A Natural History of Love (23 page)

A systematic collector of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquities, which crowded his waiting room and office like a dreamscape of past lives, he claimed to have read more books on archaeology than psychology. It was his enduring fascination. His patients often commented on all the statues, carvings, bits of ancient rubble, and reproductions of ruins that met their gaze. Whatever did they make of that necessary vigil in the waiting room, where they could not avoid staring at a reproduction of Ingres’s
Oedipus Questioning the Sphinx
, or mysterious fragments of almost recognizable faces, limbless beings, puzzles cast in stone? Sitting at his desk, Freud would often pick up one of the objects and caress it thoughtfully. It was always in eyeshot, this caravan of partial truths, whose riddles spanned time and countries. It was a powerfully symbolic obsession, which reminded him of his work—the rudimentary excavation of souls—and probably also of his mideastern heritage, his boyhood fantasies of exploration, and the simple faith that shapes, even when slightly mutilated, retain a timeless dignity and beauty. If anything, he found them more mysterious because of their injuries. He saw his work as a layer-by-layer excavation through the sediment of the past and deep into the lost cities of the heart.

Freud was very much aware of the revolution in thinking he had started. It was like throwing a ball into the air with such force that it would take some time for it to land; meanwhile, everyone kept looking upward. He lived long enough to see his disciples achieve renown, which clearly thrilled him.

Much of the last years of his life were spent at the center of a political whirlwind, in which the budding profession of psychiatry squabbled with itself. He was bad at keeping secrets about the sexual perversions of his patients and friends, and often became embroiled in father-son relationships (most notably with Jung), which led to monstrously painful breakups. Actually, his relationship with male friends and acolytes was always complicated. His life was such a checkerboard of adoration and petty quarrels that he himself wondered if he had some inner need to sabotage the relationships that mattered most to him. As he confided in
The Interpretation of
Dreams
, “An intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been necessary requirements of my emotional life.” The whole enterprise of psychoanalysis was fraught with problems, not least of which were the questions of whether or not a patient could be cured by it, and how to put the sessions’ truths to work in everyday life. Even if Freudian analysis didn’t always cure or rehabilitate, it gave a patient something remarkable and precious: a sense of one’s life as a narrative. It was to Freud’s credit that he tried to tackle every phantom and underpinning of the mind, no matter how shameful or opaque or embarrassing, in terms of his own life.

Freud always meant to write a large book about “man’s love life,” but he never did, although he often delivered important papers on the topic. For example, at a meeting of the Vienna Society in 1906, he said:

In the final analysis, the treatment accorded the child is decisive for his love life. People in love, for example, use for each other pet names by which they were called during childhood. Man becomes childish when he is in love…. Love is said to be irrational, but its irrational aspect can be traced back to an infantile source: the compulsion in love is infantile.

It is one thing to maintain that we search for lovers reminiscent of our parents, but quite another to say that love itself is an agreed-upon return to infancy. It suggests that grown-ups so much miss being children that they join forces with one another in a subversive act, which allows them to tunnel backward in time to where each becomes the other’s child. In this quest, love is a search for the golden days of childhood, the blissful tyranny of being the center of attention, and a mother-child relationship which one has lost forever.

ATTACHMENT THEORY

Many great thinkers followed Freud into the labyrinthine mine of the psyche, holding one sort of lamp or another, eager to cast light into the dark corners. It would take pages just to list all the psychoanalytic theories about love that have amplified, contradicted, or borrowed Freud’s insights. Because many minds have contributed to the field, questions such as “What exactly is love?” have elicited ingenious answers. Some think of love as a ballistic escape from oneself, a sort of spine-tingling, rip-roaring, druglike addiction. Some swear love is a learned vulnerability, agreeing with François de la Rochefoucauld when he said: “There are people who would never have fallen in love if they never heard of love.” Some argue that love is all self-delusion and fantasy. As John Barrymore once put it, ungallantly: “Love is the delightful interval between meeting a girl and discovering that she looks like a haddock.” Some see love as a narcissistic enterprise, in which people who feel inadequate use others to perfect themselves. Some differentiate between infatuation and “real” love. Some ask if love is a behavior or an attitude. Some chart the varieties and stages of love. Some distinguish between the fever of young relationships, and the more enduring “companionate” love felt by longtime spouses. Indeed, love has been surveyed from so many perspectives, gauged in so many ways, one would think by this time we would have compiled a useful atlas or relief map, showing its coasts and mountain ranges, borders and hinterlands. Instead, it is still a frontier for those who study it, and for those who cross it still a newfound land.

One currently popular line of thinking, “attachment theory,” sets love against an evolutionary backdrop. While British psychiatrist John Bowlby was studying the behavior of human infants and children, he came upon the work of animal behaviorists Konrad Lorenz and Harry Harlow, who were observing infant behavior among birds and monkeys. Bowlby was struck by the similarities. Most baby animals need to form passionate attachments with their primary “caregiver” (usually the mother). Once an attachment has developed, they become depressed, desperate, and emotionally disturbed if they are separated from that caregiver. This makes good biological sense, because a youngster in the wild cannot afford to lose its family—it would swiftly die of hunger or be eaten by a predator. So, for individuals to pass on their genes to the next generation, family members must feel powerfully bound together,

and this requires that every separation, however brief, should be responded to by an immediate, automatic, and strong effort both to recover the family, especially the member to whom attachment is closest, and to discourage that member from going away again…. The standard response to loss of loved persons are always urges first to recover them and then to scold them. If, however, the urges to recover and scold are automatic responses built into the organism, it follows that they will come into action in response to
any
and
every
loss and without discriminating between those that are really retrievable and those … that are not. It is an hypothesis of this kind, I believe, that explains why a bereaved person commonly experiences a compelling urge to recover the person even when he knows the attempt to be hopeless and to reproach him or her even when he knows reproach to be irrational.

