” (Hardt, 2011). That is, there are two extreme objects of desire—love and money—and it seems telling of a poverty (of language or of imagination) that love is represented in the terms of the other. This is hardly distinct from what Freud claims as his starting point, the “saying of the poet-philosopher, Schiller, that 'hunger and love are what moves the world,'” where hunger is the ego’s drive to preservation and eros the species’ drive to the same (Freud, 1930, p. 117). Hunger or money, Freud’s point is that it is the material basis for survival (the ego-instincts) that organize an individual’s private life, whereas love is the organizing principle of social life and its satisfactions (object-instincts).
Yet if the ability to love is an achievement and a marker of development gone right, that development is not without its losses, namely in the loss of egoism’s defense—"A strong egoism is a protection against falling ill,” writes Freud later, “but in the last resort we must begin to love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we are unable to love” (Freud, 1917, p. 85). Love exposes us to risk at every turn, then, as Freud readily admits. It is both in holding tight to investments in ego and giving up our investments in ego for the prospect of love that we expose ourselves to the possibility of neurosis. Yet for Freud, as risky as it is, it is “begin[ning] to love” that is the last resort. It is in love, too, that Freud most readily identifies the “oceanic” feelings associated with religion, which Freud admits of almost sheepishly, writing that “towards the outside, at any rate, the ego seems to maintain clear and sharp lines of demarcation. There is only one state—admittedly an unusual state, but not one that can be stigmatized as pathological—in which it does not do this. At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away” (Freud, 1930, p. 66) (emphasis mine). Love, in this view, is nearly regressive, reminiscent of the infant at the breast and his inability to distinguish his mother’s breast from his own body; as the typical pattern of development allows the ego to separate “off an external world from itself,” the ego-feeling of love resembles the infantile state in quality, though not in degree (“Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it.”) (Freud, 1930, p. 68). That the only true experience of such ego-dissolution should be infantile finds proof in the infantile repetitions that characterize love, and in the adoption of God as a paternal figure.
In his discussion of the methods of achieving happiness (satisfying the pleasure principle), Freud sees love—“cling[ing] to the objects belonging to that [external] world and obtain[ing] happiness from an emotional relationship to them” as perhaps coming closer to happiness than any other method, that “way of life which makes love the centre of everything, which looks for all satisfaction in loving and being loved” (Freud, 1930, p. 82). It is not only happiness, of course, but also that “we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love” (Freud, 1930, p. 87). For Freud, love is the aim—the highest stage of ego development, the best defense against neurosis, the closest thing Freud sees to divinity, and the most readily available method for achieving human happiness. It is also a source of vulnerability, of suffering, and of letting the outside world in—sometimes, too much so, such that we become defenseless. At the level of mass psychology, it is love relationships that “constitute the essence of the group mind” and “Eros and Ananke [Love and Necessity]” which are “the parents of human civilization,” seeking to tame the aggressive drives (Freud, 1922, p. 91, 1930, p. 101).
My treatment so far has been of Freud’s views as a philosopher more than as a clinician. Yet it was at least with some clinical interest that Freud investigated and opined on love, if for no other reason than that Freud’s patients so often longed for love or rejected love or otherwise found themselves entangled in love’s vines. But as Max Hernández writes, the essential paradox of psychoanalytic treatment is that “love is the motor of the analytic cure as well as the main obstacle to it” (Hernández, 2013, p. 98). Transference-love as it arises in the clinical situation is characteristically “composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones,” though “this is the essential character of every state of being in love” (Freud, 1914, pp. 167–168). Those repetitions might be tied to the stereotypes of any early relationship, the father-imago or that of the mother or brother. Taken alongside Freud’s description of the infantile near-regression that characterizes being in love, it becomes clear that an analyst might approach transference-love as making evident the infantile expressions of love, allowing the ego’s defenses to weaken that the repressions which obstruct the course of love might be addressed more directly. For Freud, the clinical transference-love performs “the inestimable service of making the patient's hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie” (Freud, 1914, p. 108). It is the earlier imago, the stereotype and cliché that leads to an underdetermined understanding of love that must be destroyed, first in having the patient become acquainted with the resistance and then in “continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work” (Freud, 1914, p. 155). Laying out this process and the technique that accompanies it is the key technical intervention of the three papers on transference, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” “The Dynamics of Transference,” and “Observations on Transference-Love” when they are taken together.
But beyond the waters of psychoanalytic technique, Freud also implies something of the character of love more generally—not only that it is repetitious and clichéd, but also that love is characterized by an ambivalence (indeed, Freud seems to use the word “ambivalence,” so vital to contemporary psychoanalytic discourse, for the first time in “Dynamics of Transference,” suggesting that love is the archetypal ambivalence): the feeling of love can be motivated by a desire to play a clichéd role (Freud’s stereotypical example is the woman scorned, but it may just as easily be the man who “leaves [treatment] too soon” to avoid intimacy and its disappointments, see Schaverien, 1997), but love is also a kind of optimism, “if we describe optimism as the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own” (Berlant, 2011, pp. 1–2). Love draws together the ego and the object for the precise reason that an inability to move beyond one’s narcissism leads to illness and neurosis: the ego desires love as protection from its own aggressions and self-destructive drives (this is surely related to the aims of “Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. ...[M]en are to be libidinally bound to one another (Freud, 1930, p. 122)). Love’s purpose, in the analytic situation as outside of it, is to afford the ego connection and the “oceanic feeling,” staving off isolation and an untamed death-drive.
My purpose here is not to catalogue Freud’s visions of love, a task that is somewhat hopeless for its ambitions. Rather, I am seeking to clarify what Freud might mean by love—what he believes it to be, how and where it becomes active, and what it looks like when it does. But at least as important to understanding Freud’s views on love is understanding how Freud understood the loss of love. Rather than attempt the same kind of assembly as above, which seeks to collect Freud’s scattered contemplations on love in search of unity, this paper focuses on “Mourning and Melancholia,” which some would take as Freud’s key work on the subject of losing the love-object. But I offer that this early paper is incomplete, lacking an understanding of the interminable, compulsive and repetitive nature of loss that Freud would develop later in life—particularly after the deaths of his daughter Sophie in 1920 and his grandson Heinele in 1923, and realizing that losing them would sit with Freud long afterwards (Freud, 1926).