Humble

And if love and hate is the basic polarity which is at the heart of mental and psychic life, then what does love actually mean? How do we define and explain love? In essence, there are two kinds of love, namely, self-love or love for a love object. The whole process of love, and love can perhaps be seen as a process, as Freud noted, is the transformation of self-love or “narcissism” into love for a love object. Love, therefore, amounts to sacrifice, particularly a sacrifice of the self. Narcissistic love is therefore opposed to love for a love object. 

Narcissistic love, as Freud argued, is “defending itself against the demands of object-love, and therefore against the demands of sexuality in the narrower sense as well.” Love is also highly “unintelligible.” It is something which cannot be understood. It can be understood only to the extent that love is perhaps seen as “residual effects of childhood.” But one can only speculate when stating this. Nevertheless, and as Freud noted: “Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks.” 

However, and as Freud argued, being in love “is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena.” Self-regard is “diminished” in love, while the absence of love leads to an increase in self-regard. But in both cases, namely, self-love and love for a love object, the aim is to be loved. A person in love is “humble.” To borrow from Freud: “A person who loves has, so to speak, forfeited a part of his narcissism, and it can only be replaced by his being loved. In all these respects self-regard seems to remain related to the narcissistic element in love.” 

By virtue of love, the ego is subject to and is “injured” by “sexual trends which are no longer subject to control.” Hence, the lowering or the diminution of the sense of self-regard in love. The ego and thus narcissism are built up “only by a withdrawal of libido from its objects.” Self-love is much easier and happier than love for a love object. As Freud wrote: “The return of the object-libido to the ego and its transformation into narcissism represents, as it were, a happy love once more; and, on the other hand, it is also true that a real happy love corresponds to the primal condition in which object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished.” 

As stated before, the ego and the libido cannot be distinguished from one another in the first place, given that the final inference and conclusion of psychoanalysis is that no other energy can be distinguished from the libido in the life of the psyche. And this lack of distinction between ego and libido is most evident in self-love, as we have mentioned just now. Love complicates the relationship of the ego with the external world. Normally, the ego is “marked off” from everything else in the world. But as Freud noted: “At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away.” The boundaries between the ego and the external world are therefore never “constant.” The tendency of the ego is to cut itself off from the external world. Yet, it is this blurring of the boundaries between the ego and the external world which is the basic foundation of civilization and human life.