Review of the Movie “Amour”

It’s hard to imagine Hollywood titling a film with the one word, “Love.” But if it did, it would likely be trite; overly romantic and ultimately some flimsy version of love American style. By contrast, amour, the French word for love, can stand alone as it conjures intrigue, mystery, and a never ending world of illusions, including the dire consequences and actions illusions can produce.

In taking up illusions of love in my upcoming book A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Couples Psychotherapy (Ringstrom, 2014), I discuss Stephen Mitchell’s central idea from his last book Can Love Last? (2002). In it he maintains that to a considerable extent American psychoanalysis seems to have assumed that when Freud wrote: “Where they love, they have no desire and where they desire, they cannot love,” he meant that desire and romance ultimately border on the infantile while real love is mature. Instead, Mitchell argues that while desire, romance and passion may be constituted in illusion, no less so does their dialectical opposite and that is the presumed world of attachment. In this latter conceit attachment love is about the illusions of stability, predictability, control, continuity, and safe guards against risk. Mitchell offers that in their own way, attachment love and romantic love (desire) are both illusory, notwithstanding the former fostering the illusion of security while the latter fosters exciting mystery. Reckoning with these illusions is not a problem to be solved, but a dialectic to be embraced. Amour, in contrast to American psychology is about French psychology, and from it we can learn a few things about the inexorable role of illusion in love, in amour.

Shortly after the movie begins we see Georges and Anne at a piano concert featuring one of Anne’s internationally renowned protégés. On their trolley car ride home Georges and Anne glow in conversation as they seem to be regaling the wonderful

evening’s performance while likely extolling Anne’s pivotal ro