Mary N., a forty-six-year-old housewife and mother of three, was admitted to hospital in a manic state. Just before her breakdown, Mary had attended a neighbour’s garden party with her husband, and they’d met a man named Alan, a recently widowed barrister. At some point in the evening, Mary and Alan had struck up a conversation in the kitchen. They talked openly about his grief over his wife’s death and hers over her sister’s recent death from cancer. He proposed that she come to lunch at his house the following Friday. When Friday arrived, Mary showed up at his doorstep with a bouquet of peonies, a bottle of Sancerre, and a removal van containing all of her clothes and possessions, including some large pieces of furniture. Alan welcomed Mary and accepted her gifts – not until he saw the movers did he begin to grasp fully her intention. When he refused to let her inside, Mary became frantic, crying and tearing at her clothes. Alan called her husband, who in turn called the family doctor.
Four months after separating from his wife, Isaac D., a forty-one-year-old surgeon, attended a conference in America. Sitting in a bar at Kennedy Airport, he met a twenty-nine-year-old dentist named Anna. They chatted for about an hour and then went their separate ways. Arriving back in London, Isaac used the Internet to track her down. Two days later, carrying an armful of flowers and a pearl charm-necklace, he walked into her Buenos Aires dental practice. Straightaway, Anna called her father and her fiancé; they both came to the office and tried to get Isaac to leave. Only once the police had arrived and he was threatened with arrest did Isaac finally agree to go. One week later, sitting in my office, Isaac told me that he had always been prone to crushes, but this time was different, he had really fallen in love. He’d only agreed to come and see me because his doctor had insisted. He was prepared to discuss his feelings of rejection, but he couldn’t see that there was anything wrong in his behaviour. ‘I’m just an old-fashioned romantic,’ he told me.
Most of us have come down with a case of lovesickness at one time or another, suffering its fever to a greater or lesser degree. In severe cases, lovesickness can lead to delusional behaviours (stalking, for example) or sexual obsession. When we are lovesick, we feel that our emotional boundaries, the walls between us and the object of our desire, have fallen away. We feel a weighty physical longing, an ache. We believe that we are in love.
Many psychoanalysts think that lovesickness is a form of regression, that in longing for intense closeness, we are like infants craving our mother’s embrace. This is why we are most at risk when we are struggling with loss or despair, or when we are lonely and isolated – it is not uncommon to fall in love during the first term of university, for example. But are these feelings really love?
‘I sometimes say – but not entirely seriously – that infatuation is the exciting bit at the beginning; real love is the boring bit that comes later,’ the poet Wendy Cope once told me. ‘People who are lovesick put off testing their fantasies against reality.’ But given the anguish that lovesickness can cause – the loss of mental freedom, the dissatisfaction with one’s self, and the awful ache – why do some of us put off facing reality for so long?
Often it’s because facing reality means accepting loneliness. And while loneliness can be useful – motivating us to meet someone new, for example – a fear of loneliness can work like a trap, ensnaring us in heartsick feelings for a very long time. At its worst, lovesickness becomes a habit of mind, a way of thinking about the world that is not altogether dissimilar to paranoia.
Many years ago, I had a patient named Helen B., a thirty-seven-year-old freelance journalist. For nine years, Helen had been having an affair with a married colleague named Robert. Gripped by lovesickness, Helen was unable to think about him in a rational way. For years, Robert had broken his promises to her. He would suggest that they go on holiday together, and then take his wife instead. He had pledged to leave his marriage when his youngest child went to university – but that event had come and gone, and Robert hadn’t made a move. Three months after Helen started her psychoanalysis, Robert told her that he had fallen in love with someone new and was leaving his wife for her. Helen did not reject or deny this information, but she seemed unable to grasp its implications. She told me that she could ‘see through it’ to ‘what was really going on’.
‘My friends always said “Robert will never leave his wife” but they were wrong – he is leaving her,’ she told me triumphantly. Helen said that she was ‘thrilled’ – she believed that Robert’s new girlfriend would ‘never be able to handle him’, so he’d eventually come back to her. This was a possibility, of course, but Helen seemed to believe it was a certainty, and refused to admit the obvious: Robert had fallen in love with someone else. Like the paranoid, the lovesick are keen information-gatherers, but one soon notices an unconscious intent in their observations – each new fact confirms their delusion.
For the first year of her psychoanalysis, I found that I could not help Helen to think differently. She reminded me of the conspiracy theorists who believe that Prince Philip murdered Princess Diana, or that the CIA planned the September 11th attacks – no amount of evidence could rattle her convictions. When I tried to point out that nothing Robert did seemed to alter her feelings towards him, she became irritated. ‘Isn’t that what true love is all about?’
