“I would say this quite plainly,” says Levinas, “what is truly human is—and don’t be afraid of this word—love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, I could say it better, responsibility. And responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: ‘without concupiscence’ {without lust}. . . love exists without worrying about being loved.”– Levinas While Levinas does not omit eroticism from his account of love, he seems to be most interested in explicating “love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect.” It is thus not altogether surprising that Levinas mentions that the most perfected form of love, of “disinterested love, without concupiscence,” of “responsibility for the other man,” is depicted in the “for-the-Other of saintliness.” Says Levinas,I’m not saying that men are saints, or moving towards saintliness. I’m only saying that the vocation of saintliness is recognized by all human beings as a value, and that this recognition defines the human. . . . . Man is the being who recognizes saintliness and the forgetting of self. Holding up such a selfless form of love as an ideal mode of being in the world, let alone an ideal for the average analysand, is rather far fetched and uncomfortable for most analysts. Analysts, of course, can appreciate the psychic achievement and social benefit of such a magnanimous altruistic orientation. However, from a more cynical psychoanalytic point of view, such a pervasive “for the Other” mode of being is fundamentally flawed in that it is unrealistic, it flies in the face of human nature, at least human nature conceived by Freud and others as inherently narcissistic, egotistical, pleasure-seeking, aggressive and selfish in its outlook. That is, as W.W. Meissner has pointed out, altruism is “maladaptive. . . without egoistic restraints.” For the psychoanalyst, not only is altruism sometimes a cover for aggressive and narcissistic motives and actions depending on the context and criteria we use for judging morality, remember that the Nazis thought they were doing God’s work for the sake of ridding the world of Jews, but psychoanalytically speaking, the human project is mainly about finding a balance between what analysts call “healthy narcissism” or appropriate self-investment and self-regard, and care, concern and affection for others. That is, for the psychoanalyst healthy altruism requires a fairly high degree of self-esteem in order to be able to maturely love another person. For example, a modicum of self-constancy and secondary narcissism are necessary in order to feel loved. That is, in order to affirm the other’s goodness as the other loves me, I need to be able to let myself be loved by the other. According to psychoanalysis, such reciprocity is a profound act of affirmation of the other, characteristic of mature love relations. Moreover, to believe that the love one has to give, or is obligated to give for the sake of the other, as Levinas might say, is worth giving, requires that one believe that what one has inside is “good” in the first place. I say all of this by way of orienting the reader to the fact that Levinas’ ethically infused notion of love, conceived as mainly asymmetrical, non- reciprocal responsibility for and to the Other, is not a formulation that is central to any psychoanalytic theory of love and intimacy that I am aware of. Nor is such a formulation generally regarded as a goal of, or a central characteristic of a successful psychoanalysis. As Freud asked, “Why should analyzed people be altogether better than others?” His response, “Analysis makes for unity, but not necessarily for goodness.” In this chapter I want to pick up where Freud’s troubling observation leaves off. That is, I want to suggest the possible benefit to psychoanalytic theory and practice of embracing the evocative metaphor of the “cultivation of goodness” as central to “mature,” “healthy,” and/or “authentic” love relations. Says Levinas, “to think the other as other, to think him or her straightaway before affirming oneself, signifies concretely to have goodness.” Elsewhere he notes that “responsibility for the other is the experience of the good, the very meaning of the good, goodness. Only goodness is good.” Put more straightforwardly, I want to suggest that Levinas’ notion of love, and to a considerably lesser extent his analysis of eroticism and family relations, all radically challenge psychoanalysis to further develop the ethical realm to its account(s) of love and intimacy. Indeed, as Rubin points out, there has been a “failure” by psychoanalytic writers “to articulate a workable theory of intimacy.” Moreover, he claims that, “Despite love’s extraordinary importance in the lives of individuals, it has been a curiously neglected topic in the psychoanalytic literature,” a view that Meissner tends to agree with as far as I can tell. This is surprising given the fact that Freud wrote that, “Truth is only the absolute good of science but the goal of life is love is quite independent of it. . . ” Moreover, as is well known, Freud viewed the capacity “to love and to work” as the best indication of mental health and probably the soundest basis for having a meaningful life. As Fine pointed out, in his early years, Freud even suggested setting up an Academy of Love. Fine further notes that, Psychoanalysis should be looked upon as theory of love. The psychoanalyst may be defined as a person who teaches others how to love.” All of this in sync with Levinas’ understanding of the function of philosophy. ”Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of love.” As I review a few of the important psychoanalytic contributions to understanding the many faces of love, followed by a further explication of Levinas’ account of love, I hope to persuade the reader that perhaps one of the reasons that mainstream psychoanalysis has had such difficulty developing an adequate, let alone a compelling account of love and eroticism is in part, because it has mainly embraced a self-centric, “in itself” and “for itself” conception of the human condition while underplaying man’s primordial sociality, conceived by Levinas