Transcription
Hello everyone, illustrious representatives of the YouTube people, this is me speaking. Yes, I know, Valentine's Day was last week, but this is one of those evergreen topics because, after all, we all attach great importance to love. We say it's practically essential for the life of every human being, but then we actually have no idea what it is. For what reason should we enjoy so many romantic stories in cinemas if it were something like eating or drinking? In short, we would all be bored watching a tutorial on how to eat or drink, yet as soon as someone starts talking about love, everyone is like flies, listening with open ears, ready to grasp every piece of information that is fed to us by the film, by the monologue of the moment, including this video. Well, all of us, or almost all of us, attribute enormous importance to something that, given the premises, we probably know very little about. Therefore, in this video, I propose to illustrate what psychoanalysis thinks about this topic, and then try to understand the causes of this evidently unforgivable ignorance. Let's take it step by step. Despite our dear Sigmund Freud, who it seems loved his wife Martha very much, he gives a rather cold definition of love, and one that does not differ much from the equally cold mechanism highlighted today by neuroscience. Freud, in fact, besides bringing out a preponderant biological and sexual aspect, speaks of love in terms of a narcissistic satisfaction of the ego. For Freud, to love is to love what of myself I find and is reflected in the other. He speaks of it in chapter 8 of "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego": "By virtue of a more or less effective repression or sublimation of the sexual tendencies, the illusion arises that the object is loved also sensually on account of its spiritual merits, whereas, on the contrary, only sexual gratification could have conferred such merits. The effort which here falsifies judgment is that of idealization. This, however, allows us a more ready orientation. We recognize that the object is treated as if it were the ego itself, and that, therefore, in the state of love, a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows onto the object. In certain forms of love-choice, it is even obvious that the object serves to replace an unrealized ideal of the ego. We love it because of the perfections we have aimed for our ego, and which we now, by this indirect path, wish to procure for ourselves in order to satisfy our narcissism." So, for Freud, love would be a real psychosis. It is also true, however, that he titled this chapter "Infatuation and Hypnosis." I emphasize this term "infatuation." Indeed, one cannot say that Freud was entirely wrong, just as one cannot say that his definition is complete. As already mentioned, neuroscience confirms this Freudian view. In fact, various studies have shown that discharges of dopamine, oxytocin, and so on, do not last beyond 18 months. After that, it's over, everything detaches, everything disconnects. Naturally, if it were exclusively like this, human love relationships would not last beyond those wonderful 18 months in which our brain sees only unicorns and rainbows, and butterflies fly in our stomach. This, in fact, is only one part of everything else, namely infatuation, precisely. Freud, even in error, saw things well. In psychoanalysis, in fact, infatuation is a real temporary psychosis, one of those moments when even a neurotic personality has a small experience of psychosis. Yes, you understood correctly. Here too, there are three ways of loving: we have psychotic love, perverse love, and neurotic love, and as we will see, only the last of these can be called healthy and well-considered love. To discuss this, I will therefore use Erich Fromm and, of course, Lacan. Let's begin in order. I have just illustrated how infatuation has all the characteristics of a real psychosis. Well, know that a subject with a psychotic structure manages to love as if those eighteen months never passed. Nice, you might think. In reality, there is very little romantic about this mode of love. After all, I don't blame you even if you thought this, because it is actually the most common form of love dished out by romantic films and novels. The most famous example is certainly Romeo and Juliet. In fact, if neither of them had loved each other with a psychotic mode, Romeo would not have committed suicide believing Juliet dead, and it would have ended well. In essence, in psychosis, the subject escapes the impotence that castration has inscribed in him. Therefore, the object a, the object of desire, is not lost but coincides with the subject. In psychosis, loss is drowned. The moment the object of love is lost, the subject itself is lost. Here the foundations are laid for a future critique of feminism, which I will bring you in a video sooner or later. In fact, you won't believe it, but precisely this type of psychotic love, which I am sure many exalt or have exalted in Romeo and Juliet, is exactly the love that in some cases leads to what is