When I teach psychotherapeutic technique, I often include Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on the reading list. I do this because I believe it’s a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation, and that Dickens teaches us something essential about how people change.
In Dickens’ tale, as you’ll probably remember, the miserly Scrooge is visited by three ghosts. The ghost of Christmas past returns Scrooge to his childhood, to a series of unhappy moments: his father abandoning him at a boarding school, his young sister dying, his own choice to reject his fiancée in order to devote himself to moneymaking. The ghost of Christmas present shows Scrooge the big-heartedness of the poor Cratchit family, whose littlest member, Tiny Tim, is dying – a direct result of Scrooge’s refusal to pay Bob Cratchit a decent wage. When the spirit of Christmas future shows Scrooge his own neglected grave, Scrooge is, at last, transformed.
Scrooge doesn’t change because he’s frightened – he changes because he’s haunted. We can be frightened of gaining weight, but that alone probably won’t cause us to change our diet. Haunting is different. It makes us feel – makes us alive to – some fact about the world, some piece of information, that we’re trying to avoid.
What knowledge is Scrooge trying to avoid?
Scrooge doesn’t want to think about the death of his mother, the death of his sister, or the loss of his fiancée – he cannot bear the thought that love ends. Dickens tells us that, before bed, Scrooge eats alone and reads his banker’s book – his ledger of deposits, withdrawals and interest paid. I take this to mean that Scrooge spends his evenings comforting himself; as he reads his deposit book, he thinks to himself, ‘You see? No losses, only gains.’
Ultimately, Scrooge changes because the ghosts unpick his delusion that you can live a life without loss. They undo his delusion by haunting Scrooge with the losses he has already experienced, the losses now being endured around him, and the inevitable loss of his own life and possessions.
Dickens’ story teaches another lesson: Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present – change can only take place in the here and now. This is important because trying to change the past can leave us feeling helpless, depressed.
But Dickens’ tale points to a further, darker and unexpected truth. Sometimes change comes not because we set out to fix ourselves, or repair our relation to the living; sometimes we change most when we repair our relation to the lost, the forgotten, the dead. As Scrooge grieves for those he had loved but put out of his mind, he begins to regain the world he had lost. He comes to life.
So if, inadvertently, a patient lets me know what haunts her – the thought she knows but refuses to think – my job is to be like one of Dickens’ ghosts: to keep the patient at the scene, to let it do its work.
One Monday, during her second year of psychoanalysis, Helen told me that she had bumped into a newspaper editor she knew at an art gallery. For as long as Helen could remember, this editor, a woman in her fifties, had always looked impeccable – perfect hair and manicure; fresh, glowing skin. ‘She has fabulous clothes and jewellery,’ Helen told me. ‘But then she can afford to spend a lot of time and money on herself because she doesn’t have a family.’ Helen had always admired this woman, but on this occasion, surrounded by younger people, the editor looked out of place, tired. As she was about to leave, Helen caught sight of the woman at the bar. ‘She was too loud, trying too hard, standing too close to this young guy – it was embarrassing.’
I asked Helen if she wanted me to reassure her that she wouldn’t end up like her editor.
‘I’d die if I became like that – the thought of turning out that way? No husband? No family? Making a fool of myself at some trendy art show?’ Helen paused for a few minutes. Then she changed the subject.
‘I think you told me the story of your editor because you’re frightened that you glimpsed your own future,’ I said.
In the following months, from time to time, I would return Helen to that evening at the gallery. The ‘scene at the bar’ became a kind of shorthand between us, representing Helen’s denial of time passing, her desire to eternalise the present.
Many things brought about a change in Helen. But this image of what she might become was, I think, one of them. For as long as I’d known her, Helen had been troubled by the idea that since meeting Robert – almost ten years earlier – she’d become frozen in time. She was watching the lives of those around her transform – her friends were getting married, having children – while her own life was stuck in place. But her focus was always Robert. Attending a friend’s wedding, she’d wonder, ‘Why won’t he commit? What’s wrong with me?’
Then something began to change. One day, Helen described a friend’s baby shower. The guests were all women, friends of hers from university. Instead of talking about whether or not she and Robert would ever have a baby, we talked about Helen’s friends – their closeness, and their genuine concern for one another. She could see that their intimacy had deepened and would continue to do so.
One night, a little while later, during a dinner with this same group, she saw herself through their eyes – as a woman passionately involved with someone who was not real and disengaged from the people who actually cared about her. She’d often thought that her fantasies of Robert might be keeping her from a husband and baby, but for the first time she realised that they were keeping her from the love of her friends. ‘I felt sick with sadness thinking about what I’d lost,’ she told me afterwards. During dessert, her mobile rang; she saw that it was Robert, and she didn’t answer. She turned back to be with her friends.