as “for the Other,” as responsibility for, and obligation to the Other. Such a Levinasian-inspired account of love relations is not meant to replace current psychoanalytic views of love and intimacy for such views are in many ways apt and extremely useful. Rather, my contention is that such accounts need some widening and deepening to more centrally include the under explored and crucial ethical realm of love. In this way, psychoanalysis can provide a more empathic and comprehensive account of the human condition. Perhaps most importantly, such a Levinasian outlook on love can stimulate what I believe is the analysand’s inherent, often unconscious desire to transform his self-centric and egotistical interiority, that is, his selfish cravings and infantile narcissism, into “goodness,” best expressed as radical altruism. Such radical altruism, scientists tell us, is possibly innate, reflecting an inherent desire for self-subversiveness, that is, for what the Bhagavad Gita beautifully describes as a liberation from the finite self, ego consciousness, and self-centeredness. In more analytic terms, this means liberation from the self-destructive narcissism of the ego, that which often prevents us from achieving what perhaps we really want in life: self-transformation on the way to self-transcendence. Such a mode of transcendent being is a kind of spirituality for want of a better word. However, for Levinas, the “spiritual” as he describes it, is profoundly anchored in every day social reality and ethical human relations, in living a life that is characterized by an extreme, deep-seated, far-reaching responsibility for the Other, before oneself, that is, “otherwise than being.” Psychoanalytic Notes on LoveLevinas did not trust the word love: “I don’t very much like the word love, which is worn out, . . . debased. . . . {and} ambiguous.” While Levinas preferred to speak “of the taking upon oneself of the fate of the other” as roughly synonymous with love, he was I think, emphasizing a crucial problem in the psychoanalytic and other scholarly literature on love. That is, what is love any way? I have no intention of deeply entering into this technical problem of definition and meaning for it would require many volumes to scrape the service and I am certainly not competent to take on such an awesome philosophical task. However, it is important that the reader understand that there is no consensus with regards to defining and understanding the term and the experience(s) it allegedly refer to. Thus, the straightforward, though clearly limited, Oxford Dictionary’s definition of love is probably the best place to begin our discussion of love, at least to establish some basic common ground: “an intense feeling of deep affection or fondness for a person or thing; great liking.” To make matters even more complicated, there are many forms of love, each with its own phenomenology and psychodynamics. For example, there is love of wife/husband/significant other, child, parent, God, knowledge, beauty, country, a cause, humanity, brotherly love, and possibly the purest of all love relations according to Freud, of our pet! Says Freud, It really explains why we can love an animal. . . with such extraordinary intensity; affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of a life free from the almost unbearable conflict of civilization, the beauty of an existence complete in itself. . . Often when stroking Jo-fi { his dog} I have caught myself humming a melody which, unmusical as I am, I can’t help recognizing as the aria from Don Giovanni: ‘a bond of friendship unites us both.’ Whether Freud meant exactly what he said is not entirely clear but he was pointing to strong friendship as one of the clearest expressions of a “higher level” form of love, of what Aristotle called “perfected” love. Aristotle indicated that friendships {read roughly love} are formed and sustained on different bases. There are those who sustain friendship mainly for the sensual gratification it provides; others sustain friendship for reasons of usefulness, and finally, there are friendships that are lodged in virtue. That is, one wants for one’s friend what is most beneficial for one’s friend, and this for the benefit of one’s friend. Such friendship is “perfected,” says Aristotle, telia philia, in that its aims do not go outside the friendship itself and it facilitates the good. Needless to say, such friendships are not easily created nor common. Roughly speaking, Levinas’ notion of love seems most in sync with telia philia, while the Freudian construal of love most resonates with the first two forms of Aristotle’s friendship, though obviously the matter is hardly so clear or simple. Our focus in this chapter will not be on the ideal form of love between two adults, at least as psychoanalytic perspectives tend to construe it, that is, what analysts sometimes call “healthy,” “mature” or “authentic” “object love.” Briefly, object love depicts the self’s cluster of emotions and attitudes towards integrated whole objects (e.g. significant others) that is the basis, the source of its gratification and pleasure. For Freud, as for all subsequent psychoanalysts, love has been approached mainly from the point of view of describing and understanding that which interferes and corrupts the capacity to love. Indeed, there is no body of knowledge that better depicts what St. Augustine called “disordered love,” a lack of psychological fit between various human needs and wishes and the objects that can gratify them. While psychoanalysis has in general been unsurpassable in explicating that which subverts mature love, it has been much weaker in depicting what constitutes and sustains it. What follows are some of the most interesting contributions of psychoanalysis to understanding what constitutes healthy/mature love relations. For Freud, all love relations are a “refinding of the object,” roughly analogous to the emotional experience of symbiotic togetherness with the mother or caregiver. What this means in terms of establishing love relations is that to some extent the choice of our significant other repeats or calls to