How Do You Know When You Are In Love?

Different Types of Love: passive love and active love; love at first sight

Published on April 25, 2013 by Philippa Perry in How to Stay Sane

If you ask someone to describe what being in love feels like, they will describe something that sounds like sexual passion and desire tinged with obsession. As far as our genes are concerned, sexual desire is where it’s at, and it’s a strong drive, so after a brush with passion we might find ourselves saying, “I thought I was in love, but it wasn’t love - just lust.”And then there is the niggling difference between acting in a loving way versus being ‘in love’. The former is about being active. It encompasses what we mean when we say that being in a good relationship takes work. Whereas being ‘in love’ tends to sound passive, something we fall into, over which we have no control. Perhaps it even happens at first sight. Let me talk a little bit more about this ‘love at first sight’ phenomenon, because this is what being ‘in love’ is about for many people.

‘Love at first sight’, might be better described as ‘mutual positive transference’. Transference is something we all do: it is what happens when we make unconscious assumptions about the person before us based on our experience of people we have known in the past. We may have had a significant bonding experience with a carer from our infancy, maybe a parent, a grandparent, or a nursery school teacher, and later we may meet someone who looks at us in the same way, speaks with the same rhythms, or elicits the same feelings from us, and we may feel what we call ‘chemistry’. The original love object from the past may even have faded from conscious memory.
Consciously we may think that we prefer a certain type of person, but this is prejudice. Transference is not as conscious as that, but it can cause a feeling that is highly charged and one that we cannot help but notice.
But just because something feels charged or familiar, it does not follow that it is all good even if it feels ‘right’: it might just be familiar. This is why some of us have a pattern of falling for the same ‘wrong’ types.
Transference is indeed passive – and it’s probably why we talk of ‘falling’ in love. When we fall in love, we trip over transference. Sometimes we will fall on our feet but at other times, when reality intrudes, the positive transference fades and takes love with it. There are other factors that add to this falling in love feeling - unromantic things such as a complimentary immune system that we instinctively recognise via our olfactory systems, or facial symmetry which our most basic of instincts recognises as indicating general good health.
So how can we tell if it’s really love we’re feeling? If we get this charged sensation which combines obsession with sexual attraction, it is not necessarily because the person we love is a good person or the right one for us, it only means unconscious forces are at work forcing us to see them through a filter that sifts out inconvenient realities. Jane Austen recognised that goodness has very little to do with love. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, whilst wondering why Mr. Darcy fell for her says to him, “You knew no actual good of me — but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.”
It is entirely possible that this initial positive transference can turn into a deeper, more lasting love. When this happens, erotic love based in sexual attraction changes to mature love. This develops over a period of time between long-term couples and involves actively practising goodwill, commitment, compromise and understanding. This type of love is sometimes known as Pragma: it’s when the passivity of erotic transference turns into the active behaviours of listening, caring, dialogue, appreciation, mutual impact and priority. Actions backed up with commitment. Sure, a little of the initial positive transference may linger and it does love no harm.
Yet if we never experience the transference that makes people go dreamy eyed and rather boring company for anyone other than their beloved, we are only missing out on a trick our genes would have been playing on us: it does not preclude us from having a rich and fulfilling romantic relationship based on appreciation and action rather than on tripping up over transference. Arranged marriages can work and blossom, because of the commitment of both partners to act in loving ways.
We can feel an erotic charge that is also down to transference and decide in a truly loving way, not to act on it, but to stay with the person to whom we have previously committed. That is more far loving than acting on an impulse. I find it difficult to be overly sympathetic to betraying partners who justify themselves with excuses such as, “The force of our love was too strong to resist”. Yes, erotic transference is a strong charge but it has little to do with love.
There are other kinds of love and it is confusing for us because unlike the ancient greeks and romans, we have but one word for love, they were more explicit. Here are some examples:
Philia, which is a deep but usually non-sexual intimacy between close friends and family members. It can also manifest as a deep bond forged by people who have worked together or who have been through a dramatic or emotional experience together.
Ludus, which is a more playful form of affection found in fooling around and flirting.
If you feel love for all of humanity, a more generalised love, that is Agape.
In order to love another I believe we also need a type of love sometimes called Philautia, which is self love. This is not as selfish as it sounds. As Aristotle discovered, and as any psychotherapist will tell us, in order to care for others we need to be able to care about ourselves.
So love is not just a non-specific emotion that plays an elusive game with us. It is not merely something we passively fall into. It can consist of many things, from the erotic to the pragmatic. It can also be deeply intimate yet non-sexual, as the ancients described Philia. It can be flirty, fun and Ludic, or our love can feel universal, or Agapic.
Love is not static. Feelings of love come and go just like feelings of sadness or happiness. It is commitment that does not waver. The old cliché, ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you’ describes a transition from one type of love to another. What it really means is ‘I’m moving on because I want to stay with erotic love and am not yet ready for pragmatic love’. But when we are ready for more than eroticism plus obsession we can feed affection and sexual feeling with the more rewarding worlds of pragmatic and philiatic love.
Here is a short film of Roman Krznaric, my colleague at The School of Life talking more on this subject.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/how-stay-sane/201304/how-do-you-know-when-you-are-in-love

