Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

April 13, 1971. BEING IN LOVE AND OBJECT LOSS. Freud Anniversary Lecture. Robert C. Bak, M.D.

Dr. Bak stated that he had combined scientific and literary qualities in this paper. In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud wrote: 'In the two most opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide, the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways'.

'Being in love' was examined by Bak in a triangle with mourning and melancholia, and the similarities and contradictions were discussed. He cited the role of object loss in melancholia and added that the state of being in love is often preceded by separation or by an important object loss—real, imaginary, or threatened. The person who suffers from being in love finds a substitute object to replace the loss.

After reviewing some mythological and literary examples of the relationship between these seemingly dissimilar states, Bak cited the ambivalence in melancholia and in the state of being in love. The latter is a stormy, irrational, and eventually tragic emotional turmoil in contrast to the state of loving. Goethe's Werther is the most appropriate model for this particular state of being in love: Werther wanted to lose himself in the totality of the infinite. The state of loving, on the other hand, is a calmer, more rational and durable state, a mature genital object relationship. Freud himself was the subject of a fiery 'grand passion' in his early love for Martha Bernays, and even in his later relationships with his colleagues. His separation from Brücke and Fleischl played a dynamic role in his seeking a new love object.

The most conspicuous aspect of being in love is the sexual over-evaluation of the object, an effort to counteract, or countercathect, the aggression. Bak spoke of two cases of erotomania (the most pathological form of being in love) in which there was a schizophrenic attempt to grasp an object unambivalently before final inexorable deterioration. The state of bein