mind aspects of our childhood caregivers. Love, says Freud, “consists of new editions of old traits and it repeats infantile reactions.” That is, all love is based on infantile templates, it is fundamentally a fixation on the parents. what Freud calls transference love. According to Reuben Fine, transference love and ordinary love only differ in terms of degree. The problem with this of course, is that if we refind that which is “bad” from our childhood experiences, it usually leads to impoverished and/or destructive intimate relationships. The trick then, is to refind in the significant other that which is consciously and unconsciously “good” from our childhood caregivers so that we and our partner have a better chance of being happy in our love relation. For Freud however, to accomplish this seemingly straightforward task is not at all simple for it requires resolving at a higher level of personality integration, at least three aspects of love: narcissistic versus object love; infantile versus mature love and hate versus love. To the extent that love is dominated by inordinate, unhealthy and pathological narcissism (e.g. self-centeredness and selfishness), infantile and dependent wishes and behavior (e.g., the other exists mainly to gratify one’s needs and wishes on demand) and hate (e.g. heightened ambivalence), one’s love relation is doomed to failure. To the extent that it is animated by altruistic concerns (e.g., enhancing the other), is mature (e.g., the recognition that the separate other has needs and wishes worthy of gratifying) and is mainly affectionate (e.g., not corrupted by aggression) it is likely to succeed. For Freud, and this needs to be emphasized, all relationships are ambivalent, at least to some extent. However, ultimately, the pre-condition to maintain a stable, healthy, mature love relation is that affectionate sentiments towards one’s significant other are in general, much stronger and pervasive than the aggressive ones. For Freud, love is understood within his closed energic paradigm and instinctual outlook. That is, all forms of love are derivatives of instinct and their function is to give instinctual gratification. In a sense then, for Freud all love is love of a need-satisfying object. Mature object love, in contrast to infantile, dependent, need-satisfying love, is in part, love that recognizes the reality of the other, that is, his otherness, a separate person with needs and wishes requiring and deserving gratification. Perhaps most importantly, for Freud the capacity for mature love requires object constancy, the capability to maintain an enduring relationship with a specific, single, separate other. This in turn presupposes the development of both a stable, coherent self and internalized object relations. Normal love, says Freud, thus results from the blending of caring, affectionate and sexual feelings toward a person of the opposite sex. Its accomplishment is characterized by genital primacy in sexuality and by object love in relationships with others. Thus, in a nutshell, for Freud, love relations, actually all human relations, largely reflect a utilitarian motive, that is, of using the other to gratify biologically endowed drives and thus as a means to one’s end. As Kleinian analyst Donald Meltzer points out, for Freud, love is like opening up a factory, of making a kind of capital investment bent on generating a profit. One does not invest your libido unless one feels fairly sure that one will get back more than one gives. For Klein, on the other hand, and to some extent Levinas, love is conceptualized more in terms of bequeathing a charity. That is, says Alford, “love gets from the very act of giving. It gets the opportunity to repair the self by repairing and restoring the world, or at least a little part of it.” For Klein, love emanates from the infant’s sense of gratitude toward the “good” mother, in Kleinina language, toward the satisfying, “good breast.” This feeling is the basis for the infant’s and later the adult’s appreciation of all goodness in the self and others. It is crucial to briefly contextualize Freud’s views on love in terms of his broader version of the human condition. That is, as Wallwork points out, for Freud, the supreme moral criterion, what he took to be the “good” that reflected what humans strive for was “happiness.” Says Freud, [W]hat [do] men themselves show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives.? What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. Wallwork further points out that for Freud as was the case with Aristotle and other great humanist moral philosophers, happiness was in part conceptualized as “eudaimonia.” However, eudaimonia is not simply a moment or experience of pleasure alone, but a “veritable form of life, a flourishing form of life capable of realizing the full range of possibilities for rational beings.” As Wallwork puts it, happiness for Freud is …a matter of functioning well than feeling good. The mentally healthy person’s happiness consists in the well-being that comes with certain forms of sublimation: loving and being loved, creative work, the pursuit of knowledge, freedom and aesthetic appreciation. These goods of life that make happiness possible are not instrumental means to functioning well, but constituent aspects of happiness. For Freud, love was perhaps the most important way of obtaining happiness. Giving and receiving love, that is, the ”union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its [life’s] culminating peaks.” Love is also so crucial says Freud, because it underpins other extremely important aspects of life and civilization. For instance, it libidinally binds and animates one’s ties to family, friends, community and to the world at large. Without the force of Eros, Freud’s poetic metaphor for the life-force and sexual instincts, that is love, civilization is doomed to be overwhelmed by the inherent aggressiveness and destructiveness that constitutes Thanatos, the Death Instinct. Psychoanalysis has of course developed its theories of love since Freud in interesting ways and I want to briefly touch upon some of these contributions. This mini survey is meant to be illustrative not comprehensive. Erik H. Erikson, the great ego psychologist, describes love as the key virtue, that is, ego strength, that emerges after successful resolution of the intimacy versus isolation ego crisis, the sixth stage of human development of the life cycle. Erikson defines love as “mutuality of devotion forever subduing the antagonisms inherent in divided function.” Love thus involves a complimentarity of identities, that is, having the ego strength to share identity for “mutual verification” of chosen identity while taking from the supportive and nurturing other the strength to be “self-ish.” Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic self-psychology, claims that love is fundamentally establishing a “selfobject.” A selfobject is someone who strengthens and sustains the sense of self, that is, the self’s cohesion, firmness and harmony. In infantile love the significant other, the selfobject mainly functions for my benefit and survival, a template that is rooted in early childhood experience of the empathic, supportive, reassuring and approving “good” mother or caregiver. In mature love the self is better grounded, sustained and strengthened and thus is capable of a more intense experience of receiving and giving love. In other words, for Kohut, in the love relationship one refinds the good mother, the selfobject, the one who calls to mind, sustains, and strengthens structural self coherence, energic vigor, aliveness and integration and balance among the diverse elements of the self. Thus, for the love relationship to work, both people need to refind the self-selfobject relationships they had in their parent/caregiver to child relationships. For Kohut, the sense of comfort, healing and happiness that characterizes the best of love is precisely the by product of this mutual self-selfobject refinding. Finally, Jacques Lacan says it is impossible to say anything meaningful or intelligible about love. For Lacan, love must be understood in terms of what he views as the larger ethical goal of psychoanaysis, namely, the discovery of the reality and truth of the Unconscious and its powerful interpretive grip over the subject. Thus, as Evans points out, Lacan says love is situated as a purely imaginary phenomenon although it has an impact in the symbolic register. Love for Lacan is autoerotic and mainly has a narcissistic structure since “its one’s own ego that one loves in love, one’s own ego made real on the imaginary level.” Lacan further notes that “to love is, essentially, to wish to be loved.” That is, for Lacan love involves only an imaginary reciprocity and mutuality, it is the reciprocity between “loving” and “being loved” that, along with the fantasy of fusion with the loved other, mainly comprises the compelling illusion of love. Thus, Lacan rejects Freud and most other analysts who claim that love is the central clinical goal in psychoanalysis and for that matter, the goal of life. Rather he says, the aim of analysis is to reclaim the voice for one’s desire by clarifying and making intelligible the familial experiences and knots, the governing signifiers, that have had such a powerful interpretive hold on one’s way of being in the world. As far as I can tell, this can or can not, lead to a greater capacity and actualization of love in one’s way of being in the world. Thus, as I will discuss in a bit more detail at the conclusion to this chapter, one of the limitations in the theorizing on love in Freud, Klein, Erikson, Kohut and Lacan, at least from a Levinasian point of view, is that all of these theorists to some extent, treat the significant other reductively as a depersonalized love object, as a thing to be used for one’s satisfaction. Even sophisticated relational theorists, like Jessica Benjamin, tend to view the other mainly as a source of reciprocal gratification of one’s relational needs, which from a Levinasian point of view, results in two people in a doomed arrangement of mutually instrumental use. Levinas on Love Throughout his work, including on love, Levinas in part, aims for a transformation of the form of subjectivity that underlies many psychoanalytic theories. That is, the egological subject is mainly characterized by its spontaneous free power and autonomy, emanating from its own existence, and is largely “for itself” in nature. For such a subject, the world is approached as a grand spectacle laid out before us to enjoy. In contrast, Levinas puts forward an ethical subject, one that he describes as responsible for the other, a responsibility that emanates from the other. For this subject, the world is a precious burden with which we are entrusted, or better yet, a world in which we are commanded to hallow. Heteronomy (from the Greek hetero-nomos, meaning “other ruling”) is here more powerful than autonomy (from the Greek auto-nomos, meaning “self-ruling”). While Levinas appreciates the human inclination to seek out pleasure and enjoyment, including in love relations, as these strivings are constituent aspects of existence, his focus is on service for, and to the other, not to be confused with servitude or bondage. In a number of interviews Levinas tells us what the nature of love is, including its “essence” and its “perfection”: 1. The responsibility for the other is the grounding moment of love. It is not really a state of mind; it is not a sentiment, but rather an obligation. The human is first of all obligation (133). 2. In the otherness of the other lies the beginning of all love (134). I think that where and when the other is ‘always other’, there is the essence of love. . . . The more other the other, the more he is loved, or rather, the more he is loved, the more he is other (58). 3. To approach someone as unique to the world is to love him. Affective warmth, feeling, and goodness constitute the proper mode of this approach to the unique, the thinking of the unique.” (108); “It is proper to the principle of love that the other, loved, is for me unique in the world. Not because in being in love I have the illusion that the other is unique. It is because there is the possibility of thinking someone as unique that there is love (50). 