Love & Psychoanalysis

Empath Counseling, 2023

The author discusses the solution to the self-love problem by the method of elimination the use of the word "self" in relation to love.

"Analyze any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation." Sigmund Freud.

2012

I taught Dr. Edison Miyawaki at Yale both when he was an undergraduate and graduate student of literature. His long-gestated book on Freud moves and delights me. Sigmund Freud's hope that psychoanalysis would make a contribution to biology was mistaken. Instead, Freud became the Montaigne of his age, a great moral essayist who attained the literary eminence of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett. The science of love, for secularists, finds its authentic sages in Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Proust. Freud, at his subtlest, is a sixth in that visionary company. The vulgar misunderstanding of Freud, still too prevalent, regards him as a mere sexologist. Miyawaki's enterprise is to correct this undisciplined view, so as to restore our sense of the Freudian Speculation. Ludwig Wittgenstein thought he deprecated Freud's theory of mind by calling it a speculation, not a philosophic venture, but to me that mode of wonder is the great strength of psychoanalysis. Edison Miyawaki would agree. Like Wittgenstein, he too shows that love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. We do not say: "that was not a true pain, because it passed away so quickly." Like Freud, Miyawaki is both a neurologist and a literary humanist. If we are to continue our creative apprehension of Freud, we require an understanding that literature is a way of life. Freud, as literature, is a guide to love as the summit of life. Edison Miyawaki joins himself to that quest in this heartening and lucid study of much that still matters most in Freud.-Harold Bloom ix I address Oedipus the King in detail in my second chapter. I'm curious, to start, about the association between tragedy (whether Sophoclean or not) and love. Is love tragic? Need it be? We know that the term "Oedipus complex," which describes the intricate links between children, men, and women, refers to a king whose family history is dramatized in three important plays from antiquity. So if we read Sophocles, do we learn what Freud's Oedipus complex is and how it operates? Answer: yes, sort of, but the real work lies in understanding Oedipus as a human being, fictional though he may be.

International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 2023

Freud has stated that the psychoanalytic cure is effected through the love of the patient for the analyst. This paper claims that the analyst’s love towards the patient is often essential as well. Countertransference love might indeed be associated with therapeutic risks, yet it is often a crucial part of the analytic process, since in order to be able to change, many people need to feel loved. The analyst’s curative love is defined by being both sublimated and passionate, modulated as well as libidinal. In addition, it is conscious, aware, and reflective, and hence any act based on it is directed solely to the patient’s psychic growth. Developing and maintaining such love is not easy. What comes to the aid of the analyst is the special construction of the analytic setting, which brings up a profound, loving interest in patients’ psyche as well as a “second self” that is consistently benevolent and loving and acts at a level of empathy rarely encountered in ordinary life.

The author reviews Freud's (1914) seminal paper 'On narcissism: an introduction'. Freud's paper is briefly set in the historical context of the evolution of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theories, and Freud's metapsychology up to the publication of his Narcissism paper is outlined. A detailed and comprehensive description of the content of the paper is given, accompanied by commentary on, and critical analysis of, Freud's ideas. Freud's applications of his ideas about narcissism in relation to homosexuality, hypochondria and psychosis are elucidated and discussed. The author concludes by considering some of the influences of Freud's ideas about narcissism on Kleinian and post-Kleinian developments in psychoanalytic theory.

