If one cannot define what is the love in a precise way, if one can only note that the literature and poetry charm us by their periphrases on the love without never giving an account completely of it, that since centuries, if the subject occupies so much our spirits and our intellect, it should not however be forgotten that we should not a priori accept any intellectual representation of the love under pretext which one names, commonly, all and anything under the term “love” and which the latter is often used to justify most contestable of the behaviors.
In this article, we will be interested in a quite particular kind of “love”: fusional love. Often associated the representation of passion in love, this category of love (I will take here to the word love in its direction more general and most indefinite, most social also) offers many psychological dangers of which it can be interesting to realize. Behind the “interesting” term, we could develop this concept of utility, because once involved in a history of fusional love, it is often very difficult for intellect to take again the control of the situation which created a major emotional disorder.
Archetypal images of the love passion
All most all catholic country of tradition, has a relation very particular to the love like have it the other countries of the same tradition. Contrary to the Protestant tradition, the love is placed in the catholic tradition in the forefront of the good, in front of the law. This prevalence in the scale of values explains a tradition of the love in the Latin companies where one also speaks about “love of God”, a tradition which one observes much in literature in particular.
The unconscious Latin collective (and Westerner on the whole in addition, are filled up archetypal images of the love passion, mythical couples with the tragic destinies (Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliette, etc) and traditional stories turning around loves passion. The penal code holds even a special section with the crime personnel which can be seen like a psychological loss of control and to give extenuating circumstances in a judgment for homicide.
The attraction of the literature for these drifts of the feeling in love somewhat masked a reflexion on the love which can be made by means of the psychoanalysis. There is of course no question of believing that the psychoanalysis will be able to explain the love; as a deeply human feeling, it is not very probable that no explanation is sufficient nor even credible logically. Nevertheless the use of certain psychoanalytical methods can be useful, if not to offer a reading of the love, at least to try a reading of the neurotic drifts of the love. In this direction, the subject is still often taboo.
Behind this optics, the question will arise of what being called love is not love insofar as it aims at damaging the psychology of its protagonists. This reflexion will inevitably bring back for us to consider the archetypal images of the love and with exhiber of the completely important nuances of vocabulary compared to the commonly allowed directions of the words love and passion.
Fusional love and love passion
A semantic slip seems to have taken place progressively with time between “love passion” and “fusional love”. We will try to trace contours between the two concepts knowing the danger which such a separation represents. Nevertheless, we will approach in this will of distinction only the point of view of a certain unconscious collective, of an attempt at explanation of the differences rather than in real separation.
The passion love, in the imaginary collective, is often a love of thunderbolt, in which one often finds a component sexual very marked. It is a love of excess, a love neurotic like known as Jung, for whom the thunderbolt is a manifestation of the neurosis, a love which can generate acts of violence between the members of the couples or towards the so-called enemies of this couple.
The love passion is a love which we could describe as nonintellectual, two protagonists being submerged by their attraction one for the other beyond any reason. Is associated this representation of the love passion the tragedy of the couple, either in the destroying drift of the two actors, or in the destroying drift external people. The love passion is regarded as a love of an incredible intensity but one weak lifespan, it is a love of the abandonment of the reflexion. Some share, it is necessary to insist on the positive image that the love passion near the common run of people has. One often dreams of passion, of fear of perhaps being bored, like archetypal dream, joining the myth, making themselves higher than the others in the intensity of lived.
Our intention, by this display of the commonplaces of the unconscious collective, is not to treat image of the love passion, nor to even comment on the vision of the thunderbolt as a neurosis, made by Jung. It is to be interested in the difference between the love passion and the love fusion.
The fusional love is completely different in its structure even if it is often confused with the archetypal images which we have just evoked. Its origin is not an unconditional and nonintellectual attraction towards the person, but lies above all in the will to fill a vacuum and that by means of this fusion in the other. In this direction, the fusional love is often a calmer love, more “intellectual”, representing the other like the means essential to fill the vacuum in oneself. The fusional love is thus a love neurotic.