4. Here in language there is the possibility of expressing in a didactic manner this paradoxical relation of love, which is not simply the fact that I know someone—it is not knowing—but the sociality irreducible to knowledge which is the essential moment of love. Practically, this goodness, this nonindifference to the death of the other, this kindness, is precisely the very perfection of love (58). For Levinas then, love is conceived as responsibility for the other, such that the other’s being and death are more important than my own. This he suggests may be “the human vocation in being.” Such responsibility for the other, says Levinas, is a kind of “madness,” it is “an absurd thesis.” Absurd or not, Levinas’ thesis is one that the best philosophical minds of our time have engaged, one that I hope mainstream psychoanalysis will begin to seriously dilate on. How does Levinas’ heady notion of love as fundamentally responsibility for the Other actually play out in the every day relations between adults? To answer this important question I ask the reader to keep in mind the above list of Levinas’ key terms that describe his notion of love: love is not merely a strong feeling, it is an obligation; authentic love does not mainly strive after union and fusion, it always respects the other’s radical otherness and cherishes the other as unique; love is not primarily characterized by mere mutual pleasure giving and reciprocal affirmation, rather it is expressed as acts of goodness for the sake of the other’s best interests, often requiring self-sacrifice. For Levinas, to authentically, meaningfully and lovingly participate in the life of another person involves positive feelings and warmth, but most importantly, responsibility. On this point, he is in full agreement with that great intersubjective Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. Said Buber, feelings merely “accompany the metaphysical fact of love, but they do not constitute it. . . . Feelings one ‘has,’ love occurs. Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in love. . . . Love is responsibility of an I for a You.” There are two figures in the real world that perhaps best depict the inner attitude and outer behavior of a person capable of living their love as responsibility for the Other. The first, the devoted mother, or care giver, Levinas actually mentions in his discussions of maternity. The second, the master teacher, he does not mention, as far as I know. I want to briefly describe how the ideal mother and master teacher manifest the form of Levinasian love that I want to get across. I mainly leave it to the reader to extrapolate these metaphors to the details of everyday adult love relations. For Levinas “maternity in the complete being ‘for the other’ which characterizes it, which is the very signifyingness of signification. . . ” Says Alphonso Lingis in his translator’s introduction of Otherwise Than Being, Concretely the acts by which one recognizes the other are acts of exposing, giving of one’s very substance to another. Responsibility is enacted not only in offering one’s properties or one’s possessions to the other, but in giving one’s own substance for the other. The figure of maternity is an authentic figure of responsibility. Writing in one of his Talmudic commentaries, Levinas develops one of the core aspect of maternity, the quality I want to focus on. Rakhamim (Mercy), which the Aramaic term Rakhmana evokes, goes back to the word Rekhem, which means uterus. Rakhamim is the relation of the uterus to the other, whose gestation takes place within it. Rakhamim is maternity itself. God as merciful is God defined by maternity. . . . Perhaps maternity is sensitivity itself. . . In other words, the existential stance that best exemplifies one’s responsibility for the other is one that is characterized by mercy, or in a less religious language, compassion. Compassion is a notion that is grossly under explored in the psychoanalytic literature. Moreover, it is hardly ever a term that analysts use in describing a successful analysis. Meissner, for example, a Jesuit priest/analyst, in his recent book on the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis does not even list compassion in his index. Wallwork, in his review article on “Ethics in Psychoanalysis” also does not discuss compassion as part of the deep ethical theory informing the practice of psychoanalysis. In contrast, compassion, sometimes called mercy or lovingkindness (Buddhism) is a core virtue of all major wisdom religions of the world. Briefly, compassion, defined straightforwardly as sympathy for the suffering of the other including a desire to help, especially as manifested in the ideal mother, can be viewed as having at least two dimensions. First, compassion involves the ceaseless, abundant unconditional love for the other. Second, it expresses a love devoted to helping and at times, steering the other in a new direction. This requires abiding patience, empathy and understanding, and forgiveness. These two dimensions of compassion constitute, in part, the engaged love that Levinas seems to be pointing to in his notion of responsibility for the other. Adult love relations then, are based on a fundamental obligation to make ourselves fully available, with boundless compassion, to the neediness (in the non-neurotic sense), especially the suffering, of the beloved. Forgiveness is the second term I want to mention as characteristic of the “good enough mother,” and by extension, the responsible subjectivity that is equated with the capacity to love as Levinas construes it. For the secularist, including the secular psychoanalyst, the word forgiveness, like compassion, is saturated with religious connotations and meanings and therefore is generally not a crucial part of the dialogue between the typical secular analyst and analysand, nor in general, is it usually part of scholarly psychoanalytic discourse. Like compassion, forgiveness, the act of pardoning somebody for a mistake or wrongdoing, is a profound psychological capacity, one that requires