The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
one’s analyst is genuine, it isn’t enough. To be viable, love requires more than genuineness—it entails suffering. Real love needs to recognize and accept life’s laws and limitations. This is what it means to be ethical. It isn’t a question of doing what is “good,” but of doing what is right: whatever fits the occasion.
Yet, when Freud says that genuine love—if his patient were capable of it—would lead her to become docile and submissive, that she would strive to perform the analytic work in order to please him, is this entirely convincing? If she were docile, would she cease to experience erotic longings, or simply accept them? Is normality determined by the conscious control over one’s impulses, or the freedom from these impulses themselves? If hysteria, in particular, is epitomized by a demand for love that can be insatiable, is the demand itself pathological or simply one’s refusal to recognize it? What is it about erotic strivings, after all, that can be said to be “neurotic” when we know that the repression of those strivings is the cause of neurosis?
In his 1914 paper “On Narcissism” Freud proposed that all children set before themselves an ideal of themselves that, in turn, becomes the object of their erotic yearnings. “This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego” (1957c, 94). Because every child is reluctant to give up earlier sources of satisfaction, Freud argued that “when, as he [she] grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal” (94). Yet, a positive, or aggrandized, ego ideal cannot compensate for the absence of real sources of gratification—in the form of genuine love—from others. Freud concluded that “idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s mind” (94). In other words, other people compensate for the individual’s own sense of personal frustration and dissatisfaction. The qualities one wishes for oneself—qualities that might, in turn, be exalted by others—are projected onto someone else.
It isn’t difficult to appreciate how children, who rely on the comfort of idealizing phantasies to cope with the pain of their inherently frustrating emancipation, would resort to the same tendency when they grow older: to idealize other people as a way of procuring love, in phantasy. All analysts are an object for such idealization by their patients. In fact, the more we repress our desires, the more likely we will idealize others as a compensation. “Being loved” becomes a substitute for one’s impoverished capacity to love. This is why the tendency to idealize others is an essential component of “falling in love.” Idealizing is a magical transformation of one’s world. It has the power to circumvent repressions by elevating the sexual object into a benefactor. “Since, with the object type (or attachment type), being in love occurs in virtue of the fulfillment of infantile conditions for loving, we may say that whatever fulfills that condition is idealized” (101). In other words, “What possesses the excellence which the ego lacks for making it an ideal, is loved” (101).
Neurotics, who feel unloved and, in turn, are afraid to love, are in an impossible situation. They blame others for their impoverishment, yet long for them to relieve it. The analyst, the object of their “transferences,” becomes the ideal for this confused devotion. They hope the analyst can save them from their agony of isolation, to be their companion. The cure they envision is one that isn’t, however, the culmination of ceaseless effort, but rather a salvation at the instigation of a higher power. “This is a cure by love, which he [the neurotic] generally prefers to cure by analysis. Indeed, he cannot believe in any other mechanism of cure; he usually brings expectations of this sort with him to the treatment and directs them towards the person of the physician” (101). Inevitably, the patient’s own resistances to loving, a consequence of earlier repressions, renders his plan impossible. “Falling in love,” occasioning both erotic and idealized components, contains an unconscious plea for the other person—the analyst—to shower the patient with a love he is actually incapable of accepting. Freud conceived of idealization not only as a manifestation of erotism, but as a substitute for erotism too. In his book on group psychology, published seven years later (1921), Freud returned to the problem of determining the nature of love and whether or not it could possibly possess a realistic component. In this study he was specifically concerned with distinguishing between erotic love and its aim-inhibited derivative, affection. Now idealization is conceived as a “de-eroticizing” of one’s sexual inclinations, due to the repression that follows the Oedipus complex. If individuals subsequently fail to overcome their earlier adherence to the incest taboo in adolescence, their experience of erotism and their capacity for aim-inhibited (de-eroticized) affection may remain split off from each other and reappear in the form of a neurosis: the inability to feel both affection and sexual attraction for the same person.
Freud finally concluded that the more repressed one’s erotic longings, the more likely the tendency to idealize others. “If the sensual impulsions are more or less effectively repressed or set aside, the illusion is produced that the object has come to be sensually loved on account of its spiritual merits, whereas on the contrary these merits may really only have been lent to it by its sensual charm. The tendency which falsifies judgement in this respect is that of idealization” (1955b, 112). But how can we reconcile the apparent contradiction that repressed sexuality supposedly leads to an increase in noneroticized idealization, on the one hand, and the contrary idea that repression should result in increased eroticized idealization, on the other? Some patients in analysis experience a powerful erotic attraction for their analysts, whereas others manifest nonsexualized, “spiritualized” feelings of adoration. Often, many patients experience both, alternately or simultaneously. The tendency to split off the two—erotic attraction and, as Freud would say, aim-inhibited affection—is a common neurotic symptom. But Freud was intrigued by those patients who idealized their analysts without any apparent interest in or experience of manifest erotic feelings. Many patients complain that their lovers are only interested in sex. They denigrate the sexual act and narrowly define love in terms of a spiritual or mystical, nonphysical relationship. This is, perhaps, idealization par excellence: to love someone and to long for this love to be returned in the form of an intangible, mysterious “power,” unreachable, yet compelling. The repressions can be so severe that love is consequently experienced as the absence of—and freedom from—erotic demands. These two forms of idealization are not mutually exclusive. One, however, can be emphasized over the other and become a favored “compromise formation.”
Freud was still struggling to define the nature of love, its realistic and imaginary tendencies, in his paper on group psychology when he said: “Even in its caprices the usage of language remains true to some kind of reality. Thus it gives the name of ‘love’ to a great many kinds of emotional relationship which we too group together theoretically as love; but then again it feels a doubt as whether this love is real, true, actual love, and so hints at a whole scale of possibilities within the range of the phenomena of love” (1955b, 111). At bottom, the neurotic’s inability to love, inhibited by unconscious fears, leads to two alternative solutions: the tendency to idealize the other person so as to be loved, passively; or alternately, to simply repress one’s libidinal interest in others, capitulating to the anxieties that are inevitably aroused. Both of these responses become manifest in what Freud called “transference-love.”
Freud never arrived at an unambiguous definition of real love; perhaps because even real love, according to Freud, verged on the pathological. The distinction—if there is one—emerges somewhere along the difficult transition from the so-called pleasure to reality principles. No doubt Freud was a master at recognizing the deceptions in everyday protestations of love, of the neurotic’s inability to love. What is love, if its “realness” isn’t a determining factor? Freud’s attempt to distinguish between genuine love (a love sincere in its affect and heartfelt) and real love (one that is capable of sacrifice and that is practical) says something about his views on the nature of truth and reality. The unconscious harbors truths. These truths are contained in fantastic and unrealistic wishes. Freud realized that these truths, by their nature, are concealed. The task of psychoanalysis is to disclose them. But for what purpose and to what end? What’s