relationships like descriptions of causality and dynamics of feelings experienced by lovers, typification or logical schematization of love. The invasion of reason into the realm of love was not easy. And in our time, there is a myth that the analysis is killing to love. Someone even appeals to the authority of Leo Tolstoy, who said that “every reasoning about love destroys love.” But even with the naked eye, you can see that behind the descriptions of love in Leo Tolstoy’s novels there lays deep reflections on the nature of this feeling. So, this biting quote is quite applicable to the clarification that these words should be understood “exactly the opposite of how they are usually understood,” said by him about a statement that “you should not marry out of love, but certainly with calculation.”
At the beginning of the 19th century, taking on the courage bordering with insolence, a French writer Stendhal published his experiments On Love. He foresaw the difficult fate of this “ill-fated book” when ten years after its publication found only seventeen readers. A hundred years later, the laws of love outlined in the “experiments” were chosen as a starting position, the erroneous conclusions of which was to identify and fix, to create insightful studies On Love by a Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. By this time, the “ill-fated book” had become one of the most widely read books. The author of the “studies” notes that it not only “read with ecstasy,” but is also an element of the boudoir entourage of the “marquise, the actress and the lady of the world,” indicating that “they should understand love.”
These centuries-long immersions in the nature of love form two poles of intense intellectual effort, two bright spotlights that pierce and shed light on the territory of love space available to us. It is possible, using a well-known aphorism, to say with confidence that all subsequent theories of love are notes on the margins of the “experiments” and the “studies.” With a few exceptions. One of them is represented by an insightful reading of Plato’s dialogues devoted to love – Lysis, Phaedrus, and Symposium – by a Russian philosopher Alexey Losev. Another exception is by and large a tribute to the special cast of the modern mind, which cannot do without scientific evidence of one or more other considerations based on laboratory experiments or the results of field experiments.
In this regard, food for notes is rich and varied from observing facial expressions, measuring the physiological reactions of lovers and large-scale interviews of men and women about their intimate life, to analyzing love hormones and brain scans of experimental subjects in different stages of love relationships. At the same time, one can hardly talk about any fresh discoveries made in psychology, ethology, social psychology, and other scientific disciplines that have turned to the study of love, because love is as old as the world, and much has already been saying.
The achievements of the sciences have so far been reduced mainly to giving us the opportunity to talk about love in a more modern and sterile language in the hope of understanding and formulating more clearly the long-known intimate mysteries of love. But it should be borne in mind that in modern psychology, you can find a fairly wide variety of approaches to determining the fundamental foundations of love.
Generally speaking, when going on a journey through the spaces of love, one should be prepared to talk about it in different languages. Scientific concepts of the psychology of love often stem from philosophical ideas and run into metaphysical insights. Literary images of love are expressed both in the language of common or refined prose and in chased formulas of poetic inspirations. Poetry, in turn, is often elevated to philosophical generalizations. Perhaps, only by adjusting yourself to the entire diverse linguistic palette, you can prepare yourself for passing the winding routes of conscious love.
BEING IN LOVE AND LOVE
Sacred and Profane Love. Titian, 1514
There is a treasure in my soul
And the key is entrusted only to me!
Starting a dive to the origins of love, where things that await us are, according to Ortega y Gasset, “mechanical, formulaic and, in essence, spiritless quality,” it will not be superfluous to re-read the poem by Anna Akhmatova, replacing the word “poem” with “love.”
I wish you knew the kind of garbage heap
Wild verses grow on, paying shame no heed,
Like dandelions yellowing a fence,
Like burdock and bindweed.
An angered yell, the bracing scent of tar,
And walls with runic mildew like a sign…
And soon a tender, testy poem answers
To your delight and mine.
Now, having admired the work of the magic wand of delight, we can, together with Alexander Pushkin, admit that, falling in love, we are glad to be deceived, despite the “illness of love in my soul.” It has long been noticed that in life, as in most literary works, the incomprehensible romantic epic of lovers unfolds in a bizarre combination of euphoria of delight and feelings of love illness.
If you do not rush headlong into one extreme or another and do not rush between them, then you can go in two ways: try to find something special, really sprouting from these poles of the crystal sphere of love, or recognize all this as an illusion, deception, a game with a hidden purpose.
The illusions of love were both justified and dispelled by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “The pleasure that the other sex gives us, no matter how objective it may seem, is in fact nothing more than a disguised instinct, that is, the spirit of a genus striving to preserve its type.” However, such a conclusion, shared by many gloomy soul types, does not cause any delight, and the fate of love is seen such that it is better for her to die without being born.
It is not surprising that, first of all, poets are ready to indignantly object to this. Recognizing the first part of Schopenhauer’s deduction about the game of nature with a hidden purpose, they delight in this captivating bittersweet illusion and reject its down-to-earth mechanistic part, seeking to discover their secret of all-consuming deception. Then, if we want to see the true reverse side of lovers under the moon, we have to look for other landmarks. It is tempting to exclaim after Vladimir Nabokov: “Oh, love. For your secret I am going back up the stairs of years” and try to get to where “I was only a small comma on the first page of my creation.”
At the same time, I would like to hope that this jump back will only be a swing for a forward throw. Movement in this direction on the big love map is indicated by a series of warning signs about slippery roads and dead ends. One of them is located just behind the sign: “Entry Into the Territory of the Libido of the Great and Terrible Sigmund Freud.” Having wandered here among the embryos of sexual activity in early childhood, insane fixations of libido on various, sometimes bizarre objects, one can leave with the disappointing impression that “love is fundamentally as animalistic as it has been from time immemorial. Love inclinations are difficult to educate, their education gives too much, sometimes too little.”
However, not everything is so hopelessly unambiguous. In the Freudian construction of the psyche, Self-libido and Object-libido are distinguished. Self-libido stems from childhood delusions of omnipotence and narcissism and develops under the influence of significant others into the Self-ideal. According to Freud, falling in love consists in the outpouring of the Self-libido on the Object, and “the
