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When Freud created psychoanalysis, love was a defining element in his patients' suffering. His psychoanalytic procedure became a process of revealing how forms of love and desire, about which his patients would not or could not speak, were both the sources of, and found expression in, their neuroses (Freud, 1915a). These passions were too shameful or guilt provoking, or too deeply buried to be readily remembered, and/or disguised, to be comfortably acknowledged. Insight into the instinctual sources of these infantile loves and desires cured the patient of his or her symptoms, inhibitions, and anxieties. Knowing one's forbidden desires, one's unacceptable drives, Freud envisioned, would set one free from neurotic suffering.
Our understanding of clinical psychoanalysis, and of the mind, brain, body, and social forces that shape us, have deepened and become vastly more complex. But what has changed in our understanding of love? This is the challenge Yoram Yovell takes up in this rich and provocative paper (a paper that Freud would have loved to read).
In pursuing the question of a drive to love, Yovell posits neuropsychoanalysis as an intellectual synergy of the disciplines of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. This neuropsychoanalytic perspective, while avoiding “ruthless reductionism,” can ultimately offer new and useful knowledge about the nature and sources of human motivation.
Since I write, not as a scientist, but as an analytic clinician and educator, one who thinks in terms of understanding and treating patients, I assume that analysts work with three interrelated theories always in (and necessarily not on) their minds:
a theory of mind
a theory of suffering or pathology
and a theory of treatment or cure.
From this point of view, I think that Yovell poses three linked problems: