What Freud called love is the desire to possess the beloved as a predator possesses its prey, based on the mistaken belief that the beloved is as necessary to the lover's existence as food is. He claimed we all fall in love with a woman who reminds us of our mother because she was our source of nourishment when we were infants, and falling in love as adults infantilizes us.
What we call love is an illusion based on a naïve overestimation and idealization of the beloved. In reality all women are alike, which perhaps explains why Freud appears to have had an affair with his wife’s sister.
Or his affair may have been an example of the Rachel/Leah illusion, in which a man marries a woman and then discovers, too late, that she’s not the ideal woman he imagined. The man usually blames his wife for deceiving him, when it’s his naïveté that’s responsible for his mistake.
A woman, according to the old saying, marries a man hoping he’ll change (i.e., will mature) and a man marries a woman hoping she won’t change (i.e., will remain his infantile ideal).
Ironically Freud claimed women it's women who are childlike, and therefore untrustworthy. Beautiful women are especially dangerous to men because they’re narcissists, and love themselves more than they do any man. But she was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen outside of a movie (and she didn’t have a key light), and as good as she was beautiful, which is why everyone who knew her loved her.
Adolfo was no exception. “You don’t understand her the way I do,” he told me, “because you’re an American, and she’s a typical European woman”. His naïveté amused me because he was a psychiatrist, and therefore should have understood her, and me (and himself), better. To me the supposed otherness of women seemed less than than the otherness of Americans.
Women in a patriarchal society are constrained by the expectations of men; but European women learn how to play the game, and manipulate men’s rules to their advantage, while American women want to change the rules. I enjoyed watching her because she did it so well, and because I also enjoyed manipulating the rules.
Beauty gives a woman power, but every woman knows it also sets limits on what she can do, because it arouses expectations in others; and when we don’t conform to the expectations of others, they blame us, not their own naïveté, for deceiving them.
Freud said mourning is the natural process by which we deal with the loss of a beloved. Melancholia is pathological because it never ends.
She wasn't and isn't necessary to my existence. I can live without her, but I’m a different person without her; and I don’t like the person I’ve become. I mourn the person I was with her; therefore I suffer from what the articles call ‘homoerotic mourning’, which is the loss of my ideal self, the person I could be and should be.
Most people eventually come to believe this ideal self is not lost to them, but is embodied in someone they love as they can’t love themselves. This explains not only hero worship, but also homosexual love, which seems to me as much a mistake as Freud thought heterosexual love was. All three overestimate and idealize the beloved.
Freud was almost right in saying we love the beloved as a predator loves its prey, because the only way we can possess the beloved is by making her (or him) part of us: emulating her, and making her virtues ours. In loving her I loved myself, or that part of me which most men learn to suppress in order to become men as our society defines manhood. But I can’t love myself without her. Or rather I have no incentive, no desire, to do so without her.
Freud was also almost right in saying all women are alike. All women - and all men, too – are alike, despite their differences, in that all deserve to be loved. But not by me. I used to love them all because I saw in her what we all could and should be. Now I love no one.
The articles are mostly written by genderqueer authors who claim most people suffer from homoerotic mourning because our society refuses to allow men to love other men, and women to love other women, sexually. It seems to me that, on the contrary, our society refuses to let men love other men, and women to love other women, except sexually. Freud taught us that love is merely a euphemism for lust.
There is a place in heterosexual society for homosexuals, just as there is a place in patriarchal society for women, so long as they masochistically embrace their inferiority. Their inferiority confirms the superiority of (heterosexual) men, as well as the danger of love in a society based on war.
Heterosexuality and homosexuality are equally perverse when the only way we can express our love for each other is sexual. Sex is what we settle for when we aren’t allowed to love, therefore most of us learn to live without love. Homosexual panic, the fear that if we allowed ourselves to love others we would masochistically embrace our inferiority to them, makes us unable to love anyone, including ourselves.
Society expects all of us, men as well as women, to conform to our respective social roles, of which gender roles are only one. Our pundits devote their attention to gender roles because it allows them to ignore the others.
No comments:
Post a Comment