considerable autonomy, integration and self-esteem. Not only is the capacity to forgive a pre-requisite to be a “good enough,” responsible mother or caregiver, it is also crucial to maintain the integrity and continuity of any love relation. Levinas seems to be circling the same insight when he boldly and provocatively claims that one is responsible for the persecutor, including my own persecution, by embracing the responsibilities of the persecutor that are not discerned and manifested. Says Levinas, In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effect of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor. In other words, for example, when my lover says something offensive and unkind to me, it is my responsibility to help him see how he has pained me, and to help steer him back on track. That is, it is my responsibility to demand justice from my lover, and in so doing, I encourage him towards greater critical self-reflection, sensitivity and compassion. Moreover, by pointing out his culpability, I mobilize greater responsibility for himself, in terms of self-control, remorse and making reparations. Suffice it to say, that forgiveness, a core aspect of responsibility for the other, can foster positive changes in one’s emotional life and in one’s love relation: It can reduce one’s anger, resentment and retaliatory wishes; it can renew a person’s sense of self-efficacy, control, and power in that one is taking a more active and compassionate role in changing how one views one’s sense of being mistreated or having done the mistreatment; and of course, forgiveness can possibly lead to the reconciliation between the perpetrator and the offended. In addition, by forgiving, individual’s enlarge their options, autonomy and freedom to grow, develop and flourish. Forgiveness, also encourages people to take responsibility for their wrongdoing, which makes it somewhat easier for the offended to reduce his hurt and perhaps begin the healing process. Finally, perhaps, forgiveness also includes transforming one’s rage, resentment and animosity. By forgiving someone who has mistreated you, you in effect, give up the right to hit back at the offender, this being one of the main reasons it is so hard to forgive. The second real life figure who best expresses love as responsibility for the Other is the master teacher. For example, being a master teacher involves bringing all of oneself to the student (read: the loved other) as opposed to partially attending to the student’s words. It involves taking great care of what is given to him. It demands that one be willing and able to do all he can in order to find the best solution to the problem of the student, to ease that which troubles him. In the adult to adult love relation this includes the everyday “hands on” problems in living associated with say a significant other’s work difficulties or raising children. It also involve responsibly responding to the “big” problems of existence that characterize the vicissitudes of the lifecycle, including those situations that Freud thought reflected what he called the “harshness” of life. Responsibility towards one’s student also involves attempting, with great gentleness and care, and within the context of profound trust, to disrupt the student. That is, to undermine the security/safety maintaining walls around him that constitute his taken for granted assumptions about himself and the world. The purpose of such disruption is in part, to create the conditions of possibility for the student to think differently. This means encouraging him to create the space inside him to imagine a wider horizon, and if he chooses, to expand, deepen and change his perspective on a particular issue, and/or to shift his angle of vision on life. In the educational context, this can be accomplished if the teacher listens to the student with the fullness of his whole being and responds with the maximum of intellectual/emotional resources he has available in the particular set of circumstances he and the student are in. The application of this existential orientation of the master teacher to his student is easily recast for the adult to adult love relation, and, for that matter, to most forms of love. That is, in the adult love relation genuine responsibility, in part, means helping the significant other to actualize his humanizing potential. In the current context of the teacher metaphor, this means acting like a midwife to the soul, facilitating the birth of a new self, a better self. That is, a self capable of actualizing the best of its intellectual, emotional and moral capacity, especially perhaps, for love, compassion and forgiveness, among other human virtues. Return to the “Other” Freud I am well aware that all of this talk about responsibility for and to the Other, the obligation to give to the other before oneself, and the cultivation of goodness as a general existential orientation in the world is perhaps troubling to the mainstream psychoanalyst for a number of reasons. In their view, not only is such an expectation naïve and unrealistic for most people, it flies in the face of human nature as usually psychoanalytically conceived: man is inherently egoistic and narcissistic, he tends to put himself first, and is inclined to insensitivity and indifference to the Other. Moreover, a Levinasian approach also seems to cultivate a kind of masochistic outlook, a masochistic submission to the other’s needs and desires. I want to briefly respond to these criticisms with the hope that the analyst will perhaps be more inclined to make some space for Levinas in their outlook. That is, to consider incorporating a Levinasian angle of vision on love, and for that matter, on the human condition, into its theorizing and practice, at least a little bit. The great Saint Thomas Aquinas famously wrote, “If our natures were different our duties would be different.” That is, how one conceptualizes human nature will to some extent, determine how one formulates what is reasonable to expect from people, especially in terms of their moral life. To the extent that one views the human condition mainly in terms of its dark