LOVE AS A LINK

REFLECTIONS ON THE L (LOVE) AND -L (-LOVE) LINKS

NEY MARINHO (SBPRJ / RIO II - 1997)

(translated by Brian Hazlehurst)

1 - INTRODUCTION

If speaking about love is something that frightens any experienced psychoanalyst, avoiding the theme would be an attitude that would be little in keeping with the truth of our everyday clinical experience. The reasons for the referred fear extend, I think, from the risk of making it banal to that of reaching the limits of the language. With regard to banality, everyone knows the vast range of literature about the theme, which is largely worthless, reserving only for geniuses - like Socrates, Plato or Shakespeare - the legitimate authority to clarify love and to bring us closer to its mysteries. In addition, more than the literature, the very life of mankind has taken upon itself the task of making it banal, of confusing, mystifying, a faculty inherent to the very species, leading some to the point of questioning if there exists such a thing as love, or, wonder if it were not just one more fiction created by the idle of all time - philosophers, poets, psychoanalysts. Nevertheless, like the primitive being he is, love knocks on our door when we least expect, and its presence, or absence, imposes itself, dispensing with definition our previous presentation. In our day-to-day practice it is present from the initial interview until the end of the longest of analyses, concealed under symptoms, acting out, or, by an embarrassing absence that marks an emptiness, the object of many recent works. I do not see, therefore, how to avoid the theme, even in the knowledge that we are at the frontiers of the language, which I have mentioned as fear of the second order, and consider the more important.

1.1 - "THE SYMPOSIUM" - TERMINABLE / INTERMINABLE DIALOGUE

There is the well-known invitation Agathon made to his friends - Fedro, Pausanias, Aristophanes and Socrates - to debate the theme, in celebration of his victory in the tragedies contest. We have news of this encounter thanks to the care with which Plato recorded it in "The Symposium", a text that has enlightened us for over two thousand years. We shall take "The Symposium", especially Socrates' discourse, as basic reference for everything that will be said below. It consists of a terminable/interminable dialogue, depending on the notion of "end" we adopt. In this way, it approximates to analytical dialogue: it travels between knowledge ("transformation in K") and ineffable personal experience ("transformation in O"), this being our understanding of Socrates' silence in the face of Alcebiades' insistence in knowing, grasping, love. It differs from other Platonic dialogues - like the Cratilo - that are aporetic, concluding with a necessary aporia, or, in other words, two conflicting solutions without any way out.

1.2 - PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE

Freud, in thinking up Psychoanalysis, became a legitimate guest at "The Symposium". Nowadays, it is impossible to speak of love without listening to what Psychoanalysis has to say. On the other hand, just as occurred in relation to Ethics, Aesthetics and the Theory of Knowledge, Psychoanalysis has broadened our scope of discussion, but it does not intend to answer the questions that these themes pose, respecting its limits. This is our understanding of Freud's contribution and his great followers - like Abraham, whose theory of the libido can be seen as a rigorous attempt to account for the natural history of object-love - of which we are going to take Bion as the principal reference.

1.3 - BION'S CONTRIBUTION.

NOTION OF LINK AND TYPES OF RELATIONSHIP

Given the nature of this meeting, I intend to present some ideas, rather summarily, about the notions of link and of types of relationship, based on Bion's work, which I regard as useful in psychoanalytical clinical practice. This summary character, with particular respect to the limited amount of time available, could give rise to misunderstandings. In an attempt to overcome these, I have attached some notes that I trust will further clarify my points of view.

It was based on the analysis of psychotic patients that the importance of study of the links between objects, whatever they may be (ideas, feelings, internal figures, external relations, patient/analyst, word/meaning, and so forth), was impinged on Bion. This points towards our abyssal regions. To speak of a link is to speak of something primitive - as much in the phylum and ontogenetic sense as in the logical sense - of something basic to mental functioning, just as it is in its description.

In this text, I will relate the notion of link to that of types of relationship. I think that the links that Bion proposed: K L, H and their counterparts, through the action of the death instinct, -K, -L and -H determine the types of relationship among the objects. I shall use Bion's last formulation about the types of relationship, described in 'Attention and Interpretation', as I regard it as the richest for future developments (see respective note). In the text mentioned, he describes: "By 'commensal' I mean a relationship in which two objects share a third to the advantage of all three. By 'symbiotic' I understand a relationship in which one depends on another to mutual advantage. By 'parasitic' I mean to represent a relationship in which one depends on another to produce a third, which is destructive of all three." (Bion, in 'Attention and Interpretation', Chapter 10).

