Valentine's Day is coming soon and instead of something light and fluffy,
it's a good a time as any to do a deep dive into intimate relationships. Social
connections and intimate relationships are the boogeyman for many people. Some
prefer being alone and others feel that intimate relationships are worth it,
even if there are a lot of conflicts. For them we are making social memories that
last a lifetime. Love is always worth it! Then there are another group of people
who treat it as a hobby and think that it's not worth taking seriously. It's a
cynical game where most of the fun is in the anticipation. Consummation leads to boredom.
Fond as Freud was of artists and their depictions of what love is
supposed to be, the important question still remained. What are the "necessary
conditions for loving?" As always the difficulty for analysands undergoing
psychoanalysis is how to...
In the world of love there's a no bigger gulf
than first dates. They often go nowhere, but some relationships begin here and radically
alter the life paths of each partner. One of the biggest stressors for any human
being is navigating between what people want and what is available. With "poetic license"
writers can contrive results, which has its own form of satisfaction
for the writer, who gets to write their dreams and fancies, and for the reader,
who gets to imagine a more interesting world than their own. In the real world
of love, contrivance is just a fancy word for manipulation. Most people loathe
manipulation, but find it hard to avoid completely.
Manipulation of others and of oneself is essentially conflict. In Freud's three
papers on the subject of Love, he moves in those directions that are more
unpleasant and these unpleasant situations are mostly absent in many
romantic novels. Of course the Neo-Freudian René Girard selected stories
for his analysis that buck the trend and illuminate how difficult it is to
maintain bliss in a real relationship. Freud warned that...
When we snap out of our romantic fog and use a scientific gaze,
unsettling details come into focus, and no one is exempt. The one leveling
feature of love is seeing patterns that can apply to...
Finding quality partners is difficult and conflict over scarcity is omnipresent in dating circles.
Regardless of status, everyone feels the internal command: "Act now, or else you'll miss out!"
It can lead to rash decisions, obsessive ambivalence, and a number of
other neurotic consequences. We follow the pleasure principle, but find pain instead.
Freud focused on men in his first paper of the love trilogy in A Special Type of Choice of Object by Men,
which has many patterns that can also be observed in
the modern world with women and others with different sexual orientations.
One of the first necessary conditions for love is envy. Like Girard emphasized,
Freud was aware of the herd mentality of humans. We need social proof for our
choices, even if we lose connection with facts, the only proof we actually need to
make a good choice. Through transference we all rely on self-anointed experts,
human idols and parental replacements to bless our decisions,
but the freest person focuses on objective markers that consistently appear in reality.
Whether the herd decides which properties to invest in, or which people
we should marry, both objects and people can be over or under-valued.
How this often appears in relationships is when couples are newly married. The social
gathering, the wedding party and the wedding ring itself, all symbolize
value to onlookers. Single people left on the side will never look as enticing as those already taken.
At some point somebody authentically chooses someone, and those who are
ignoring on the side become jealous, when before the choice was made the
third parties did not care enough to act. The scary thing is that this still applies
for the newlyweds as well. The choices we make with who we marry tend to sparkle
with all the excitement of marriage ceremonies. What is forgotten in all of
our excitement with all the socially blessed choices is that social
authorities are not living with these choices, we are. Social attention, what
Otto Fenichel called Narcissistic Supply, is not always available. When all the
chemical excitement of the marriage celebration and honeymoon dies away,
boredom rears its ugly head. Boredom can appear with the repeated procedures of
home-economics, that resemble many boring workplaces. Sex that was new, fails to
reveal mystery. Depending on how mismatched the couple is, many will quite
quickly seek for replacement excitements in the form of affairs.
Just like in a workplace, employers and employees can take each other for
granted. Exploitation can also follow boredom
when partners need more and more to stave off the empty feeling associated
with what is not mysterious anymore. Nothing is ever good enough and very
quickly over-valuation turns into under-valuation.
Partners are blamed for not succeeding in keeping the exciting chemicals flowing.
