I came across an excerpt from Francesco Alberoni in Richard Schwartz's You Are the One You've Been Waiting For where he quotes Francesco Alberoni's Falling in Love (1983):
"Whenever we fall in love, the other person always appear rich with a superabundant life. The beloved is always a vital force—free, unforeseeable, polymorphous. She is like a marvelous wild animal, extraordinarily beautiful and extraordinarily alive, an animal whose nature is not to be docile but rebellious, not weak but strong. The one we love attracts and gives pleasure precisely because she possesses this force, which is free and liberating but also unforeseeable and frightening. This is why the person who is more frightened imposes on the other a great many restrictions, a great many small sacrifices, all of which are basically intended to make her gentle, safe, and innocuous. And the other person gradually accepts them. She has friends, but she decides not to go out with them; she used to travel, but now she stays home; she used to love her profession, but now she neglects it in order to devote herself to her lover. To avoid upsetting her lover, she imperceptibly eradicates everything that may have that effect. She makes many small renunciations, none of which is serious. She gladly makes them because she wants her lover to be happy, and she tries to become what he wants her to be. Gradually she becomes domestic, available, always ready, always grateful. In this way, the marvelous wild beast is reduced to a domestic pet; the tropical flower, plucked from its environment, droops in a little vase by the window. And the lover who asked her to become like this because he wanted to be reassured, because he was frightened by the new experience, winds up missing in her what he had previously sought and found. The person who stands before him is not the same one he had fallen in love wich, precisely because at that time she was different and fully alive. He asked her to model herself on his fears, and now he faces the resulr of thos fears- her nothingness and he no longer loves her.'" - Francesco Alberoni
I found this quote so stirring, and sought out a copy of Alberoni's 1983 book. Making my way through it, this passage stood out to me, and I continue to make my way back to it again and again:
"Let us now take a step back. Before an individual fell in love, what relationship existed between him and his fam-ily, his class, his church, his spouse, his ethnic or linguistic group? In other words, what relationship will he sever when he falls in love? We can assume that at first there was a pleasurable or at least an acceptable relationship, judged to be normal, legitimate. Of course, in all human relationships, no matter what kind they may be, there is always a more or less ample margin of dissatisfaction and disappointment; there is always ambivalence. The child in a family loves his father and mother, his brothers and sis-ters, even the family as a whole. The family is a collective object of love. Yet the family is also the locus of tensions and frustrations, of resentment and aggression. It is an object of love, but also of aggression: hence the ambiva-lence. Freud based his psychology on ambivalence: the Oedipus complex is the manifestation of ambivalence toward the father and the mother, who are loved, certainly, but also hated. Yet this hatred and rancor are not openly manifested. Even if there is ambivalence, the image of fa-ther, mother and family remains positive. And this happens because we feel the desire (we would probably have to say "the necessity") to preserve the object of our love in a state that is as pure and uncontaminated (unambiva-lent) as possible. The image that the child constructs of his mother and father, the image that the adult constructs of his church and political party, is the most perfect image possible. And he does everything he can to keep it perfect in his own eyes. To succeed in this, he learns, on the one hand, to take out his aggression on himself and express it as a sense of guilt (depression) and, on the other, to explain the imperfection he sees by attributing it to an enemy. The father is angry because he works too hard; the nation or party or church is imperfect because inside or outside of it there exist enemies, wicked people (perse-cution). Thanks to these mechanisms of depression and persecution, the object of love stays as close to the ideal as possible. This is the state we consider normal. But when things around us change, when we ourselves change (in adolescence, for example), when we encounter other pos-sibilities, other realities, when our relationships with our love objects deteriorate, then it becomes more and more difficult to preserve this ideal image through depression and persecution. In every historical period that precedes an experience of falling in love, there is always a long preparation due to a slow change, a slow deterioration in relations with love objects. In this period, those two old mechanisms, depression and persecution, continue to function: we protect our ideal with all our strength, concealing the problem. The consequence is that the collective movement (falling in love) always strikes suddenly. "She was so kind and af-fectionate," says the abandoned husband, "she was so happy with me." In reality, she was already looking for an alternative, but she rejected it obsessively. She consciously forced herself to continue loving her husband; she made every effort to keep on considering him perfect, worthy of her love. In order to do so, however, she became at once more depressed and more uncommunicative. She had to direct more and more aggression against her-self, constantly increasing the extent of her self-sacrifice. The ideal the god shows himself to be capable of surviving only if he is nourished by increasing sacrifices. First-to continue the metaphor-he asked only for the first fruits, then the entire harvest, then the seed itself, and finally self-destruction. This is the excessive depression that precedes all collective movements as well as falling in love. In the face of self-destruction, even fear is mitigated, and other things, once experienced as seductions to be avoided, are now seen in a different light. Is there not perhaps life in them too? Is their difference as wicked as people say? The process continues to a threshold beyond which eros overflows the structures and floods prohibited territories; the violence that was self-directed for too long also overflows, uncontainable, overwhelming the rules that had kept it prisoner and destroying them: this is the nascent state. Now two forces are freed: one eros— violently embraces with its force new objects which it instantly transforms into ideals; the other-violence— breaks with endured and accepted restraints. The experience is one of liberation, fullness of life, happiness. The possible opens before us and the pure object of eros appears, the unambivalent object, in which duty and pleasure coincide, in which all alienation is extinguished." - Francesco Alberoni
The idea that on the other side of our currently love object is simply another... inspires me to reflect. Am on already on this path? Will the same things emerge if I am to find a new love object/ideal? Am I doing my best to see how depression and persecution are emerging below the surface and doing my best to proactively care for them to give the currently love the best chance it has? Am I ready now to seek the liberation of new love? Can I minimize destruction on that path?
Comentários