2 - THE L LINK

André Malraux - in "The Human Condition" - describes an episode in which Kyo, the central character of the romance - hears from his lover (May) that she had betrayed him, making love with an old friend on the verge of death. The scene takes place while both - Kyo and May - are awaiting instructions to begin the Shanghai uprising, an episode that, in reality, Malraux would witness in 1927, in which one youth in particular attracts his attention - the leader of the movement, who, later, according to some biographers of the author, was identified as the well-known Chou-en-Lai. The same sources suggest that the passage to be discussed was of an autobiographical nature. My reason for choosing this text is that the art/life relationships are quite evident.

Returning to our characters: Kyo receives May's words, with apparent indifference. After all, both being revolutionaries, engaged in a life and death struggle, had a pact of the greatest possible mutual respect for each other's freedom, there being no place for lower feelings, like jealousy, as in this case. Nevertheless, Kyo's acute sensitivity overwhelms the sophisticated intellectualizations of the young politician, saturated with scientific conceptions about Man and his history. A succession of thoughts and emotions occur. Malraux accompanies them with a degree of intimacy quite forbidden to us, and, thus, he allows us to approach certain emotional experiences that our everyday work insinuates, and the psychoanalytical literature, in its crude scientific language, attempts to describe in certain obscure works, perhaps, for the same reasons that confused Kyo at first. Let us see what Malraux tells us:

"... Nevertheless, he went on looking at her, upon discovering that she could make him suffer, but after months, looking at her or not, he would not recognize her; perhaps only some expressions ... This love, often tense, that united them like a sick child, this common purpose of their lives and deaths, this carnal agreement between them, all of this would not exist faced with fatality that blurs the forms that saturate our sight. "Would I love her less than I think ?", inquires Kyo. No. Even at this moment, he was certain that if she died, he would no longer serve his cause with hope, rather with despair, as if he himself had died. Nothing, nonetheless, prevailed against the pailing of this figure buried at the depth of their life in common, like in the mist, like in the earth. He remembered a friend who had accompanied the slow death of the intelligence of the woman he loved, paralysed for months; it seemed to him he was seeing May dying like this, seeing the form of his happiness disappear absurdly, as a cloud that is reabsorbed into the grey sky. It was as if she would die twice, by time and because of what she had told him."

In the dialogue that ensues, May ponders over the little importance of the fact, for all of them - she, Kyo and the old friend - experience moments so close to imminent death. The insurrection is about to burst into action, and May is working as a doctor, in a hospital where, every day, they receive the gravely wounded from the civil war, now already advancing on Shanghai. Returning to Malraux:

"Nevertheless, jealousy did exist, even more disturbing, when the sexual desire she aroused was based on tenderness. His eyes closed, always resting on one elbow, Kyo tried - a sad task - to understand ..."

"The essential point, what disturbed him to the point of anguish, is that he was abruptly separated from her, not by hate - though there had been hate in him - not by jealousy (or was this not precisely jealousy?); by a feeling without a name, as destructive as time and death: he did not find her again." Kyo remembers May and continues:

"... One doesn't forget what one wants. However, this body rediscovered the pungent mystery of the dumb, of the blind, of the mad, in the known being, suddenly transformed ... And it was a woman. Not a kind of man. Something else ... "

There is a temptation to escape the "sad task of understanding", through the sensorial, sensual contact between the lovers.

Afterwards, heading towards the uprising, Kyo thinks: "To me, a short time ago, she seemed mad or blind. I don't know her, except in as much as I love her, except the way I love her. A being is not possessed, apart from what can be changed in him, said my father ... And so what? ... 'One hears the others' voices with the ears, and one's own with the throat". Yes. His life is heard too. One's life is also heard with the throat, and what about those of others? ... For the others, I am what I have done'. For May alone, he was not what he could do, and, for him alone, she was very different from her biography. The link, by which love keeps beings tightly clung together against loneliness, does not bring relief to Man; rather, it is to the madman, to the incomparable monster, preferable above all else, that every being is, and cherishes in his heart. Since his mother died, May was the only being for whom he was not Kyo Gisors, rather she was the closest complicity. "A complicity with consent, conquered, chosen", thought Kyo, extraordinarily in accordance with the night, as if his thought were not possible in daylight. "Men are not akin to me, for they are those who look at me and judge me; my fellows are those who love me and do not look at me, who love me despite everything, who love me despite failure, despite lowness, despite betrayal, me, and not what I have done or will do, who would love me as much as I would love myself - even in suicide .... Only with her do I have this love in common, shattered or not, in the same way that couples have towards children who are sick and may die ..." Certainly, this was not happiness, but something primitive that blended in with the dark and made heat rise within him, terminating in an immobile link, like one face against another - the only thing in him that was as strong as death."