The love passion was qualified like neurotic on behalf of Jung because of his definition of the neurosis. The neurosis is for him an imbalance between intellect and the feelings. In this direction, when one of the two components of psyche takes supremacy on the other in a durable way and enters in conflict with the other part, there is neurosis. The love passion would be thus a love neurotic due to an excess of “significant” passion and the love fusion a love neurotic due to an excess of intellect.Each type of psychology will have a tendency to make derive its notion of the love in a natural way towards one or the other of these neurotic demonstrations.
Who more is, the reason of re-elected love passion in our Western companies is that this type of love is less intellectual and thus nearer to our Judeo-Christians roots, more immediate, more “naturalness” in what it makes derive the love towards excess from sensitive, towards the possession of psyche whole by passion.The fusional love, on the other hand, is a more discrete but revealing love of a disorder often larger of the personality, insofar as this disorder is durable. This love is often confused with the love passion insofar as during the rupture, it can also start unverifiable accesses of madness (violence's, suicide, etc). Its demonstrations a posteriori are thus close to the demonstrations a priori of the love passion but its structure is very different.
Structure of the fusional love
The fusional love, as we said, comes from a lack which is filled by the other. It is ambiguous to qualify neurotic this established fact, since with the love often the lack of the other is essential. In this direction, a clarification is necessary: the lack of the fusional love is a lack which preexists to the love, it is an individual lack which is an emotional lack with the paces of pit. The roots of this lack are to be sought in the personal past of the person, in particular in the physical and/or psychological absence of the relative of sex opposed during childhood.
A contraries of the love passion, the fusional love is thus asymmetrical whereas the love passion is symmetrical in excess. The part played by the two protagonists is completely different, the first having an emotional internal lack very important to fill and the second of the tendencies natural to want to believe that it can fill it. One will quote in the predispositions which carry out to believe that one can fill the major emotional vacuum of a person the following features:
- the kindness,
- the weakness of character,
- the syndrome of the charming prince,
- the over-estimate of the loved person due to an under valuation of its own value,
- the imbalance of psyche too intellectual and not sensitive enough.
The mechanics of this kind of love is thus a setting in phase of two people for which one has emotional needs to fill and the other thinks of being able to fill them. Once again, I repeat that the quantification of these needs is, in the case of the fusional love, very important and due to other factors that the simple fact of liking. The disorder of psyche of the personality in lack is former to the couple.
The unicity of the love
Very quickly in the life of the couple, the difficulty of the unicity of this love in purely intellectual terms arises. It is a question of being convinced that this love is single and thus to re-sift the archetypal images of the impassioned couples, whereas we saw that this representation was erroneous in the case of the fusional love. Of course, any love is single in what it relates to two people who are they-also single. But behind this single love, the fusional couple tries to position in a competition intellectual with the other couples: it is necessary to manage to make couple what the others do not manage to do. Like any intellectual love, the concept of challenge and perfection emerges quickly in the positioning of the couple towards itself and the external world.
This process leads to a very easy judgment on the external people with the couple and to a raising the moral standard based on the fact that this particular couple is higher than the others by far insofar as it “is welded more” that others. In this direction, this kind of couple is often regarded inventors of the love and not as discoverers of this one, which is completely different, the first being located in a simplistic scale of value at the top of the seconds.
Moreover, the purpose of this setting in prospect for the couple as it is exceptional be to flatter not very stable individual egos: the person in emotional lack finding the means there glorifier “of having built something” while the person little ensured of itself draws from the couple an insurance of loan related to the image that the couple has itself.
The psyche common one
Each one finding in the intellectual representation of the couple its immediate happiness and the means of developing itself will have a tendency natural to cultivate this common representation, to reinforce it, cherish it, with the deifier. This stage is built by means of the integration in this “psyché common” (which is a true closed reference frame) of elements of personalities coming from the two protagonists.The psyche common one is thus a mixture of both psyches given that that this mixture is incomplete compared to each one because it contains only the representation shared of each psyche. This remark very important insofar as, this is structurally psyche common caricature of each one,
The evidence of love
Why does one make vis-à-vis this kind of mechanism? Why moreover seek one answer to this question? There is an answer to this question because the fusional couple is a intellectual couple and thus there is a very intellectual reason with the construction of this psyche common. The reason in is simple. The person having the vacuum to fill cannot rely on the love, because this one is indemonstrable . There is thus need for evidence of love, evidence which is completely useless in the case of the love passion where the love is there and even often too there.
