‘Is It Love?’, with a Twist

By Mugees Ul Kaisar

We need to teach our youth the very basic but crucially important difference between “love” which one maturely absorbs as a mode of being and (toxic) “relationships” which are mostly psychological conditions/fixations bordering on pathological.

Based on the testimonies one receives from friends and people around, one can confidently say that a large percentage of our youth has been debilitated by the so-called love relationships with the consequent breakups. It creates lifelessness within people. Why does it give rise to such psychological pain? Why do people get fixated with a person to the point of madness? 

The simple point to note is that in almost all these cases, the primary root cause is the failure to distinguish between one’s mother/father & the world with whatever it contains. Let us properly flesh this out. 

Every human has been an infant once; the primary mode of being, therefore, that one starts this life with is what we may refer to as “maternal mode of relationship” i.e. we (when we were children) were at the centre of our relation with people around to love us unconditionally; in fact one felt at the centre of the whole cosmos. This becomes our “unconscious” psychological expectation even when we grow up. 

Now, the reason behind the psychological pain of breakups or for that matter any “failure” or upset in life is nothing but the fact that the person hasn’t consciously realized (as of yet) that the world or the woman/man or career is not one’s “mother”. The woman (one has “fallen” in love with, for example) or the people or the world that one faces is not one’s mother. Even though, consciously, no one would call some girl or world as their mother, the unconscious expectation of maternal mode of relation is always hidden. And thus the natural shock: how dare so & so leave me? How is it possible that I didn’t get this & I failed at that? 

This is referred to as “mother complex” which is one of the main causes of escapism and death drive within people particularly in modern times when psychological rites of initiation are extinct. The psychological wish of leaving this world in order to hide in some cave in mountains, after someone hurts you or one has failed in some exam, is the unconscious desire to recede back into the age old warmth of the mother’s womb. 

All great fairy tales and myths of the past that deal with confronting the “unknown” (for example adapted in movies like: Frodo in Lord of the rings, Harry in Harry Potter, Neo in Matrix) – fundamentally aim at triumphing one’s “mother complex” within in order to actually face the world on the outside, in kind. Please see our article “Ancient Myths in Contemporary Cinema”. Why would people in love call each other “baby”? The whole relation naturally erupts from a childish mode of being.

Therefore, coming back to our main subject matter, we may say that the primary feature of these love relations is inherently a childish mode of being; a mode of being where mother (who represents whole world for child) is perfect, loyal, predictable, exclusively in love with child, the child has to just brood for a while and there the wish is made true (a simulation of jannah/heaven); most young people even after coming out of their childhood (biologically) haven’t come out of it (psychologically) as of yet. One may like someone to the point of developing deep attachment with them but it is perfectly plausible that things might not turn out well because this is neither childhood nor heaven but rather “world” which is inherently flawed & imperfect. Thus, one may be sad over this thing or that thing but will never be diseased with fixations, possessions and unconscious childish psychological “complexes”, only if one understands the basic fact that we have been discussing above. This is the psychoanalytic principle of “truth sets you free”. Now let us see few evidences for the problematic childish mode of being in most of the so-called love relations. 

Why do these so-called “love” relations fail so often, so miserably and more often than not, bitterly, as Erich Fromm asks in his Art of Loving, even though it receives disproportionately huge amounts of time, attention and investment from our youth? The answer is, as we have mentioned in the beginning that love is actually, as Fromm explains, a mature mode of being where one actually loves another person i.e. one loves someone out of one’s own nature of “being”, what one may call “virtue”, developed over a long period of time through self-work & not because one actually wants to be “loved” which is the main feature of “childish” mode of being where one is not in “love” but in love with the feeling of being loved. 

What people take for granted, Fromm notes, is that they assume that the feeling of “falling” in love necessarily entails a successful relation when in fact the primary prerequisite of any loving relation is that the two partners involved themselves should be “good”, loving, mature, understanding & giving individuals. These are one’s permanent “traits” (virtues) that one develops over time through strenuous self-work. If the individuals comprising the relationship are (psychologically) still children then one may only expect inevitable mess.  This prerequisite of one’s own inner goodness is bypassed in these relationships by positing a magical feeling of “falling” in love which then becomes parasitic upon psychological “complex”. Whether it be philosophers or poets, we need to note, with due respect, that more often than not, most of them have completely ignored or missed this distinction between “love” (as virtue) and psychopathological fixations. A great deal of literature is spent in tribute to “love” without separating psychological complexes out of it. 

These are childish (sometimes pathological) relationships simply because the two people are still “infants” (still living in their childish mode of being) & thus end up loving/worshipping their own selves (in garb) because an infant cannot but put itself in the centre of relation. Now, let us ponder over the kind of infighting that happens in these relationships. How can two people be in “love” when in fact both of them want the other to revolve around them? This is pathology not love. Let us become cognizant of all these poetry clips saturating social media. Everything isn’t love. We aren’t mere spiritual beings. We are ignoring our psychological situatedness. All the theatrics that we see in these fixations is shocking when one sees & hears different reports. One person does things for the reason that the other person “in relation” cries for them or feels ashamed or hovers around them. Is this love? This is the highest proof of one’s childish mode of being. An infant/child cannot actually maturely love the “other” understood as the “other”. 

A child just moves in the direction where food or toys are kept. This is what Erich Fromm calls “immature” relationships. Investing in gym or guitar skills or Instagram profiles or twitter theatrics, if done with the intention to self-objectify oneself i.e. putting oneself out there as a shiny object “to be loved” (i.e. typical childish mode of being) by increasing one’s “functionalities” then one hasn’t come out of childish state of being as of yet. All these skills/profiles/theatrics done to increase one’s “market value”, as Fromm would say, exposes the fact that this mode of being can be anything but love.

*This is a psychoanalytical reading/writing 

• Views expressed in the article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the editorial stance of Kashmir Observer

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