Given the innumerable questions this text raises, I would prefer to reserve comment until we reach the respective note. For our immediate use, however, I would just like to point out how the predominance of the L link allows the containing of hate and favours the exercise of the capacity to think. Within my proposal to investigate the links in question and the types of relationship, I would conjecture that, in a painfully frustrating situation, the action of the L link allowed "the sad task of understanding", so magnificently described by Malraux. From this point of view, I see an evolution from a symbiotic relationship to a commensal one, the third performing the role of reflection to the benefit of all three. In my assessment, I would say that the transcribed text, which I have taken as category C, using it as notation, equivalent to a clinical account, provides elements on which to found a distinction between symbiotic and commensal relationships, as well as illustrating the relationship between the depressive position and the development of the capacity to think.

3 - THE -L LINK

The patient was led to analysis thanks to a sister who had convinced her parents to seek a psychoanalyst for him before taking any other measure: to hospitalise him, to remove him from home somehow, among others. The patient, a man of around 35, constituted a grave problem for his family. Since primary school, and becoming accentuated by the end of intermediate level, his attitude was of permanent disquiet, speaking a lot, reluctant to follow the disciplinary norms and always questioning his teachers. He became the butt for jokes in his class. His classmates would take advantage of his permanent excitability to provoke him and make him get up to mischief. The patient accepted this role well, and, in not appearing to be openly aggressive, was tolerated in the school atmosphere and so he was able to conclude his secondary education. He did not succeed in entering a university, and, probably, due to what I deduced from his accounts, his disturbances of thought became accentuated and proved incompatible with further educational activity. The possibility of working was also obstructed by his not being able to respond to any discipline, whether it was working hours or abiding by the rules. The latter were not simply disobeyed, but he created his own that he considered as better. When faced with any situation requiring a carefully considered opinion, he would always argue in favour of the advantages of his proposals. This attitude became frequent in his day-to-day life. There were some intermittent attempts at psychiatric treatment, but without continuity or success.

When he came for analysis what was most disturbing for his family was his behaviour: he had been transformed into a folklore character of the district. He wore childish clothes - short trousers, sports shoes and white knee-length socks, giving him an appearance of an adult dressed up as a child, rather like those in carnival processions. On his shirt, he sported an adornment, from which he would not be parted. This object was not in itself extravagant. However, its constant use with any clothing, did attract attention. In short, this object, the patient's appearance and his behaviour formed a bizarre combination. He had no definite times for sleeping or eating. He only seemed to sleep due to exhaustion. During the day, or rather, in his waking hours, he used to go to pay bills, be sent on small errands, and the rest of the time he spent wandering around. As he did not travel by bus, he went on long walks, sometimes crossing two or three districts. For a long time, he used to walk ten kilometres to come to the consulting room, and another four to reach home! All the same, he was always assiduous and punctual!

His mental activity was absorbed in devising economic plans to control inflation and promote development in the country, as well as certain inventions. The latter were often represented in geometrical drawings, consisting of new models of cars, aeroplanes, helicopters, or construction techniques that signified important improvements - such as the creation of a wireless electricity supply network - without, however, there being not the least concern for the feasibility of the invention. In short: his inventions were useful, intended to provide comfort and even social justice, erring only in his disregard for detail that would make him recognize the Principle of Reality.

There are innumerable other data in the patient's psychopathology that I am going to omit here in order to focus on the crucial point, for the family and the social environment, which is also of interest in our discussion about the L link and its vicissitudes, such as, the one about becoming -L.

I refer to the fact that the patient provoked frequent incidents in the street, in the neighbourhood, and, in particular, in his district. The origin of these incidents is rooted in the fact that the patient wished everyone would obey the law, in particular, the traffic laws. Thus, cars parked on the pavement, occasional disobedience of red traffic lights, or the non-use of safety belts were reasons for long discussions with the offenders. The patient's argumentation regarding this was the most coherent and consistent possible, albeit unreasonable. This statement deserves a long discussion that would, however, not be fitting at this point. What is and what is not reasonable? What is the role of reason in relationships? Reason as an element of psychoanalysis, as Bion suggests.

A fragment of the analytical session is sufficient, I think, to illustrate my understanding of the -L link, which is my objective in presenting this clinical experience.

