The Freudian Psychology of Love

Sigmund Freud wrote in 1936 that “I have never ventured beyond the ground floor and basement of the building,” (The Sigmund Freud-Ludwig Binswanger Correspondence 1908-1938 [New

Page 186

York: Other Press, 2003], October 8, 1936, p. 212). Concerning his ideas on love, both his strength and limitation are his emphasis on the underside—the unconscious, sexually-derived motivations in human relationships. Freud brings the discussion back to less altruistic notions of love. He grounds our emotional connection to others to their infantile sources, shows the sides of love that grow out of need, demand, desire, and complicated family dynamics. Integrating self-seeking and mutual care is not the strong point of Freud’s explication on love relationships.

Disentangling love and sex is a challenge in Freud’s work. Sex and aggression were the two basic drives; love was not included. In the index to his complete works, sexuality covers about five pages; love, little more than a column. Still, what makes Freud so important for understanding the nature of love is his concentration on the earliest relationship, that of mother and infant. He sees this connection as the prototype for all subsequent romantic attachments. While Freud built on the 19^th-century glorification of the mother, he moved this idealization from the mother as a moral force, to the mother as providing the nourishment-sensual-sexual-relational needs of the baby. He believed that the emotions aroused in infancy have long-lasting impact on the individual’s romantic life. Freud also showed how important imagination and fantasy are in the lives of all human beings.

He revealed the centrality of the mother to the child, but he did not omit the father’s importance, or that of siblings. Through the notions of identification and choice of a loved one (“object” in Freud’s psychoanalytic terminology), he brought in the problem of gender and the importance of sexual identity. Attachment separation issues and the vicissitudes of relationships also have strong roots in Freud’s thought. Later investigators show it is not just the feeding at the breast that forms the child, but also tactile experiences, sensuality, varying attachment patterns, stages of brain development, and the actual parent-child relations that are important. Almost all these subsequent developments build on Freud’s innovations and syntheses. His thought is a foundation for under-

Page 187

standing love’s nature. This article will consider Freud’s ideas on sexual love; later writings will concern sublimated love, the relationship of sexual and sublimated love, eros, and more on sexual love.

Love, Freud maintains, is when the mental side of sexuality is in the foreground (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, S.E. Vol. 16 [London: The Hogarth Press, 1917], p. 329). He believes the origins of love are in the satisfied need for nourishment (Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, S.E. Vol. 23 [London: The Hogarth Press, 1940], p. 188). He sees sexual life beginning with the baby suckling the mother’s breast (Freud, Intro Lectures, p. 313). When “children fall asleep after being sated at the breast, they show an expression of blissful satisfaction which will be repeated in life after the experience of a sexual orgasm” (Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures). The mother finds fulfillment in relation to her baby. The “mother’s love for the infant she suckles and cares for…is in the nature of a completely satisfying love-relation, which not only fulfills every mental wish but also every physical need; and…it represents one of the forms of attainable human happiness” (Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, S.E. Vol. 11 [London: Hogarth Press, 1910], p. 117). In feeding and sexually arousing the infant “lies the root of a mother’s importance, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the first and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations—for both sexes” (Freud, Outline, p. 188). The mother is the child’s first love (Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 329). When he speaks of an “object choice,” he means it is what one wants to have (Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, S.E. Vol. 18 [London: Hogarth Press, 1921], p. 106). Love to Freud involves possessing the other, which at first is the mother.

The course of the child’s love for the mother does not run smooth. While others attribute the disruption in the infant-mother bond to the child’s anxiety over separation, Freud dates the crisis in the relationship to the appearance of a younger sibling. “A child,”

Page 188

Freud writes, “who has been put into second place by the birth of a brother or sister, and who is now for the first time almost isolated from his mother, does not easily forgive her this loss of place; feelings which in an adult would be described as greatly embittered arise in him and are often the basis of a permanent estrangement” (Freud, Introductory Lectures, p. 334). This loss “of love” leaves behind “a permanent injury to self-regard in the form of a narcissistic scar” (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, S.E. Vol. 18 [London: Hogarth Press, 1920], p. 20).