Introduction and Apologia This is a schematic-like introduction to psychoanalytic theory or philosophy (including its philosophy and psychology of mind) and its correlative mode of therapy. This novel science and its corresponding therapeutic model (in the form of a unique therapeutic regimen known as ‘analysis’) is considerably more modest in aim and scope than what we find in religious and philosophical models of therapeia that go back to Hellenistic ethics and ancient Indic philosophies. Loosely speaking, these “therapies of desire” (or ‘the passions’), “spiritual exercises” and antidotes to ignorance continue in one way or another into our own time, be it, for example, in the Yoga system of Patañjali (400-500 CE) as outlined in the Yogasūtra(s), among sincere devotees of Buddhism, or with those attracted to philosophy as therapeia (or ‘philosophical counseling’) believed prominent in the works, say, of Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. In other words, cures, remedies, therapeutic prescriptions and regimens for “maladies of the soul” or human suffering in its various forms, but especially its psychological and existential incarnations, have long been conspicuous features of philosophical and religious worldviews (this largely ‘Western’ division of intellectual and ethical labor is not hard and fast in classical Indic and Chinese worldviews), and thus it is not surprising that there is a growing literature comparing various dimensions or elements of psychoanalysis (its philosophy and praxis) with Yoga and especially Buddhism. The “modesty” I refer to in Freudian (and Kleinian) psychoanalysis is in reference to the fact that Freud was committed to the relief or amelioration of suffering, this suffering being intrinsic to the human condition and thus not eliminable or subject to transcendence as we frequently find is the case with the aforementioned (especially religious) worldviews (this ‘transcendence’ does not come with death but is thought to be possible in this very life, while embodied, as it were). Psychoanalytic therapy was designed by Freud (i) to increase our capacity for self-knowledge or understanding, (ii) to encourage or enhance the powers of human agency or moral psychological autonomy, and (iii) to set the conditions of or improve the analysand’s capacity for happiness or the little joys we might find in everyday life. As Ernest Wallwork reminds us, although psychoanalysis “is one of the healing arts,” and while it was originally intended to “relieve mainly neurotic suffering” (it has since been extended to address more severe forms of mental disorder or illness), Freud was adamant that the person so relieved “may continue to suffer from the common human misery.” Again, Wallwork is apropos: “The goal is not only the negative one of reducing the patient’s suffering that Freud’s famous line about substituting ordinary unhappiness for neurotic misery is often taken as implying, but also the positive one of enabling the patient to enjoy life as fully as possible and to ‘make the best of him[self] that his inherited capacities will allow.”

Since ancient times, scholars in the West have shown great enthusiasm towards understanding the subject on man and personality. Driven by this zeal, there appeared a multitude of theories discussing man and his nature. Though the various concepts on man showcased by the scholars complemented one another, at times their ideas also contradicted and discredited one another. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) the founding father of psychoanalysis presented to the world a concept on man and his personality which turned out to be a controversial one till to these days. In realizing the fact that Freud's ideas have a huge impact on modern psychology and people in the West, the researchers of this study would like to revisit some of his ideas on man and personality. Upon making an exposition of his ideas, the researchers too would like to carry out an appraisal on Freud and to identify some of the underlying factors that led him towards conceptualizing a theory on man which is not only degrading to man's position as the most intelligent of God's creation but also an unprecedented one in the history of modern psychology.

Philosophy and Literature, 2000

2012

I taught Dr. Edison Miyawaki at Yale both when he was an undergraduate and graduate student of literature. His long-gestated book on Freud moves and delights me. Sigmund Freud's hope that psychoanalysis would make a contribution to biology was mistaken. Instead, Freud became the Montaigne of his age, a great moral essayist who attained the literary eminence of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett. The science of love, for secularists, finds its authentic sages in Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoi, and Proust. Freud, at his subtlest, is a sixth in that visionary company. The vulgar misunderstanding of Freud, still too prevalent, regards him as a mere sexologist. Miyawaki's enterprise is to correct this undisciplined view, so as to restore our sense of the Freudian Speculation. Ludwig Wittgenstein thought he deprecated Freud's theory of mind by calling it a speculation, not a philosophic venture, but to me that mode of wonder is the great strength of psychoanalysis. Edison Miyawaki would agree. Like Wittgenstein, he too shows that love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. We do not say: "that was not a true pain, because it passed away so quickly." Like Freud, Miyawaki is both a neurologist and a literary humanist. If we are to continue our creative apprehension of Freud, we require an understanding that literature is a way of life. Freud, as literature, is a guide to love as the summit of life. Edison Miyawaki joins himself to that quest in this heartening and lucid study of much that still matters most in Freud.-Harold Bloom ix I address Oedipus the King in detail in my second chapter. I'm curious, to start, about the association between tragedy (whether Sophoclean or not) and love. Is love tragic? Need it be? We know that the term "Oedipus complex," which describes the intricate links between children, men, and women, refers to a king whose family history is dramatized in three important plays from antiquity. So if we read Sophocles, do we learn what Freud's Oedipus complex is and how it operates? Answer: yes, sort of, but the real work lies in understanding Oedipus as a human being, fictional though he may be.