The Love and Relationships Series: “On Love and Loving”

I am here starting a series in human relationships. I introduce this subject because I cannot think of any aspect of our lives that has a greater impact on our moods and on our levels of happiness (or depression and despair) than having good, harmonious, love relationships. For this reason– and from a psychological perspective–nothing is more important to people, but for young people in particular–than to get their bearings in this complicated life matter. Nothing will affect your levels of happiness more than learning about Love and how to love.

Love is such large word that one can write about it forever and never exhaust the subject. This has been the fact throughout human history. This reality of the conundrums of Love has led some authors, such as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to say that when we talk about Love “we cannot help but begin to fall into idiocy.” Well, I don’t agree with that assertion. I much more concur with psychoanalyst Eric Fromm’s take that wrote extensively on this matter.

Eric Fromm was the author of an excellent book on Loving that I wholeheartedly recommend to everybody interested in this subject called “The Art of Loving.” Fromm thought that–not only can we write and speak about love sensibly–but we can also state a few things about Love that are useful for us all to improve our love lives.

My point of view here then will be a psychoanalytical one, i.e., one that sees love from the perspective of depth psychology. But, being a psychiatrist, I will also add the modern knowledge extracted from the state of the art of Neurobiology and the Neurosciences, all branches of knowledge that did not exist in Freud’s times.

This combination of the Analytical and the Neuroscientifical viewpoints will set this series apart from other sources of information that discuss this subject from other non-psychoanalytic/non-scientific perspectives.

The Two Kinds of Love: Eros and Agape

When it comes to Love, there two different aspects of the phenomenon to take into account: two different kinds of Love. There is brotherly love–known as “Agape”–and erotic love–known as “Eros”. My posts in this initial series will be geared towards addressing erotic love. In other words, I will point out the problems in relationships of sensual Love between men and women–and will venture some solutions to those problems. I will focus here exclusively on men and women love relationships, leaving homosexual relationships for another series.

This is not to say that these posts will address any coarse aspect of sexual matters: This series on EROTIC LOVE is not another revolutionary Kama Sutra. So, if that what you are looking for, you will be disappointed. Neither is this series on Love about learning different sexual positions in bed or on learning any manipulative strategies for easy sexual conquests or manipulations. There are enough blogs and sites out there from which you can find that kind of information if that is what you are looking for. Here I am not intending to write about Sex–but about Love in human relationships and its importance. And I intend to do this from a scientific but practical standpoint.

The Origins of Love: Libido and The Life Instinct

• First we have to look at the origins of Love. I will carry this inquiry out from what it was discovered in over 120 years of psychoanalytic inquiry.
• According to Freud, Love is a manifestation of the Life Instinct or the Life Drive (in German Trieb =Drive).
• This “Drive (push) to Life” is manifested in “a psychical energy” he called “Libido”.
• Libido–or sexual energy–is the underlying unconscious force that drives Life on Earth both in humans and in animals.
• Libido represents the instinctual tendency to create and perpetuate Life on the planet.
• Sexual energy is a tendency of the Eros (or the Union principle) to produce more life–bigger and bigger unions of organic molecules into larger living beings.

Our Human Origins: Love, Libido, and the Art of Making Babies

Babies are the by-product of the activity of Libido, even though most of us do not stop to think about this fact much.

We all showed up on this planet as a result of this sexual force. This driving force is inherent in our bodies–it comes “built in from the factory,” so to speak and it impels us to action from within.

Today, in modern Neuroscience, we know that Libido is the product of the activity of our bodies’ chemistry, our sexual hormones, and our brains’ activity. This biological energy that constantly pushes us from inside aims at the perpetuation of the species through sexual union. Interestingly enough, libido in humans–both male and female–is driven by only one Hormone: Testosterone–both in men and women.

Libido, though, is a blind force and does not care about the welfare of the individual. This is the ultimate biological fact underlying the not infrequent fatal outcomes for us all in the matters of Love. In other words, while Love may be good for the species, it may be FATAL for a particular person who is “madly” in love.

All unconscious Libido wants is to keep reproducing itself keeping the species alive, strong, and going. This happens to be the case, even if the individual has to be sacrificed in the process.

Love and Beyond the Pleasure Principle

In his 1920’s paper “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud speculated with the biological fact that we are made of two sets of cells: The “Gametes” (or the reproductive cells: The female Egg, and the millions of Male Spermatozoa), and the “Soma” cells (the 30 trillion cells that are not Gametes and that constitute who we are physically as individuals).

The Gamete cells are immortal. They are passed on from one generation to another perpetuating our species while they keep living on. While the Soma cells are expendable, i.e, we as individuals have to die. However, we reproduce and a part of us lives on in another body: our children. This is the biology of what is behind The Power of Love and the desire for children.

In order to achieve this titanic mission of keeping our species from extinction, biology and evolution (or the Creator, if you are a believer), made Libido an all powerful force pushing existence from behind and it put its immense powers in the service of reproduction.

Sex, Love, and Pleasure

But, in order for this mission to be accomplished, sexual activity had to be felt as immensely pleasurable. In this regard, Freud said that “there was no greater physical pleasure than the one experienced in orgasm”. He also asserted that this organic experience becomes “the prototype of ALL intense human pleasures”. And he concluded that once experienced, this kind of pleasure makes us all seek it over and over again.