This evidence passes by the establishment of a common reference frame stable and demonstrable. It is necessary that the couple is tangible psychologically, that its reactions are foreseeable and can be associated the love. It should be proven at every moment that the emotional pit must fill.
Necessarily, to arrive at such ends, each one must yield with the domination of psyche common which, as a shared intellectual representation, does not have anything any more human, but is on the contrary cold and abstract construction in which the needs or the characteristics of each one are caricatured.
Loss of personality and confusion of the feelings
To yield with psyche common is a true psychological torture that only people having a developed intellectual side can support for questions of principle (in particular that to have built a perfect couple . To endorse this common personality, it is first of all necessary to deny its intrinsic personality in the name of the love which one carries to the other .
Then, it is necessary to live with this cold and incomplete personality like a dress of ice, therefore to make repression of its feelings and its singularity a permanent state.To endorse a common personality for rational reasons is thus a way necessary towards the characterized neurosis. Let us note that this obligatory psychological punishment is of an extreme violence against oneself and has thus nothing to see with the love. Certain behavioral demonstrations could make laugh if they were not so serious: one is for example, once this common personality entered in us, able to be “certain” (intellectually gets along) knowledge what the other thinks constantly and to answer by the thought of the other when somebody asks us what one one thinks oneself.The fusional love thus leads mechanically to a chronic schizophrenia.
Rupture
The end of the adventure in love fusional cannot be, formally that of only one kind: the abdication of the person having believed to be able to fill the vacuum. In the facts, several types of behaviors can be observed:
- brutal stop of the relationship to a very great difficulty of keeping reports/ratios would be this only normal with the people formerly in fusional love;
- escapes structural of the person who believed capacity to fill the emotional vacuum;
- mental annihilation of the person who is not authorized any more to think by oneself;
- suicide of the one of the two people, either because of a lack of evidence of love, or because of an unbearable psychic presence of this psyche common (psychological vampirism).The person having the emotional lack to fill will be able to develop, in the continuation of her neurosis, an attachment particular to this common personality and to make it live only by making it speak and continuously to develop accesses of chronic schizophrenia, in particular through reproaches with the other not to make what was well for itself, that is to say “to continue to build” on the late couple.
It is necessary to have a very good analyst to manage to bring back these people towards themselves, nature making that, in this case, the complementary personality resulting from the remains from psyche common is always reassuring, like an echo with the past. One will be able only to deplore this established fact and to note that the forces gathered several personalities in the same person are often fights some against the analyst in order to show to him that all is well and that it investigate of dummy roads, and at the bottom, in order to continue to exist in psyche of the patient to refuse the fear of creating a new vacuum while looking after itself.
It is possible that the psychoanalysis is not, for this kind of patients, of any utility and that the analyst sees himself obliged to give up.The other type of actor who believed capacity to fill the vacuum will be able to deal with very important risks of relapse with an attraction for comparable psychologies people in serious emotional lack. The analysis appears to be more useful in this case. It is necessary nevertheless to insist on resistance that one can wait of an intellect which was accustomed to function on a neurotic mode and which will have to take again self-awareness on a normal mode. The fusional love could be, ultimately, a pathology of the intellect which threatens the integrity of the reasoning themselves while using of the systematic repression on the sensitive side.
Conclusion
Under the term of love hide very important dangers, i.e. an underestimation of the psychological dangers related to certain relations and a latent confusion of the feelings due to an ignorance of common psychological pathologies. If it were necessary to give simple qualifiers to the love, we could try the following:
- the love should not draw aside from oneself,
- the love is achievement of oneself with the other,
- the achievement of the other is a joy of the love,
- the love is to feel happy when the other is happy (and not to want its happiness while presupposing to know what good through the is psyche to him common one),
- if there is strong relation in love, there is not control with a named abstract entity couple.To leave the images of a real scene of each individuals, even within the couple, it is what should allow the love. However, often, the love forces the latent features neurotic, underlines them, the door with their apogee. In other words, it is not because it is said that there is love that there is love, it is not because one seeks to be convinced that one knows what is the love that one knows what is the love. Mistrust towards the love which is most beautiful of the things of the life and which can be one of most dangerous.