The patient arrives very late (around 25 minutes). His appearance draws my attention: white clothes, short trousers, sports shoes, knee-length socks (he has not been wearing the object referred to above for a long time), and his haircut is almost of the pudding-basin type (in a previous session he had informed me that, in attempting to trim his sideburns evenly, he had ended up cutting until he reached the frontal region).

He enters talking sentences of the type: "... Well, how are you?... I'm fine ... ", without waiting for any response from me. He pulls up a chair and sits in front of me, still talking. "I don't have friends ... I talked to my aunt yesterday. She told me that if I had friends, I would improve my appearance ...." He moves on to talking about pains in his joints, believing them to be due to a problem in his ligaments.

I start to say that ligaments allow articulation of the bones, allow them to work together. At this point, he interrupts me and says: "... no, ligaments that talk ..."

I tell him he is right, that we are talking about the relationships among people, as he feels that they are necessary but painful. So far, for us to work together. He seems to agree, judging by the attentive silence, and along with various facial expressions of suffering, he says: " ... I don't like people ... if I got a girlfriend, I think everything would get better. I would have a stimulus, the urge to do things". Then, he starts exalting the importance of love relationships in life. He gets up and walks, gesticulating like a caricatured orator. Then, he puts on expressions of pain and worry. I draw his attention to the drama he is performing for me: not liking people and missing having a girlfriend, a woman who loves him, or, perhaps, someone who likes him even though he does not like other people.

The session proceeds with the patient telling two stories, in one of which he is driving a car and exposing his parents to danger. The other refers to the lack of syntony in relationships. It seems to me to be an allusion to the fear of assuming responsibility for relationships, able to destroy the couple with his sadistic impulses. Certainly, it is a risk that we two could be running here. I do not intend to continue the account of the session, which raises other issues related to the analysis of psychotics. I would like to comment only on what I understand, clinically, as the -L link.

The economic plans, the inventions, just like the warning people as to the importance of obeying the law, I have no great doubts that they are manifestations of love. Nonetheless, the permanent action of the death instinct mutilates the exercise of the life instinct. As a consequence, there are a lack of syntony, misunderstandings, demands that transform the love link into the - (minus) love link, which does not mean hate, although, the latter will arise, whether it be in the patient or in his interlocutor. This feeling is not experienced as such by the patient, but as incomprehension. Thus, the way is open to despair.

It is natural for the question to arise: what is the advantage of us speaking of -L instead of H? I think that we would be closer to the patient's true emotional experience, or rather, the drama he undergoes: loving without any of the characteristics that accompany love. In my view, the incomprehension of this aspect by the analyst, given the patients' low tolerance of frustration, leads to misunderstanding and sets up a vicious circle due to an increase in projective identification. Another point: -L links without harmony, thus the lack of syntony that such patients arouse. The harmony seems to be a function of L, as we shall see later when we discuss the aesthetic ideas.

4 - BACK TO THE "SYMPOSIUM".

THE NOTION OF GENIUS IN PLATO, KANT AND BION

Here we are going to examine a notion that Plato introduced - the notion of genius (daimon) - that seems very useful to us in understanding love as a link.

In verses 202d to 204c, Diotima, after leading Socrates to conclude that love is not beautiful, wise, or good, though this does not mean it is ugly, ignorant and bad, seeks to enlighten the philosopher in his perplexity. It is thus that she develops the notion of intermediary, the one between the gods and the mortals: the genius. She proceeds, reminding Socrates of the origin of Eros: son of a god (Poros or Resource) and a mortal (Penia or Poverty), conceived on Aphrodite's birthday, during the feast of the gods.

Upon the appearance of genius, the epistemological impasse of the intention for us to get to know a god (idea, essence, "thing-in-itself") is overcome This intermediate element - genius - by its hybrid, human and divine origin, if it does not allow us to become acquainted with its intimacy, it does reveal its function to us: ".... that of interpreting and conveying to the gods what comes from men, and to men what comes from the gods .... and, as it is in the midst of the two, it completes them in such a manner that the whole becomes totally linked to itself (202e)." The function of linking appears here in all its force.

I suggest now that we follow up the idea of genius and its linking function through another author, who, until the end of his long and creative life, confronted the same questions: Kant.