commonly called femicide. In this way, you will understand, that entire theoretical apparatus of a feminist nature, which sees a discriminatory motive towards women in these criminological cases, collapses. How many times have you been told that a femicide is nothing more than someone who kills a woman because she is a woman? Well, this motive is totally unrealistic. If you question any femicide, they will never tell you that they killed their wife or girlfriend because she was a woman, but because she was *their* woman, their object a, which cannot be lost because it is incorporated into the subject itself. The moment the partner of a psychotic subject does something that the latter does not like, this is experienced as a real narcissistic wound. Paranoia sets in. The object of love, so idealized, onto which a whole series of positive aspects had been projected, suddenly becomes imperfect. At the slightest sign of imperfection, it is immediately stripped of all positive idealizations, thus becoming, all of a sudden, the container of every imaginable negative aspect. From here, therefore, jealousy, leading in the most serious cases to mutilation or murder. With this, far be it from me to justify these people or even to downplay what they do. The explanation of a psychic mechanism does not absolve anyone. On the contrary, I find it much more crude to make these events excessively politicized cases on which the media march. But as I said, I will talk about this in another video. If we don't stray from the topic of this one, another video will also be entirely dedicated to perversion and paraphilias. However, the type of perverse love I want to discuss here has little to do with paraphilic and psychopathological cases. It is here that we turn to Erich Fromm. In fact, the latter repeatedly refers to a certain social influence in the individual's approach to this field. Closely linked to this factor is another characteristic of contemporary society, based on the desire to buy, on the idea of a profitable exchange. The happiness of modern man consists in the thrill of looking at shop windows, of buying everything he can afford, both in cash and in installments. He looks at people in the same way. For a man, an attractive girl, and for a woman, an attractive man, are the objects of their search. Later, in this way, two people fall in love, certain of having found the best and most convenient object on the market, considering the limits of their exchange values. Often, as in buying and selling, hidden possibilities that can be developed play a considerable role in this contract. In a civilization in which commercial orientations prevail and in which material success is the predominant value, there is little to be surprised if love relationships follow the same exchange model that governs practical life. This is what Fromm writes in the first chapter of his very famous essay, "The Art of Loving." This argument is also taken up by the equally illustrious sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in two wonderful essays, "Liquid Love" and "The Postmodern Uses of Sex." The bibliography for this video will be enormous. In essence, we have already seen how society, which some call postmodern, post-human, in short, current society, is substantially perverse in nature. And in a world where limitless mortal enjoyment is exalted, where every object can be exchanged for another, love, which should aim for eternity, as Recalcati says, every love aims for the eternal repetition of the first encounter of the two lovers. You will understand how outdated the concept of perverse love is, and this passing from one partner to another as one does with an object, keeping love and sexual pleasure at a due distance, believing therefore that the two things are totally disconnected, when once again neuroscience and psychology show us that sex without emotional involvement is much less pleasant simply because it is self-referential and not in the service of the other's pleasure. We have thus automatically arrived at Lacan and therefore at having to talk about what I feel I can define as neurotic love. Taking up the discussion on sex for a moment, our dear Dracula, who was indeed a first-class Don Juan, made one of the most powerful statements in psychoanalysis: "Sexual intercourse does not exist." And if a person who pursued the practical aspects of the matter very much said this, he must have had his reasons. He dedicated an entire seminar to the subject, the twentieth, which was titled, still today, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle." Besides referring to the previous quote from Recalcati, lovers desire to relive the first encounter. The French pronunciation of this word recalls "un corps" (a body), hence the sexual reference. Two lovers desire to become one with each other, something that objectively, even in the act of sex, can never happen. Furthermore, to rewind the tape, even before the sexual act, those who love, the lovers who desire each other, experience the incompleteness of their own being. There can be no desire without a