Quite naturally blame and cheating and a need to win, replace all
those beautiful vows that were made at the beginning. It's a great lesson at
match-making. Unless the match-maker actually knows a lot about the people
being matched, it's really just a guess. Intelligent partners work out
life negotiations before they marry. Predictable red flags can be assessed
before taking the plunge. A good meditation practice would be to watch
how objects and people increase in valence in your perception, or how things
standout, when social proof is being blessed on people or objects. The people
or objects shine in a way that can distort actual value.
The next precondition for lustul attraction comes from the first.
A lot of pleasure is the pleasure of winning, conquest and revenge. For many people conflict is a
sadistic spice that adds to the flavour of desire. It's an...
The sadistic motivation of rivalry is also boosted by jealousy
caused by the flirtatious target...
Here we have René Girard's triangular desire that he applies in all areas
where there is a mediator of desire, or role model, but his theory was inspired
by Freud's love triangle. Instead René transformed love into a transference and
with Girard transference worship is in any area where there's fandom.
Celebrity is simply celebrating role models. Social proof enhances people and objects.
This hints at the importance for social rewards for survival and procreation and
the mind is constantly searching for signs. We can own those signs, dress up
in them and marry them. When people share the same symbols then there's a hovering
and potential for conflict. It's both threatening and tantalizing.
Like the ancient tribes, being the hero that hunts and brings back the kill confers social
rewards so that the threat of conflict is offset by the promise of reward.
Sometimes Freud's third wheel sticks around longer than you would expect,
enjoying the excitement of the triangle.
This is the attractiveness of "sluts", as Serge Pankejeff called them in Part 3 of The 'Wolfman.'
This of course used to only apply to women, but men can be sluts too. These are the people who
manufacture intensity with flirtation. As you can see in my video of René Girard's theories,
possession kills intensity. Flirtatious people who are otherwise attached,
create the sense that they cannot be possessed.
This increases intensity so that partners must be won back over and over again.
It is why people can hover in toxic relationships, because the intensity
isn't always pleasurable and a lot of the pleasure comes from increasing
intensity to get a pay-off of relief with consummation; to manipulate how the brain
responds to conquests, to maximize the high of relief. This is how people can
hover in these relationships even if it looks torturous. In fact it has to be
torturous or there's no anticipation of relief. It's the typical stereotype of
men chasing and women trying to get more attention. The greater the high,
the greater the conditioning to repeat. It's often said that people leave toxic relationships
many times before they leave for good.
One of the quickest ways to get out of the cycle of abuse, which is all about
this manipulation of intensity, is to either cherish your alone time with
interesting projects to reconnect again with the lost self, or to find the
insight that peace away from all these ups and downs is happiness.
If intensity always falls into boredom or stress it's a never ending roller-coaster.
People can get fed up, and if they have found a calling elsewhere, then
the threat of loneliness that motivated desperate searches for a new
relationship disappears. People can feel just as lonely in relationships and that
realization leads one to make new choices with one's time. The lonely
feeling has more to do with having nothing meaningful to occupy your time,
not that you need a romantic partner.
When people lose their drug of choice,
and there's no replacement, it's easy to fall back on these dark relationships.
The social brain becomes a trap and the individual self starts to fall apart.
All their projects and goals take a backseat to the relationship,
and self-esteem reduces. For example, if the person is objectively young
and attractive, their allure increases with social competition.
They become lustfully irresistible. The hunger and yearning starts to animate
action that can often embarrass the pursuers as their self-esteem decreases
with all the debasing they do to win over their target. Debasing is the
abandoning of all one's self-goals in order to get a social reward.
Since self-esteem is modulated by social concerns, as Girard pointed out, the
hunter becomes masochistic and the hunted, narcissistic. Typically this was the male
chasing the female, but most modern people can detect this pattern in any
sexual combination. Some Girardians like Jean-Michel Oughourlian, actually are
tempted by the idea of increasing intensity with flirtation and threats to cheat.
The idea is that if it's done consciously, both partners can channel
their lustful hunger back to each other and remain in the relationship. Of course
this is not looking far enough down the road of consequences. Any intentional
flirting will increase the energy of the person flirting and decrease the energy
of the hapless target when they are no longer useful and discarded. That energy
exchange can create conflict because you are using others as a battery. Also the
brain knows which person is the old partner and who is the new target.