side–conflict, deficit and psychopathology–then one is likely to obscure seeing and working with other dimensions of being. This includes, the individual’s yearnings for self-transformation and self-transcendence, for radically ethical living, what Levinas calls, “Otherwise Than Being.” As is well know, the received wisdom about Freud was that he did not have a very positive attitude about most human beings and what was possible in terms of enhancing their moral life. For example, Freud wrote, I don’t cudgel my brains much about good and evil, but I have not found much ‘good’ in the average human being. Most of them are in my experience riff-raff, whether they loudly proclaim this or that ethical doctrine or none at all. The unworthiness of human beings, even of analysts, has always made a deep impression on me, but why should analyzed people be altogether better than others? While Freud’s view by no means depict how all subsequent analysts and their theories see such things, I do believe that his fundamental cynicism and pessimism has to some extent tainted how analysts conceptualize the human condition and the human capacity for self-transformation and self-transcendence. This is especially the case when it comes to articulating what is possible in terms of improving, enhancing and elevating human moral life. As I quoted earlier, Freud said, “Analysis makes for unity, but not necessarily for goodness.” However, this is only one side of Freud. He also believed, though this is much less known, that human beings were capable of living somewhat less selfishly and self-centrically than his theory and severe and gloomy comments suggested, at least at first glance. For example, as Wallwork points out, Freud quietly urged people to strive to live according to the love commandment, “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Freud believed that such an ideal was a worthwhile personal goal, and not one that was utterly unobtainable. In Civilization and its Discontents, while Freud challenged the extreme demands for self-denial and selflessness of the Christian interpretation of the love commandment, says Wallwork, he actually reinterpreted it along more moderate, broadly humanistic lines. “I myself have always advocated the love of mankind,” he wrote to Romain Rolland. Freud also noted in his essay, “Why War?” that the love commandment was the best cure to the human proclivity to violence, hatred and war: Our mythological theory of instincts makes it easy for us to find a formula for indirect methods of combating war. If willingness to engage in war is an effect of the destructive instinct, the most obvious plan will be to bring Eros, its antagonist, into play against it. Anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling those towards a loved object, though without having a sexual aim. There is no need for psycho-analysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion itself uses the same words: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ This, however, is more easily said than done. My point is that there is an “other” Freud, one that is less dour than the received wisdom depicts him. This Freud admiringly intuits another form of subjectivity, one that imagines the human person as fundamentally an ethical subject. Such a subjectivity goes beyond the egological, self-centric one that dominated Freud’s published writings, and to some extent, animates, and limits, psychoanalytic views of the human condition and what humans are capable of, at their best. I agree with the “other” Freud, that an outlook that has the love commandment as one of its guiding metaphors raises the bar in terms of what we imagine our analysands can achieve in their moral life. It nudges them in the direction of a Levinasian sensibility, of thinking oneself as an ethical subject. Levinas, of course, takes the matter even further. He invites us to consider the cultivation of “goodness,” as our guiding metaphor. “Goodness,” he says, “consists in taking up a position such that the Other counts more than myself.” Such an ethical ideal goes beyond the love commandment, in that it demands an even greater transformation of one’s narcissism towards a responsibility for the Other calculus. This leads me to the second criticism of Levinas. The typical psychoanalyst might claim that Levinas’ notion of love as roughly equated with the cultivation of goodness, is a viewpoint that smacks of masochism, or at least inordinate self-denial and self-sacrifice. This form of self-negation is precisely what Freud was criticizing in Civilization and its Discontents in his discussion of the love commandment. As Edith Wyschogrod has pointed out, such a charge does not adequately appreciate to what extent Levinas is advocating a “remarkable transvaluation of values.” That is, like Nietzsche, and later Foucault, Levinas is proposing revolutionizing the dominating tendencies, sentiments, the ways of thinking and being of our age. Levinas, says Wyschogrod, is not advocating submissiveness as analysts usually construe the term, as merely giving in to the demands or the authority of the other. Rather, for Levinas “submissiveness is reinstated as self-donation.” That is, with Levinas we are dealing with a radically different notion of the self, of the I, one that I think needs to be included in any psychoanalytic version of the human condition for it locates the person first and foremost, as an ethical subject seeking out the “Good.” Such an ethical subject is struggling to transform the very conditions, the form of his or his life, such that his capacity to love the Other is deepened, expanded and is his ultimate concern. Says Levinas, “the self is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything.” “Perhaps the possibility of a point of the universe where such an overflow of responsibility is produced ultimately defines the I.” Such an appreciation of the “other” Freud, of love relations and more generally, the human condition as Levinas describes it, has not been entirely neglected by psychoanalysts, though it has been an extremely marginal and an inadequately formulated theme. For