"Psychoanalysis: The Science Of Love"

Psychoanalysis: The Science of Love

Psychoanalysis views extreme versions of excess as perhaps a cry for help. The man I sit with (and for obvious reasons I am fictionalising here) in my consulting room here in South Bombay is a highly successful entrepreneur in financial terms. Sadly, his fiancé left him over a year ago. Yet ever faithful to his illusions, he continues to mentally scheme and strategist ways to get her back. She is in fact, now married to someone else and has a child. This reality is simply too unbearable for him. He has entered the pretend play world of the child, rather than bare a functioning engagement with reality and avoid the difficult grief-work of acceptance and loss. What causes this sort of hallucination? Over time, I learn that as a child when he turned to his mother to say tell her he could not sleep, or was frightened by a bad dream, her response, rather than to enter into some sort of comprehension of his emotional world, or comfort, she would more often than not, completely negate his feelings with rather severe comment, “you’re fine, nothing will happen to you,”.

As a child he spent much of his time in the fantasy world of computer games, alone in his room. Drugs, especially cocaine, add another method of further cutting off from reality, a disorientating fuel for his romantic and the grandiose illusions. Each drug binge leaves my client with a sense of yet further depletion of his sense of self and any meaning from his real life. It brings a sort of self-disgust that often leads to yet another drug-spree. The challenge of working with this man is that he is obstinate, rather deceitful to himself and has great difficulty learning from his experience.

When two millionaire brothers compete with one another to accumulate as much land and property as they can, it is far too simplistic to view this as merely a vulgar display of wealth. Again, psychoanalysis complicates matters. In the analytic space, we learn that as children, the brothers were regularly graded as to their performance at school during the week. Their father would shout, pointing a finger, “you are an ‘A’” to one child and “you are a ‘D’” to the other. This harshness of parenting seems not uncommon in the clients I see in this City. No doubt, the well intentioned father was trying to drive the boys to achieve more. However, rather than help them gauge their success based on an internal compass that asks “are you doing your best here,” the competition is externalised and the enemy that stands between succeeding or failing is identified: one’s own brother. Without some sort of working through the effects of this early training in rivalry, the skylines of the City will continue to be marked by the symbols of their childhood experience.

The guiding principles of psychoanalysis, is that our basic psychological framework for trusting others is formed in the relationship with our primary caregivers, typically our parents of course. In the site of the family, we develop a prototype for later relations. In that family setting, we learn and develop internal working models or theories if you to like, to make predictions of how other people will respond. In a healthy family, you are likely to hear frank communication of the parents own working models, spoke aloud, such as “I seem to think that if you stay out late tonight, something might happen to you…” Yet this sort of communication is perhaps rare in many families and instead - there is a defensive exclusion of information - important things that need to be said, are not said. When parents, sadly pretend things are not as they in fact are, to a degree that is a sort of farce, it may be just too unbearable for the child to think about.  When the memory that is supplied by those around him is experienced as vastly different from the child’s experience, the family narrating one thing, but the child knowing something else, a place of non-though provides the comfort to temporarily protect the child from mental pain, or confusion or conflict. This is what might be going on when we see children who appear to be excessively wilful, or indeed excessive will-less. It is a recipe of course, for the child to seek safety and comfort in getting lost in a world of fantasy, devoid of reality, a childhood way of coping with what is just too unbearable to think about.    

In a sense, this is a recipe for the child and soon to be adult, in learning to become a fake, a master of disguise.  What the child (now adult?) most longs for, is that when reaching out for comfort that he or she receive love and attention and support to independently explore the world. Without this sort of support, the child develops an internal model of themselves as both untrustworthy and incompetent. Distant caregiving involves distancing from oneself. It sets the norm where real contact with reality is diverted in fantasy production, and nullifies a healthy curiosity for self-understanding.

So it is here in the family that we learn the essence of how to relate to one another, and how to form close attachments not only with others but with ourselves. Healthy love relationships delight us, give us confidence and support us.

This close emotional bonding is what we call love and the scientific study of love and how it develops has its roots in psychoanalysis.