When infants are separated from their mothers, they respond in predictable ways: first they protest loudly and search frantically for her; then they become sad, passive, and despairing; and at last they become quite detached, even defensive, and refuse to go to Mother when she does return. Loss is a weed whose roots strike deep into our evolutionary past. Seen from this perspective, most psychiatric illness is a form of mourning for lost or inadequate love. Bowlby, who clinically observed people for over twenty years, found many links between disturbed adults and broken attachments in childhood. He argues that the making of a strong bond of affection is what we call “falling in love;” steadily sustaining that bond is what we call “loving;” and breaking up or in some other way losing a love partner is followed by what we label “grieving.”
^*
But all are biologically necessary functions. Out of convenience, and confusion, and perhaps a bias not to think of ourselves as being under nature’s thumb, we use these terms as a shorthand for what, in reality, are elaborate emotional dramas that have evolved because they were strategic for survival.

Bowlby says also that conflicts in loving, especially in courtship, are not only healthy but easy to explain in evolutionary terms: “All animals are constantly beset by impulses which are incompatible with one another, such as attack, flight, and sexual approach.” In the stealth and slash world of nature, an armistice must happen when animals are ready to mate; each has to be sure that it won’t be beaten or eaten, and each has to suppress the instinct to fight or devour the other. This usually calls for a minuet as elaborate as two eighteenth-century fops standing in unctuous mock-graciousness at the doorway to a dining room, one saying “After you,” the other insisting, “Oh,
no
, after you”—repeated until the two are pushed headlong through the door by a hungry crowd. Bowlby offers the example of the European robin: both male and female have red breasts, and come springtime the male instinctively wars with any other male that enters his territory. Seeing a female’s red breast, a male’s instinct is to attack her, and hers is to fly off. Instead, at courting time, she stands fast, becomes coy, showing him just a little interest, then none, then a little again, and this allows the male to control his wrath long enough to begin wooing. “In the early phases,” Bowlby writes, “both sexes are in a state of conflict, the male torn between attack and sexual advance and the hen between flirtation and flight.” Conflicts are normal in romance as in all other glades of life. Governing them makes love, family, and society possible. The mentally ill are people who cannot regulate the conflicting emotions they feel.

Our attachments are strongest during childhood, when we are utterly dependent on our parents for survival, but in adulthood we also form strong attachments, to a lover and perhaps to such authority figures as an employer or a teacher. We choose someone who seems to cope with the world better than we do. Knowing such a person is “there for us,” in case of emergency, helps us feel safe and secure. The need strikes especially hard when one is frightened, sick, or alone, and it’s an instinct that is perfectly normal and healthy. A child needs a “secure base” to return to after its small forays into a bustling world filled with marvels and frights and strangers. As Mary Salter Ainsworth discovered, in her four-year study of children in Uganda, infants regularly use their mother as a home base to which they return after miniexpeditions. Ainsworth conducted a parallel study with American children in Baltimore, with similar results. She identified three patterns of attachment. If a caregiver is responsive to a child’s need for contact and comfort, it explores happily and will probably develop into a self-reliant adult. If the caregiver rebuffs the child’s bids for closeness, the child learns to keep its distance, distract itself with nonsocial activities, and become compulsively self-reliant. If the caregiver acts inconsistently—at times responsive, at other times neglectful or intrusive—the child becomes clingy, and expresses its distress more urgently, which tends to preclude exploration. Self-reliance correlates very highly with reliance on parent. That is, children who have a trusting relationship with a parent, using that parent as a safe harbor, turn out to be more stable and self-reliant adults.

Freud assumes that the mother-child bond is so strong because of the food the mother provides. But Bowlby argues that the human infant’s need for attachment is all-consuming, has little to do with food, and is the same drive that later on in life leads one to seek a love partner. Crying, calling to, following, and clinging are all part of the routine, whose purpose is to elicit nurturing. With adults, we see this behavior most clearly when a person is worried, ill, upset, or afraid. Being separated from a loved one—say, when a child goes off to school or college—isn’t necessarily dangerous, but it very slightly increases the risk of danger, and that is enough to produce a gut-wrenching pang.

Freud concludes that when lovers act irrationally what they’re really doing is regressing to the needs, insecurities, and obsessions of childhood. Using an archaeological metaphor, he pictures the mind as the many-layered city of Rome, where different eras and societies rub shoulders. Right below today’s bustling metropolis lie other cities, and each one has its own set of morals, principles of justice, punishments, customs, rulers, piety, and red tape. In contrast, attachment theory looks at Rome and sees, in the remnants of the past, more than artifacts:

… some of the important historical landmarks, bridges and crooked streets are still there. But few of the ancient structures exist unaltered or in mental isolation, so simple regression and fixation are unlikely. There is continuity in attachment behavior, but there can also be significant change.