There's no guarantee that each individual will gain enough energy to
continue the old relationship. Hence many Narcissists move on to endless partners
until their social or objective value fades with age. Fidelity is rated so
highly by so many people, but in the end...
The blindness of each subjective point of view is perceptively seen by Freud. The attention is away from the trap of the
endless string of lovers and only focused on how to be of value to the next target.
Freud then goes back into the childhood of these men, and sees the Oedipus Complex again.
The 1st romantic triangle of rivalry with the father to obtain the mother.
"Mother-surrogates." In modern slang the term would be "Motherfuckers."
So the next time you see a conflict in a love triangle and someone is called
a motherfucker, they may not actually be wrong and both men may be implicated
depending on how similar the pursued female is to their mothers. You can catch
yourself being caught in the "motherfucker" template when you are
attracted to a woman that has a similar profession to your mother, or has looks
or body language that is familiar and comfortable like your mother.
Notice sexual feelings arising when this happens.
Familiarity reduces stress and increases sexual desire, and unfamiliarity
increases stress and reduces sexual desire. Mindfulness helps you catch these
embarrassing intentions. Now you don't have to avoid women who are in that template,
especially if they are good partners, but if it's an unhealthy template,
based on bullying and abuse, it's an opportunity to try and
appreciate women who might be better for you and move into a different trajectory in your life.
The new object-choice may provide fresh challenges and if a person
is secure if there is rejection and persistent in their search,
they may find what they really need. Some people need to divorce first before they
start considering more features of what they need in a partner than they did originally.
Freud goes back to the template of the Oedipus Complex, but Jean-Michel
focuses on a different angle. He calls it possession. When you want
your spouse back you are also wanting to be in the place of the new suitor.
You are possessed by their rival personality. There's a temptation to copy their
winning tactics. It's the main way people can get into your head, by taking your spot.
It's a territorial feeling, possibly connected with serotonin, where you
desire to be back in that good comfortable spot. Like a cat in a sunbeam,
or a bird perched up high above with a perfect view of the scenery and their prey.
Humans are also animals and want a nice spot in relationships and also the workplace.
Intensity is most felt when you are about to gain a spot or to lose one.
The corresponding need for revenge is powerful. Notice how you can be
obsessed with enemies in the workplace and catch yourself. Realize that you are
obsessed because you want a spot that others want, or they are in a spot you
used to have. Relief happens when you find a different spot that is open.
Being open to a variety of spots will reduce your neurosis over others.
Girard called it an "ontological disease", or a being disease when one can't help
but obsess about rivals. Knowing that having a spot kills intensity also helps with relief.
This means that the winner can only take pleasure in the conquest.
When the loser is no longer around for comparison pleasure, the winner has to
find new targets for competition to avoid boredom. A loser who is flexible
can also find undervalued people and situations which leads to a social
happiness that can be added to a meditation practice. This is a more
Christian meditation where the belief of a permanent spot for happiness is abandoned.
Winners are never completely satisfied. This is what allows for flexibility.
Coveted professions and romantic partners are a fools gold
leading to endless stressful conflict. It's possible for a winner to actually
be a loser in one's emotional life. The neurosis of chasing a perfect spot leads
to substitute pleasures in the form of addictions, entertainment, religion or
politics as a means of escape. This fits the pattern of people looking for
replacements when they lose their perch or valued partner. The so called "losers"
of society have to learn flexibility, sublimate or breakdown. This is seen very
acutely in bad economic times when lifestyles have to be curtailed.
People grieve and go through withdrawal symptoms of their old life and start
debasing themselves in preparation for blame and abandonment, when their
partners don't like the changes. The problem with The Spot, and why it goes
out of scope in this article and into another project on Group Psychology,
is that people either get bored with the spot and start searching out other spots,
mostly with an eye on a role model, and unconsciously, or in some cases
onsciously, this works to escalate conflict with the person already in The Spot.
A lack of appreciation for the current Spot can be a problem and so is
the blindness towards your new Spot that you want and the wrong belief that it
isn't already wanted by someone else. Again the Blue Ocean Strategy focuses
more on spots that are undervalued and the perception improves with that attitude.
