« Our psychic life and loves oscillate back and forth between aloneness and connection. Both can be frightening: both are risky. The dangers inherent in each can be circumvented through contrivance and fantasy. Thus the unconscious contract that parallels many legal marriage contracts is an agreement to pretend to be permanently, unalterably, impossibly bound – an agreement that creates the necessity for a carefully guarded, perpetually measured distance.
Jacques Lacan, the influential French psychoanalyst, seems never to have grasped the possibility of a genuine relatedness, but he captured vividly the mirages of degraded romance in the service of illusory security: « Love, » he noted, « is giving something you don’t have to someone you don’t know. »
Excerpt from Can Love Last? by Stephen A. Mitchell.
Salon Magazine wrote a great review of this book which made me buy it, a couple of years ago. I still haven’t managed to finish it…
« Stephen Mitchell’s own view, both warmed and deepened by a 30-year clinical practice of what came to be called « relational psychoanalysis, » is that romantic love doesn’t die a natural, inevitable death: We kill it, out of fear. It’s just too dangerous, he says, to experience erotic currents toward somebody you actually know, somebody who shares not only your bed but the chores and the cable bill. What if he or she stopped desiring you? Compared to the emotional risks of long-term domestic passion, Mitchell observes, the zipless fuck is as daring as oatmeal. »
