Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotions

367 Pages·2002·1.39 MB·English

by  Theodor Reik

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

The idea that love results from a counterreaction to the activity of repressed envy
and hostility is so remote to all current concepts of psychology that it is difficult
to formulate it in the precise terms of psychological language. It is not doubt or
lack of courage that makes us hesitate but the very character of the concept never
before formulated. Here are the two conclusions at which we have arrived, and
which in my opinion are inescapable.
Love is not origmated in the sexual urge but belongs to the realm of the ego-
drives.

Love is in its essential nature an emotional reaction-formation to envy,
possessiveness and hostility.
This characterization covers all kinds of love, infatuation and passion, tenderness
for one's wife, friendship and love of one's neighbor. All these are founded on
the overcoming of envy and the will to dominate, of hostility and jealousy. We
understand that the accent has to be laid on the triumph over these unconscious
emotions, on the intensity of the counterreaction to them or on the decisiveness
of the victory of the opposite feelings.
Looking back we wonder how we could have failed to see this for so long. What
else could love be? Only consider love's character and its most strongly marked
features, those which signify its very nature. They are all expressions of the
opposite traits that belong to the realm of envy, hostility and destructiveness.
Real love does not know envy. It rejoices in the happiness, achievements and
fine qualities of the object. Love is not hostile but the supreme expression of
tenderness. The characteristics of the reaction are so marked and so much in the
foreground that we cannot even imagine how it could have been different.
Victory was so triumphant that it seems as if there had never been a fight. The
regime of love is so uncontested and incontestable that no one thinks it was
wrested from an enemy.
We know many similar reaction-formations in psychology and psychopathology.
Frequently an intense emotion is not replaced by a balanced state but swings
over into an even stronger opposite feeling. It seems that new reinforcements,
gathered during the action, strengthen the coming reaction, that the counterblow
becomes more powerful than the original one. Thus an unconscious impulse of
cruel satisfaction often turns into pity and compassion. A depression is overcome