Most people, like a stampeding herd, move into the most coveted spots
which so many vie for and don't realize the mental health problems they are
running into, including obsessive thoughts about
rivalry and PTSD. I've even run into random examples of
this in my own life. For example, at a seminar in Phoenix, I went to a really
good breakfast place. I was sitting next to another American and I casually
mentioned that I was Canadian. He eventually started talking about another
Canadian he knew.
The look on his face was a mild embarrassment mixed with envy and aggression. I felt like he was warning me.
Why envy is my favourite subject is that it's a taboo and people
react to those feelings but try to disguise them, yet body language starts
to betray them. Usually an embarrassed smile gives it away. I come from a
Conservative background but this kind of Conservative, ethnic entitled socialism,
is not for me. I responded that "Americans live in Canada and we try to treat them nicely.
We live in a global economy. Americans work around the world." Now this
isn't to pick on Americans, because this stuff is everywhere there are humans
vying for a Spot in life. An example I clearly remember in Canada was an
Accounting Seminar for a designation that I shall not name, where it was openly
discussed that to change your name to an Anglophone equivalent would increase
your chances of getting hired. The audience was depressed and murmuring,
but we were just to accept this. There are other examples I remember, but I've
linked to some intelligent ones below involving teaching in Vietnam and
people's experiences in Japan. The lesson is that one must eliminate any romantic
notions of different countries and what they can offer you.
Our standard of living is very interdependent on social hierarchies and
what they will allow you to have. And even if you get disgusted with
right wing politics, and you try the left, you will ultimately find the exact same concerns there.
Unions have to limit the supply of labour to increase the cost of
labour for their supporters. Hierarchies are there too.
To be a free thinker in the end is to be an independent politically, where you are
skeptical of power structures in any system. In the end all of us will end up
in a Spot that is a coffin or an urn. The Spot, or heaven doesn't exist on this planet,
and this insight will keep repeating.
Part of the difficulty in trying to move beyond relationship templates that are old and comfortable
is the stress of taking a risk. The biggest risk a person can make is choosing an
intimate partner, especially one that is more challenging in a good way. As Freud
pointed out in many different ways, our stress can repress our cravings or libido.
Some of the reasons for impotence are inferred by Freud to be unconscious obstacles.
These disturbances for Freud often started in childhood where the love and
lust aren't developed to a mature level.
Like a lot of Freud's theories there are libidinous currents that can ally together on an
object or split off with different objects.
Of course the path from child to marriage is fraught with obstacles and...
If you are mindful you can detect family templates being selected unconsciously and Freud here talks about these
unconscious templates and how they continue to operate.
It's easier to venture for a comfortable familiar target than it is to risk rejection on other paths.
In some cases rejection is total or very close to it. Freud describes what happens to
the mind when reality is unsatisfactory.
Because the sexuality has turned to imagination as a replacement, Freud worried that it would result in...
...in real sexual relations. Of course this doesn't mean
impotence in the sexual organs, but that new realistic healthy templates are not
approached. This can be seen in modern days with pornography inadequately
filling the gap left by broken relationships. Rampant divorce and fewer
people marrying have led to a dystopian sexual world. With sex dolls beginning to
enter the market, sex becomes an unrealistic template where a passive
partner just does whatever the excited customer wants in a one-sided way.
The affective current stays with childhood oedipal templates and lust moves in
different directions where there is no love.
The sensual and the affective become split.
For Freud the feature of how sexuality appears when sacred is separated from profane, consists in...
This for Freud leads to perversions because sexuality
is associated with the debased and the sacred locked in prohibition. It is why
higher and virtuous forms of love can appear unsexy to many people. So for
Freud the desire for mother from childhood and disgust in response to
these desires in adulthood, when unconscious desires become conscious, can
lead to being turned off. Debasing the partner becomes necessary to bring sexual desire back.
Modern man for Freud only...
For Freud, the awareness of the sacred mother figure
acceptance of incestual desires is actually the beginning of fusing
together the affectionate and sensual currents.