From this perspective, this means that Love operates on our minds just like an addictive drug. Today, in the neurosciences, we know that this is the case as both sexual pleasure and other addictive pleasures share the same brain pathways in the reward system of our limbic systems.

Love is Addictive

Love is immensely pleasurable; therefore, it has powerful “addictive properties”. So, beware.

This has to be so, as Libido wants to make sure that we keep reproducing, having babies, and that our species goes on. And the only way to attain this aim, from a biological standpoint, is by making sex, subjectively, extremely pleasurable. Thus, bodily libido causes the pleasure seeking aspects of our bodily parts to make sensual activities intensely pleasurable. This applies–not just to sexual intercourse–but to all the physical/sensual activities that eventually may (or may not) lead to sexual intercourse, just as well; or what is commonly known as “foreplay” .

In a way, we can say that we are all here because of the addictive properties of sexuality. We are all a by product of a biological ADDICTION of our bodies to Love and Sex.

Libido is driven by an addiction to pleasure. “Love,” on the other hand, is an outer, much more refined, humanized–and sublimated aspect, of this “addiction.” Love is then the civilized side of the Sexual Drive. From an evolutionary standpoint, Love was born at a much later date in human evolution than coarse sexuality and aggression: Love is a refinement and an achievement of Human civilization.

Below is an image of the reward or the pleasure circuit in our brains

In order to achieve biological perpetuation, the entire body had to follow the Pleasure Principle. This “Principle” is the natural tendency to seek pleasure and to avoid displeasure. Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” operates in our bodies automatically and its functions go well beyond the sphere of sexuality to keep us alive and well.

The Chemistry of Love

Today, we know that the pleasure center of the brain is the Nucleus Accumbens (in green in the image above) and that the main chemical involved in its stimulation is DOPAMINE. But, sexuality–and sexual activity–is its main manifestation. So the Dopaminergic impulses that arise from the deeper areas of our primitive “reptilian” brain stem (in the Ventral Tegmental Area; a pink round cherry area in the image above) lead our attention in the direction of seeking stimulating sexual objects in the outside world.

Those sexual “objects” (object is the psychoanalytical word for people that we are attracted to) must have one quality: The ability to arouse our Desire; and the most powerful activator of Desire is Images. So, always keep in mind when you think ADHD, that our Attention is driven by interest; and interest is driven by Desire.

What the brain/body unconsciously seeks in this search is its union (the union of its gametes) with the opposite sex and a measure of pleasure extracted from that activity.

It is essential to realize that–no matter who we are–we are here because of the existence of Eros. It is because there is sexual libido in humans that we ALL showed up here. Otherwise, Life would have been extinct millions of years ago. As someone put it humorously: “We all started with a Picnic. The story goes that “we went to the Picnic with our fathers and came back home from the Picnic with our mothers.”

To this instinct, Freud opposed Tanatos, or the Death Instinct. This is the destructive, aggressive force, present in all of us. This force is silent–it works in the background, so to speak–and it tends to the destruction of life matter. This Death Drive tend towards the disintegration of our lives and that of others through aggressive acts.

The Two Opposing Instincts: The Sexual Instinct and the Death Instinct

These two forces are always operating unconsciously in ALL OF US. These are forces perennially at odds with each other. And, the problem is: there is no way to extricate ourselves from their influence. These facts led Freud to the conclusion that ALL LOVE RELATIONSHIPS ARE AMBIVALENT.

Put in plain English, this means that–even in the best of love relationships–there is always a degree of aggression and animosity. So, this finding of psychoanalysis came to debunk the myth of the Romantic Love.

The reality of the imperfection of Human Love life is something a lot of people do not like to hear about. But it is important to start looking at Love and love relationships from a realistic perspective if we want to succeed in our love relationships, rather than to take an idealized Hollywoodian vision in love affairs that can only lead to disaster.

Now, as in any matter, we need to start by trying to come up with a definition of what Love is. From the get go, I must say that there is not–nor there will ever be–a final definition of Love. Every person must come up with his or her own in their life times: It is your own answer to the problem of Love. But, there are a few traits of a loving relationship that are accepted by most authors, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and poets agree on.

I am going to try here one definition of my own. I believe that–even if Love emanates from our sexual instincts, it is a sublimated form of that instinct that in fact goes against sexual activity. Love is then something different than sex.

A possible definition of Love

So, from my perspective, I will attempt here my own definition:

“Love is a deep and persistent tender/erotic feeling we have for another person based on emotion and choice. It is the result of prolonged shared experiences with that person and it is based on honesty and commitment. When we are truly in Love, the well-being of the other person becomes as important as our own. Sometimes, this love feeling can be so strong that the other person’s well-being becomes even more important than our own.”

In other words, when we are in love, there is an element of “transcending our narcissism” (as much as this is humanly possible) to get out of our own “narcissistic bubbles” in order to reunite ourselves with another Human Being.

For that reason, true Love, even if it is erotic, always involves a certain measure of Sacrifice. What I mean by sacrifice here, is that true love involves at times not putting ourselves first. The practice of True Love involves thinking about the loved one and wanting his/her well-being as much as we want ours. In short, it is about wanting for him/her the best that you want for yourself.

I will stop here and leave you with a couple of questions to reflect upon:

What is your own definition of Love? How do you put it into practice? do you see people around that are Loving examples?

I will continue examining Love and relationships in the next post. Keep tuning.