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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new formulation of ego-object interaction in the experience of being loved.
The paper derives from the idea in Theodor Reik's The Need to be Loved, that the experience of being loved can be distinguished from the experience of loving. This would seem to be an obvious and familiar distinction—obvious to the psychoanalyst, familiar to lovers, poets, or philosophers universally; yet it has not been made, explicitly and systematically, in psychoanalytic theory. Dr. Reik says:
There is, as far as I know, only one article dealing with that distinction between loving and being loved. This is a psychoanalytic paper by Leon Saul, who emphasizes the significance that the difference deserves…. Since then, nothing has been added. The matter has been swallowed up by silence.54
Dr. Saul's two-page paper, published in 1950, states at one point: “Freud repeatedly pointed out the importance of the need to be loved … without explicitly making the distinction between loving and being loved.”63 It fails to state why Freud did not explicitly make this distinction: because his conception of “love” was essentially onesided.39
Freud defined “love” in terms of an active ego's relations with its passive sexual objects. “Love,” he said, “expresses the motor strivings of the ego after these objects as sources of pleasure.”16 Psychodynamically, this ego-object conception of “love” can accommodate the experience