The new partner's countenance being like that of the mother is accepted,
but relief is also obtained because that person ultimately is not
the mother. The benefits of having sex with someone that is not a member of the
family can be joined with the benefits of harmony with someone who is
understood and familiar. This trap of separating debased objects from sacred
ones has its effect on women as well. Sex is considered dirty and not good, so good
girls remain chaste for too long. They become a wife where there is love but no lust,
and the wife is denied full passion.
Then when you add the prohibition of
sex aimed at women, especially in Freud's time,
The frigidity and debasing tendencies for Freud come from
This is a difficult problem for civilization, but Freud doesn't advocate complete sexual liberation.
Just like with Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, and
countless other theorists that are influenced by Freud, there's a sexual
Flow that can become boring.
A big part of the cycle of abuse is the debasing of objects to
breakdown boundaries, increase excitement and surmount obstacles to sex.
Milder forms of debasing appear in teasing and put-downs.
Ease of sex leads to boredom and signs pointing to that insight appear in history.
Freud then later compares the value of social barriers, like those imposed by religions, with alcoholics who
get a tolerance for their favourite wine but grow accustomed to it by habit
because barriers for other choices of wine are too steep, such as distance,
money and prohibition. If there's enough prohibition of sex,
including prohibition of infidelity, then available partners become habitual.
Freud compounds the lack of satisfaction that people
feel not just from external obstacles, but also internal ones. Freud surmises
that satisfaction can't be complete because many partners are surrogates for
childhood templates, and also because some perversions have to be repressed in
civilized society. Then he searches for more sexual limits in the human need for
complete sexual satisfaction, by surmising that if all sexual desires
could be satisfied completely, there would be no reason to develop culture.
Here I think Freud didn't explore enough avenues for why boredom exists. Humanity
has had to struggle against nature to survive for so long that too much
pleasure would weaken survivability.
Humans were so busy with survival that
it would be impossible to be copulating all the time, and indeed that was the case.
René Girard also focused on later conceptions of happiness that Freud
zeroed in on in his future On Narcissism, and the case study of The 'Wolfman.'
This is his perception that to be in a floating oceanic religious experience, like prayer
or meditation, is a re-creation of the womb. All needs are met there with no effort,
but all of our worldly responsibilities
make this impossible. All pleasure has a limit.
The famous rat experiment where the rat preferred addiction over food, is a clear
answer that too much pleasure interferes with survival. This supports Freud's
worry that too much copulation would lead to no development, but the rat in
this case had a tool put into it's head. Biology by itself will limit pleasure.
The closest comparison would be a drug addiction where the brain biology is hacked,
but even there one finds tolerance or overdose. The search for a
heaven of endless pleasure will always fail because there are consequences for
too much or too little pleasure. It all points to balance again.
This was a thread from the early to late Freud. Social goals and individual goals have always been a trade-off.
Conflicts over desire can manifest in civilization as macro
demands for collective survival with large organizations, or in micro demands with partners and families.
Naturally my next exploration will have to move onto
mimetics, groups and the herd mentality. Early psychological thinkers loved
staying with the forest and tantalizingly left the trees for other
thinkers to focus on. Errors are found in the trees and new theories developed, but
today we find ourselves lost in the trees and forget about the forest,
or the big picture. Both the trees and the forest are
important because as individuals we are still dependent on the stability of
everyone else in society. A lot of what interferes in relationships is exactly
that big picture of unforeseen influences. Oligarchies, politics,
economics and social climbing are chaotic traffic we have to navigate.
Girard said that...
In his literary studies he compared the story of Tristan and Isolde to the narcissism that couples force onto each other.
A lot of your attractiveness is not only if people are pursuing you for a romantic relationship,
but also being in demand in a career. If you are in demand in society
and the money is flowing then you become more attractive by proxy with your lifestyle.
This is part of the reason why royalty and celebrity is so attractive to people.
People can day-dream themselves into your lifestyle, that you are paying for, and get excited.
...which leads to...
Our attractiveness ebbs and flows with how our jobs change, age, health and also if
we have a tantalizing potential. True love in the end is when people love
their partner's personality and good intentions, even when there's little fanfare
and demand from society. Life is going to take everything away from us,
but we can still love what's left.
