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Transference, or Amorous Dynamics
- Fordham University Press
- Chapter
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love as transference Love is a necessary seeming, which is to be restored, aroused, promoted endlessly. —Tales of Love After so persuasively demonstrating that self-love is not reducible to a moral value or a medical symptom but rather that it is a complex organization that enables the emerging subject to take shape and to truly live, it would only make sense that Kristeva would not portray Eros as an anti-Narcissus and depict love of the other as wholly distinct or severed from love of the self. Kristeva, like a certain Freud, resists the overly simplistic and naïve opposition that has so often been set up between Eros and Narcissus and, instead, claims that the lover is another incarnation of the narcissist, “a narcissist with an object” to be exact (TL 33/47). In spite of the differences between love and narcissism, Kristeva stresses the continuity between the two forms of love. Perhaps, it is more precise to say that love, chapter 4 Transference, or Amorous Dynamics Transference, or Amorous Dynamics 81 which “is initially [and, perhaps, essentially] narcissistic,” repeats the movement of loving identification and transference that is central to narcissism (TL 124/157). And, in this sense, Narcissus is the “prime mover (moteur) [ . . . ] for love” (TL 124/156). As was noted in the introduction to Part II, Kristeva insists that all love discourses have not denied but “dealt with narcissism ” and, thus, integrated self-love into their erotic ideals (TL 7/16). This is because all “[a]matory experience rests on narcissism and on its aura of emptiness, seeming and impossibility, which underlies any idealization” (TL 267/331). In fact, Kristeva asserts that love flourishes between, what she calls, “the two borders of narcissism and idealization” (TL 6/16). In other words, the narcissistic structure that generates self-love via idealizing the third can be logically, although not experientially, divided into these two essential elements that universally appear in every love, regardless of its particular configuration or orchestration (friendship, erotic, homosexual, heterosexual, etc.). Although this division between narcissism and idealization appears reminiscent of, if not identical to, Freud’s split of libido into ego-libido and object-libido, that is, into narcissistic and anaclitic love, what Kristeva is highlighting is that each and every instance of love is inevitably bound up with both. Thus, in love the “emphasis may be put in [one] situation more on violence , or more on narcissism, or more on idealization, or more on the erotic, and so on. But the two components: narcissism and idealization will last, will endure” (PK 337). Let us then examine how these two inseparable aspects of the narcissistic structure find themselves reenacted in the experience of love. Like the narcissistic child, the lover finds himself getting carried away. Self-love, as we witnessed in the previous chapter, is engendered in the child insofar as he identifies with and is transferred to the place where the “I” is loved by the Other, by the third. “The first variant of identification,” Kristeva writes in Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, “recurs with amorous idealization in the lover’s discourse” (SNS 52/84). In [18.232.169.110] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:58 GMT) amorous identification, the Ego Ideal, its “Highness the Ego,” “projects and glorifies itself, or else shatters into pieces and is engulfed, when it admires itself in the mirror of an idealized Other” (TL 7/16). It is therefore this narcissistic capacity to project oneself “through the ideal instance and to identify with it” that Kristeva terms idealization (PK 337). Clearly idealization is inseparable from narcissism, as the “I” projects its own ideal image (itself an imaginary construction based on the child’s first and most influential identification with the father-mother conglomeration in personal prehistory) onto the beloved only to have it returned to him, revealing an “exorbitant aggrandizement of the loving Self as extravagant in its pride as in its humility” (TL 4/13). Thus, amorous projection is a repetition of transference in which the lover is carried over to the place of the loved one; that is, the idealized Other. In this revival of narcissism, the lover “imagine[s] himself similar, merging with [the beloved], and even indistinguishable from him” (TL 33/47). Hence, Kristeva defines love as “the merging of the identifying ideal with the object of desire” (TL 32/46). Once again, loving identification (in truth, is there...