If the knowledge of the world, of nature, has been exhaustively investigated in their conditions of possibility, in the "Critique of Pure Reason" and the possibility of an ethic, a critical and consistent investigation of human actions, has been established in the "Critique of Practical Reason", it was left to Kant, at the end of his work, to face the challenge of aesthetics. To speak of "left to" is to oversimplify the question, for the undertaking that resulted in the "Critique of the Faculty to Judge" completes and gives new meaning to the other Critiques. It is a work of Eros.

How can one assess the statement that something is beautiful? What is the value and statute of such judgements? A whole array of questions are developed by Kant in his last Critique. And it is in this we are going to reencounter the idea of genius. For Kant, genius is the faculty of aesthetic ideas. It is talent (natural gift) that gives rules to art. The need to introduce the notion of genius came from the impossibility of reducing the aesthetic object to a determination of the understanding. We cannot, a priori, determine the aesthetic object. This is the result of the free harmony between imagination and understanding. It is unique, original, and, consequently, its producer is the genius, the opposite of the "spirit of imitation". In the course of his examination of genius, certain characteristics become ever more prominent, indicating individuality and communicability. The latter aspect is what would allow Kant to make the approximation between ethics and aesthetics. The work of art presupposes a "sensus communis", that gives it universality. The notion of humanity is derived from this presupposition of a "sensus communis".

So, we see that genius is the faculty that allows the link, the harmony (between imagination and understanding) and communication (the relationships among men). In this sense, it is that we approximate the Platonic daimon to the Kantian genius and we identify them as a function of Eros. I would like to emphasise Kant's development, that of stressing "the harmonious link". I wish to remind you that, in the clinical case I have just described, there was a link, but not harmony, leading to lack of syntony and incommunicability.

Let us now see, through another great thinker, how Psychoanalysis can contribute to this debate, to the investigation of the intermediary between gods and men, whose relationships are traditionally tense.

Bion discusses such questions in "Attention and Interpretation" (Chap.7). The notion of genius arises as analogous to the mystic or messianic idea. It does not matter to the examination that he proposes, whether it is a person or an idea. He discusses the relationships between this messianic idea/person and the container that contains it (group/institution/personality). Genius, once again, is what allows the contact with the divinity, or rather, with what is susceptible only to transforming experience - "O" - it not being susceptible to knowledge. Bion evokes mythology to remind us of the stage of man/god indistinction. He shows the diverse roles of the group: to contain, destroy, imprison, and, at the same time, create the genius/mystic/messianic idea. The group or institution must also allow the ordinary man access to the deity, to Freud, to Psychoanalysis. Bion's main contribution, at least at that moment, to the theme of genius is the necessary tension that it bears in relation to what contains it, its destiny - creative or destructive - depending on the relationships established (parasitic, symbiotic or commensal).

At the beginning of my text, I spoke of the limits of language as one of the obstacles in the investigation of love. Only language promotes knowledge. This seems to be the drama of Eros: we cannot know it, nor even identify it with precision. Its presence is inferred by the function: to link harmoniously, to allow communication. All this leads us back to the question of language. The proper language to deal with these themes Bion called: Language of Achievement.

SUMMARY

The author discusses "Love as a Link", specifically Bion's contribution with regard to the links: L (Love) and -L (-Love). He correlates the role of the links: L, H and K (and their counterparts: -L, -H and -K) with the types of container/contained relationship (Parasitic, Symbiotic and Commensal). He uses "The Symposium" (Plato) as a basic reference text.

The L link is studied based on a fragment from "The Human Condition" (André Malraux). The -L link is investigated based on a clinical case, special attention being due to the technical implications of the use of -L and the distinction in relation to H.

He proposes examination of the notion of "genius" in Plato, Kant and Bion for the understanding of love as the capacity to link harmoniously, its relationships with what it contains (personality/group/institution) and its vicissitudes.

As the presentation required brevity, the text is complemented by notes ("Notes on Love as a Link"), to be published later, referring to each one of the sections.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1 - Abraham, K - Teoria Psicanalítica da Libido, Imago, Rio.

2 - Bion, W. R.- (1962) Learning from Experience, in Seven Servants, Jason Aronson, New York.

- (1963) Elements of Psychoanalysis, in Seven Servants, Jason Aronson, New York.

- (1965) Transformations, in Seven Servants, Jason Aronson, New York.

- (1967) Second Thoughts, Heinemann, London.

- (1970) Attention and Interpretation, in Seven Servants, Jason Aronson, New York.

3 - Kant, I. - Critique de la Faculté de Juger, Vrin, Paris.

4 - Malraux, A. - La Condition Humaine, Gallimard, Paris.

5 - Platão - O Banquete, Difel, São Paulo.

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