example, Erich Fromm, the psychoanalytic social psychologist, who is surely one of the greatest, though I think enormously under appreciated psychoanalytic codifiers and theoreticians on love since Freud, is the exception. In his small gem, The Art of Loving, An Enquiry into the Nature of Love he rejects Freud’s physiological instinctivist view that human capacities for love and aggression are strictly biological potentials. Rather, Fromm reconceptualizes all interpersonal relationships in terms of specific kinds of relatedness. In this context, love is one of the key characteristics of the “productive type.” The productive person has achieved a high level of autonomy and personality integration: he is spontaneous, creative, related, transcendent, rooted, he has a strong sense of who he is, and he has a stable though flexible frame of orientation toward living. Most importantly, the productive person can love and work. “Mature love’ says Fromm, is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity; one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; loves makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. For Fromm, sounding similar to Levinas, love, at least the active character of love can be described as “primarily giving, not receiving.” Love is characterized by “care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.” In essence, for Fromm, “to love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith. . .” Final WordAs I have said earlier, the Levinasian view of love challenges the psychoanalytic theorizing of, for example Freud, Klein, Erickson, Kohut and Lacan, as well as most relational thinkers. It does so in two ways. First, a Levinasian outlook challenges the notion of selfhood that underlies these theories, man as first and foremost egocentric and selfcentric in outlook and behavior. Instead, as Atterton and Calarco point out, Levinas claims that “the relationship of responsibility for the Other is just as early, if not earlier than egoism.” That is, Levinas’s main objective has been to create “a metaphysics upon ethical foundations by showing man’s being in the world to be moral being,” a “moral self.” Second, in part as a consequence of this ego centered version of self, love relations tend to be viewed in terms of two related forms of questionable approach towards the Other. First, love relations are conceptualized largely as hedonistic and utilitarian in focus. That is, the other is viewed mainly as a need satisfying object: how can the other pleasure me, what can the other do for me? In an improved variation on this conceptualization, for example in the work of Rubin and Benjamin, love relations are viewed largely in terms of a mutual instrumental calculus of two equal subjects who appreciate the uniqueness of each other, and give each other satisfaction. This surely goes further than the strict hedonistic/utilitarian view in that it acknowledges the other as unique in terms of desires, goals, values and needs and it makes satisfying those needs as important: “I am for you, you are for me.” This is the love relation as symmetrically conceived. For Levinas, while such an approach moves in the direction of relating to the other as Other, this view still subtly retains the wish to make the other the same, to totalize the Other, and thus to open him or her to disrespect, disregard, de-individuation and other forms of intersubjective violence. Such an ontologically based approach seeks to comprehend the otherness of the Other by including him under a notion “that is thought within me, and thus is in some sense the same as me.” To the extent that the Other is mainly construed in terms of his or her Being, is comprehended and thematized on the basis of what he or she has in common with other beings, the Other becomes conceptually the same as others, and is therefore loses his uniqueness and individuality. According to Levinas, to comprehend the Other in this way, is roughly equivalent “to predicting, manipulating, controlling, even dominating the Other.” Instead of approaching the other in terms of ontology, of knowing and comprehension, Levinas offers an ethical approach that always strives to respects the radical alterity of the Other. The consequences of this Levinasian viewpoint are profound for understanding the limitations of the above psychoanalytic theories of love and point us in the direction that I think psychoanalytic theory should go. Psychoanalytic theory tends to assume that from birth, the self is concerned only, and later, mainly with itself. This is the form of self-love that Freud called primary narcissism. Given this assumption about the human condition, one would therefore require a rationale, a compelling reason to be moral. That is, to love, conceived mainly as responsibility for the Other. This is precisely the assumption and formulation that Levinas rejects. Instead, he vigorously claims that the question of “am I first and foremost responsible for the Other,” is a question that makes sense only within a version of the human condition that is lodged in a philosophy of ontology and human reason. In contrast, for Levinas, the self has no such freedom and choice with regards to responsibility for the Other. The Levinasian self does not need a rationale to be moral: “Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what humanly, I cannont refuse.”. Perhaps most importantly, at least as it relates to the reciprocity/mutuality assumption lodged in certain relational views of love, I am responsible for the Other without the Other being responsible for me in return. Says Levinas, it may well be reasonable to assume that the Other has responsibilities toward me, but I can never know this for sure: “Reciprocity is his affair.” Thus, I am obligated to tend to the Other’s needs without expecting emotional and/or other forms of payback. This is asymmetrical love. Says Levinas, “We are all guilty {responsible for} of all and for all men before all, and I more than the others.”
Freud, letter to S. Ferenczi, 1/10/10. in Jones, Life and “Work of Sigmund Freud, 2:446.
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