Why Are Cellphones so Annoying?

New evidence on how our brains react.

Published on March 19, 2013 by Elizabeth Wagele in The Career Within You

Cartoon by Elizabeth Wagele

I read an interesting article in the NY Times about the reasons people talking loudly on cell phones are so annoying (March 14, 2013). The newspaper came the same day I had been especially irritated in the drug store by the man in front of me in line. He was talking to his friend about playing soccer and several other things the whole time his transaction with the clerk took place, talking extremely loudly so those at the opposite end of the huge store could hear every word.
My interpretation of why this sort of thing is so annoying includes:
• the simple facts of too much noise and the person’s insensitivity
• the unconscious attitude of the guy. He seemed to have no idea how loud he was or how boring his intrusion into our psyches was to us. His unconsciousness about what he was doing and how it was affecting people bordered on something obscene. I thought he shouldn’t be out doing this in public but needed to be behind closed doors, out of hearing and out of sight.

 The article had another interpretation, however. Author Douglas Quenqua wrote, “…Scientists have found another piece of evidence (besides that we have to reread what we’re reading 12 times when someone is using a cell phone sitting next to us on a bus) that overheard cell-phone conversations are far more distracting and annoying than a dialogue between two people nearby. Talking to someone who is not there hijacks the cognitive function of the bystanders. In other words, we want to fill in the missing part of the conversation when we only hear one side of it.

There’s even a word for this type of over-hearing: A one-sided dialogue is called a halfalogue. When we’re stuck near one of these we feel trapped and we have a stress response to it. We’re constantly forced to try to predict what’s going to happen next.”

Researchers also found out that we think these halfologues are really louder than they are. “When you can’t not pay attention to a sound, it seems louder.” The article goes on, “Though surveys have repeatedly placed public cellphone conversations at the top of Americans’ pet peeves, there are indications that the problem is easing. In 2006, 82 percent of Americans said they were at least occasionally annoyed by cellphone conversations in public. In 2012, that number dropped to 74 percent. ‘People are starting to recognize that it’s really rude to force other people to listen to your conversation.’”

May this trend continue!

For Famous Enneagram types, http://www.wagele.com/Famous.html

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-career-within-you/201303/why-are-cellphones-so-annoying

Art and the Clinical Encounter

How is psychoanalysis like making art?

Published on April 5, 2013 by Molly S. Castelloe, Ph.D. in The Me in We

 

How is practicing psychoanalysis like being an artist? In Dancing with the Unconscious: The Art of Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalysis of Art, Routledge, 2012) Danielle Knafo elaborates this connection with thoughtful care and insight. For inspiration she calls on her own childhood immigration from French Morocco to Dutch Pennsylvania, which required she creatively bridge the world of “couscous and b’stilla” and “funnel cakes and shoo-fly pie” (p. xvii).
For Knafo, psychoanalysis takes the form of dance because it seeks movement, action, and release – the dissemination of unconscious energies. It also engages stillness and interludes of incubation. But beginning with Breuer and Freud's study of women's bodies that were physically stuck, sometimes literally, psychoanalytic healing animates places in the flesh cut-off from embodiment.

