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The Latin proverb Amor Omnia Vincet is familiar to you. The Greek and Roman world portrayed the God of Love as invincible. In this presentation I'll bring to you the sad news that the Latin proverb expresses a fantasy rather than psychic reality. I will ask myself who are the enemies of love and why love is not always victorious. Before I proceed, however, I would like to describe to you some thoughts pertaining to what psychoanalysts have discovered about love.
Freud himself never attempted a definition of love. However, there is no shortage of such definitions in the writings of poets and philosophers. The best one known to me was given by Schopenhauer who described love as a longing associated with an image of possessing one woman that offers the lover unending bliss, and the failure to win this woman unspeakable pain. The existential philosopher Roland Barthes (1978) expressed it similarly when he said: “I meet a million bodies. Of these a few hundred evoke in me sexual wishes. But only one evokes such love.” Love gives to lust its uniqueness.
Tradition has it that the lover is always male and the beloved female. This is, of course, not the case in real life and it does an injustice to the capacity of women, who are so often portrayed even by Freud as preferring being loved to loving. With few exceptions, throughout history it was maintained that one can love one person only. Literature therefore has ill prepared us for the clinical fact that more than one person may be loved at a time and that there are people for whom the decision whom they love can be a very difficult one.
I would like also to remind you of Cherubino's famous aria (in Mozart's Figaro) “Tell us you who possess this knowledge what is