Читать книгу Enjoy, Comprehend, Love. Entering the Spaces of Conscious Love - Yury Tomin - Страница 5

Sacred and Profane Love. Titian, 1514

There is a treasure in my soul

And the key is entrusted only to me!

Alexander Blok. The Stranger

Starting a dive to the origins of love, where things that await us are, according to Ortega y Gasset, “mechanical, formulaic and, in essence, spiritless quality,” it will not be superfluous to re-read the poem by Anna Akhmatova, replacing the word “poem” with “love.”

Now, having admired the work of the magic wand of delight, we can, together with Alexander Pushkin, admit that, falling in love, we are glad to be deceived, despite the “illness of love in my soul.” It has long been noticed that in life, as in most literary works, the incomprehensible romantic epic of lovers unfolds in a bizarre combination of euphoria of delight and feelings of love illness.

If you do not rush headlong into one extreme or another and do not rush between them, then you can go in two ways: try to find something special, really sprouting from these poles of the crystal sphere of love, or recognize all this as an illusion, deception, a game with a hidden purpose.

The illusions of love were both justified and dispelled by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: “The pleasure that the other sex gives us, no matter how objective it may seem, is in fact nothing more than a disguised instinct, that is, the spirit of a genus striving to preserve its type.” However, such a conclusion, shared by many gloomy soul types, does not cause any delight, and the fate of love is seen such that it is better for her to die without being born.

It is not surprising that, first of all, poets are ready to indignantly object to this. Recognizing the first part of Schopenhauer’s deduction about the game of nature with a hidden purpose, they delight in this captivating bittersweet illusion and reject its down-to-earth mechanistic part, seeking to discover their secret of all-consuming deception. Then, if we want to see the true reverse side of lovers under the moon, we have to look for other landmarks. It is tempting to exclaim after Vladimir Nabokov: “Oh, love. For your secret I am going back up the stairs of years” and try to get to where “I was only a small comma on the first page of my creation.”

At the same time, I would like to hope that this jump back will only be a swing for a forward throw. Movement in this direction on the big love map is indicated by a series of warning signs about slippery roads and dead ends. One of them is located just behind the sign: “Entry Into the Territory of the Libido of the Great and Terrible Sigmund Freud.” Having wandered here among the embryos of sexual activity in early childhood, insane fixations of libido on various, sometimes bizarre objects, one can leave with the disappointing impression that “love is fundamentally as animalistic as it has been from time immemorial. Love inclinations are difficult to educate, their education gives too much, sometimes too little.”

However, not everything is so hopelessly unambiguous. In the Freudian construction of the psyche, Self-libido and Object-libido are distinguished. Self-libido stems from childhood delusions of omnipotence and narcissism and develops under the influence of significant others into the Self-ideal. According to Freud, falling in love consists in the outpouring of the Self-libido on the Object, and “the sexual ideal can enter with the Self-ideal in an interesting relationship of mutual assistance.” This is already far more interesting. So, let’s leave the Freudian zone, pondering how in our minds the sexual ideal interacts with the Self-ideal, while we are in love with a specific person in the flesh.

It is no secret that the theories of Schopenhauer and Freud, like other philosophical constructions about love, are a reflection of the individual preferences and psychological inclinations of their authors. Recklessly following their logic, we involuntarily fall into the trap of a predetermined, already chewed-up perception. How should one move towards comprehending love, which, undoubtedly, is a complex, multifaceted, and at the same time energetically intense and emotionally charged phenomenon? Let’s try to start by advertently listening to the very feelings and experiences of love, and rely on the poets in this, and then try to carefully discern the core that is the source of the diverse palette of the feeling of love.

The types and paths of love according to Sigmund Freud