The first half of the book discusses the artistic components of clinical practice beginning with three forms of unconscious expression: free association, (integral to Surrealism), transference-countertransference, and dream making. Knafo updates the concept of "regression," too often misunderstood, she argues, highlighting its various purposes "in the service of art" as well as ego (p. 23).

Data is gathered from extensive personal interviews the author conducted with artists and her own clinical research. Knafo describes Kasia, a second-generation holocaust survivor who used the consulting room as a "concentration camp," screaming through sessions in which Knafo felt more the vibration than heard her patient's words (p. 86). At home Kasia, a photographer, hung her pictures with the image side turned to the wall. The author describes an arduous therapeutic journey through which anger became agency and her analysand gained freedom through “imaginatively created embodied images” (p. 87).

Knafo suggests that collective catastrophe, such as holocausts, need be re-presented, however partial, even though the aesthetic experience risks retraumatization and assault on the viewer. She cites concerns about exploiting the pain of victims by affording aesthetic pleasure. Yet pleasure does not preclude learning. Knafo puts it this way: aesthetic recreations of massive trauma induce in the spectator "sensations felt by the artists, themselves, and thereby have viewers share the psychological burden as well as ethical responsibility of containing the trauma. . . artists possess the gift of using aesthetic forms to present us with these unpalatable truths and help us digest them" (p. 88). Repetitions of trauma, in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis, are remade as shards of symbolization struggle to find gentler form.

Knafo asks us to consider: death is something that people deny more than anything else. Although conscious of mortality, people dissociate from the actuality of their own demise (not only the fact of it but its literal context: the possibilities of how, when, where). If we could be more accepting of our own attitudes about death could we more fully register our near-death experiences and thus "transcend our fear and clinging?" (p. 65).

The second half of the book studies the work of artists, among which Knafo includes Freud’s “Dream of the Three Fates” and pieces by Egon Schiele, David Lynch, Bruno Schulz and Ana Mendieta. Although referencing the performance work of artists such as Mendieta, Orlan, and Marina Abramović, Knafo overlooks the intriguing parallel between psychoanalysis and the theatrical Avant-Garde. Both Movements rely on the body as primary instrument, use autobiography explicitly, and question the function of the frame.
Knafo addresses the frame in her discussion of Michal Heiman's work, a prominent contemporary Israeli artist who films herself looking through a rear-view car mirror as she drives to Jerusalem. The use of a second frame, the mirror, calls attention to filmmaking as a mirroring process. Jean Luc-Godard, once said that an honest film would merely “show a camera filming itself in a mirror.” (Stam, 59) An honest life is the face inside the mirror gazing back at the lens. In this instance, it is one precariously poised between life and death -- the spectator worries Heiman could run off the road! This work, Mirror Test, (2001), viscerally conveys the political anxiety and violence that Heiman inhabits daily, exemplifying what Knafo describes as “art in an age of terror” (p. 76).

"Leben? Order Theater?" (Life? or Theater?)

Reframing was also imperative to the psychic and spiritual survival of painter Charlotte Salomon who descended from a line of family suicides and was murdered in Auschwitz at age 26 when she was five months pregnant. Salomon's exquisite series of pictures Leben? Order Theater? (Life? or Theater?) (1940-42) wrests beauty from doom by recontexualizing it.

In Salomon's final self-portrait, the artist kneels on the beach painting a transparent canvas held in her lap. The composition blurs the distinction between sexualities, between life and art. Such “boundary fluidity” between inside/outside, masculine/feminine is a "hallmark of creativity," asserts Knafo (p. 6). In her forward-thinking work, Knafo expands the limits therapeutic intervention. Psychoanalysis, like dance, is messy and demands the courage of uncertainty. But when this pas de deux remains open in choreography it can lead to creative transcendence.

REFERENCE
Stam, Robert. (1992). Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-me-in-we/201304/art-and-the-clinical-encounter