It is not only a baby sister or brother that stands between mother and child. The young boy observes that his father stands between him and his mother (Freud, Group Psychology, p. 105). “He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness” (Freud, “A Special Type of Object Choice Made By Men,” S.E. Vol. 11 [London: Hogarth Press, 1910], p. 171). His displacement from his mother arouses the boy’s anger, not at the unfaithful mother, Freud asserts, but toward his paternal rival. The son’s relationship with his father “takes on a hostile coloring and becomes identical with the wish to replace his father in regard to his mother as well” (Freud, Group Psychology, p. 105). Freud’s writings on the girl’s oedipal dynamics are not as extensive or clear as those on boys. Still, from his writings it is evident that the little girl finds herself in emotional turmoil when she chooses her father as her desired love and turns away from the mother who nourished and cared for her.

To Freud, emotional attachment becomes complicated by rivalry for the loved one’s attention. Love desires exclusiveness, and from childhood on, this desire is difficult to fulfill. These issues emerge in the complete Oedipus complex, which, Freud maintains, stems from the bisexuality present in children (Freud, The Ego and the Id, S.E. Vol. 19 [London: Hogarth Press, 1923], p. 31). The oedipal drama becomes a complicated triangle where the child struggles over gender and sexual identity. On one hand, the child wants to possess the mother and get rid of the father; on the other,

Page 189

the child wants to have the father and sees the mother as rival. The strength of the child’s gender identification with one or the other parent determines whether the child chooses the positive Oedipus complex and the parent of the opposite sex as the love to be identified with, the negative complex where the youngster chooses the parent of the same sex to ultimately love, or some combination of the two (Freud, Ego and Id, pp. 31-32). While love is a dyadic relationship to many, Freud sees it as being a triad at the minimum. Competition and choice of love attachment go hand in hand. The lover is worried over being replaced by someone else, a rival for exclusive possession. Concern over whether one is loved or not is as much a part of romance as is benevolence toward the loved one.

Equally part of this oedipal dynamic is sexual and gender identification. The complete Oedipus complex offers a spectrum of positive and negative choices and identifications. This means that sexual identities can take a variety of forms within each individual and this internal diversity impacts the outcome of the Oedipus complex and subsequent choices.

The dynamics of the complete Oedipus complex then show how individuals develop their sexual selves, what can stimulate romantic attraction, and how relational conflicts are implicit in dyadic love alliances. Freud believes that moving beyond romantic fixation on a parental love choice is important. “The liberation of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development” (Freud, “Family Romance”, S.E. Vol. 9 [London: Hogarth Press, 1909], p. 237). This may happen if incestuous fantasies can be overcome (Freud, The Psychology of Love [New York: Penguin, 1905, 2007], p. 202). The emergence of a superego corresponds to the male child’s giving up his mother as a love choice. Then, after puberty, sexual love is front and center. For “love naturally consists…in sexual love with sexual union as its aim.” (Freud, Group Psychology, p. 90). Yet according to another motif in Freud’s writings, it is not always easy to let go of the first love choices. The “first allocations of the

Page 190

libido” are “powerful,” and later choices do not quite measure up. “The husband is…only ever a substitute, never the right man…[T] he father…has first claim on the woman’s capacity for love, the husband has at best the second claim” (Freud, Love, p. 272). To Freud, these emotional complications indicate that “there is something in the nature of the sexual drive itself that is unfavorable to the achievement of complete satisfaction.” An adult sexual partner is a “surrogate” for the original choice, and a later choice is not “completely satisfying” (Freud, Love, p. 259). The lover or spouse is always fighting ghosts from the nursery. Adult romances then contain echoes of childhood oedipal choices. The struggle for liberation from the parent’s authority is likely never ending.

Neither Philia, agape, Platonic eros, nor Shakespearean constancy can explain these complex undercurrents of romantic entanglements that Freud reveals. It is in showing these relational complications, with their roots in infancy and the Oedipus complex, that Freud makes his major contribution to understanding the dynamics of love. He redirects discussion about love away from the one-sided emphasis on benevolence and goodness in philia and agape to the vagaries of attachment and choice. While literature can illustrate the volatility of romance, Freud’s ideas go farther in showing why sexual connections arouse such a range of emotions.

Page 191