lack and deprivation of something. Love for the neurotic is like a cloister in a cloistered convent. Now, let's take this example correctly. A cloister in a monastery is a beautiful garden, usually cultivated, enclosed by four walls and isolated from the whole world. The only way out, ideally, would be heaven. What a heavy example I have chosen! Neurotic love is the same thing. It is a garden within a cloister that must be cultivated. Only when we experience our limits can we love. If we do not experience the walls of our cloister, we cannot dedicate ourselves to the garden within it, which we would all like to cultivate. Every neurotic love tends towards eternity. The moment you love a person, in a certain way, you keep the whole world out of the couple, not in the sense that you isolate yourselves as can happen in certain psychotic loves, but in the sense that that person's place for the lover is a place that ideally cannot be occupied by anyone else. I repeat once again and emphasize: ideally. The moment, in fact, this place becomes vacant again, the couple has broken up, or worse, the partner has passed on to a better life. What is worse, not suffering it. In neurotic love, it is possible to process grief, regardless of whether the partner has actually died or not. This is another element of distinction from psychotic love. If Romeo, I repeat, had processed his grief, it would have ended well, and all those stories in which one of the two partners does not give up and causes harm would surely end well. This too is an awareness of limits. Well, I think I have exhausted the topic enough. I will conclude by giving you one last mention of what Lacan calls the "comedy of the sexes." In this video, I am stopping too much on those who are against gender differences, damn it! Lacan, still in the twentieth seminar, writes: "Such is the woman behind the veil: the absence of the penis makes her the phallus, the object of desire. It can be said that the comedy of the sexes is based entirely on this single proposition." In this comedy, man plays the part of the one who pretends to have the phallus, which, in truth, no one possesses. The woman, therefore, covers herself with a mask to hide her lack. The fact of not having the phallus, writes Zeitberg, continues to write: "The asymmetry between the sexes lies in the fact that the woman, in her relationship with man, must not so much desire as make herself desired, that is, adapt to the conditions of man's desire, which overshadows the question of her own desire, even when it exists in the absolute. " Even further: "While man turns a bit towards one and a bit towards another woman, in the fundamental alternation according to Freud between the virgin and the prostitute, the woman, by playing on her lack through masquerade, constructs a possible femininity. She makes herself loved for what she does not know, desired for what she is not." This is the comedy of the sexes, according to the masterfully illustrated by Malvine Zaidberg, a Brazilian psychoanalyst. A woman, mind you, trigger warning. I conclude the video by explaining this concept a bit. Lacan calls this concept "comedy" to make it clear that it is something that should not be taken seriously and acts exclusively on the practical, but imaginary, level. Only, think about it, the so-called male chauvinists, the psychotics, take this thing seriously. The comedy of the sexes is simply the way, the only way, in which the two sexes can meet: man on one side, because he is stupefied by having the phallus; woman on the other, because she is in continuous search of a feminine signifier that makes her a woman. In this sense, it can therefore be said that man always loves in a rather fetishistic way, for example, "those eyes, how she has them, no one else does." This mode is independent of the type of love: psychotic, neurotic, or perverse. Instead, on the contrary, it can be said that woman is decidedly detached from this phallic stupefaction and therefore loves in a much more absolute way, since in one fell swoop she has debunked feminists on one hand, and once again the red pills on the other. The video can conclude here, also because if I continue, I risk competing with "Morte Cuore" by Bianca, whom I greet and whom, as always, I recommend you follow. So, if you want practical advice, go watch "Morte Cuore." If, on the other hand, you are a bookworm like me, it's time to list the Amazon links for the bibliography. In the description, you will find links to Amazon for "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" by Freud, "The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm, "Liquid Love" and "The Postmodern Uses of Sex" by Bauman, and finally "Mantieni il Bacio" by Massimo Recalcati and "Da cosa pretende una figlia dalla propria madre" by Malvine Zaidberg. Having said that, I bid you farewell. If you liked the video, I invite you to give it a like, share it if you know someone who might be interested. Please, do not declare yourselves with this video, and subscribe if you want to follow this and other segments. See you next time.