Women, Love, and Power: Literary and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

6. Romantic Narcissism: Freud and the Love O/Abject

Romantic Narcissism: Freud and the Love O/Abject ^RHAPS the biggest surprise for the reader who comes to Romantic literature for the first time or after long absence is its almost total disregard of what is now called romantic love, that is, a physical but spiritually idealized relationship between a man and a woman, whether within or outside marriage. The Romantics are interested in nature, in self, in love as an integrative force that binds the universe together, but of consummated love between man and woman we find remarkably little in their writings . What has been said of the troubadours might well be said of them. Their art is an avoidance of love. "The lover is a narcissist with an object." So writes Julia Kristeva in her book Tales of Love (Histoires d'amour).1 If this is true, we might say that the Romantic—at least the male Romantic—is often a lover without an object. His ideal is narcissistic love, but even this eludes him. Lacan put his lens on the problem when he said in Encore (IV, "L'Amour et le signifiant"; "Love and thé Signifier"), if love originates in the self as Freud said, how can we ever love another?2 A footnote that Freud added in 1910 to his "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," first published in 1905, illuminates the Romantic problem: The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object. The ancients glorified 82 6 P JLEI ROMANTIC NARCISSISM 83 the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor even an inferior object; while we despise the instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the object.3 What is striking about this statement is how we now appear to have come full circle. Like the Greeks, we emphasize the instinctual life (or at least did until the advent of AIDS). However, the Romantic view of love, which we are perhaps returning to, is epitomized by Freud's statement. Freud is often referred to as a Victorian. Yet in many ways he is the last of the great Romantics. As Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out in her article "Forbidden Love," "Psychoanalysis is itself to some extent romantic as a process and as a method of self-exploration , with its imagery of quest and hoped-for salvation, its tactic of enlightenment by metaphor."4 And no less than the Romantics , many an analysand is searching for the ideal lover. There is ample evidence that the Romantics glorified the object and denigrated the sexual instinct. The problem is that the Romantic often longs for someone who is already betrothed, or someone who otherwise represents an incestuous object, or indeed someone who doesn't exist at all. Rather than splitting the object into the affectional and the sensual, the pattern that Freud treats in his essay "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," the Romantic is often split off from the object itself, a situation that places him in a state of profound abjection. Thus abject, the lover is often reduced to object status himself. In her book Powers of Horror (Pouvoirs de l'horreur) Kristeva associates abjection, a term which conveys a far greater sense of disgust—as well as fascination—in French than in English, with the mother and the need to separate from her. Perhaps too the Romantic lover cannot find an object because he only finds an abject. If, as Philip Rieff says in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, "the therapeutic goal of psychoanalysis [is] to abrogate the power of the prototype, to cut the umbilical cord of authority—so that love may be truly between persons, not between imagoes,"5 then few if any Romantic figures achieve psychic health. But for the Romantic, health was not the point. Intensity of feeling was. Who 84 WOMEN, LOVE, AND POWER knows? Maybe it is the twentieth-century advocate of objectrelations school genitality who is settling for too little. Even for Freud, as Wilson points out, "Adult love . . . was always to some extent a reenactment of the grandiose and unattainable aspirations of the infant. Romantic passion is really, therefore, a longing for the impossible, representing, like so much else in Freud, the wish to...