TRUE LOVE
There are so many kinds of love. Erich Fromm wrote of mother love, father love, sibling love, love of country, and sexual love. Did the Greeks have a word for it? Not just one, but three: eros, the sexual, erotic love of man and woman; filios, the love between parent and child; and agape, the rich, deep love of good friends, a form of love with neither sexual nor filial component. Scientists and psychoanalysts write of the powerful forces that bind people together in love. Religious leaders speak of the manner in which we are loved by God and of proper ways to love God.
All of these experts declare love to be a positive experience. Look up all the wonders of love in that ultimate authority on adjectives, the 1947 Rodale Press book called The Word Finder. I skim from a full page of modifiers. Love is: abiding, absorbing, abstract, approving, ardent, artless, blissful, boundless, bounteous, brave, burning, celestial, chivalrous, confiding, deathless, deep-rooted, earnest, endearing, enduring, entrancing, everlasting, genuine, heroic, immoderate, intimate, invincible, lavish, matchless, meritorious, mutual, mystical, nameless, never-wearying, noble, passionate, persistent, pounding, predominating, primal, profound, responsive, reverent, romantic, sentimental, sin-destroying, strong, stupendous, sustaining, tranquil, trusting, unbounded, unchanging, unconquerable, undying, unconscious, unquestioned, valiant, virtuous, visionary, vivid, willing, wondrous, yearning, and zealous. Good stuff, this love.
But I cheated by ignoring a host of negative modifiers. Love is also: adulterous, ambitious, animal, baffled, barbaric, barefaced, betrayed, bleeding, brittle, calculating, casual, changeful, chastising, coerced, common, condescending, condemned, conventional, corrupt, costly, cunning, cutting, debasing, debatable, depraved, despised, despiteful dire, disgusting, embittered, erring, exacting, faddist, faithless, false, feigning, festering, foolish, frustrated, hapless, hollow, hopeless, humiliated, illicit, immoderate, jealous, loveless, melancholy, misguided, obdurate, obsequious, one-sided, painful, palsied, paltry, pathetic, rending, repudiated, satiated, selfish, sham, shameless, sinful, thwarted, tragic, transient, transparent, unfashionable, unreasonable, unrelenting, unrequited, unrestful, unreturned, unruly, unsatisfactory, violent, warped, wasted, weakening, well-quitted, wilting, and worst. Not good for the soul, this love.
So to the list of authorities we add lexicographer’s love. I ask your attention to cultural sources that inform with equal proficiency. I am interested in the forms of love studied by poets and songwriters, by novelists and moviemakers, by therapists who work in the theater of intimate revelation, by the civil and criminal officials who deal firsthand with the mayhem of love.
Lovers: “I’m crazy about him (her).” “I love you so much that you drive me crazy.” “Even hearing his name makes my heart pound like mad.” “I love her so much I think my heart will burst.” “I’m so happy I could just die!” “Hubba hubba, ding ding. Baby, you’ve got everything!”
Songwriters: “What is this thing called love; this strange, wondrous thing called love? Just who can explain its mysteries?” “How can I believe you when you say you love me when I know you’ve been a liar all your life?” “I give to you and you give to me, true love, true love, love forevermore . . . Now you and I have a guardian angel on high with nothing to do/But to give to you and to give to me, love forevermore.” “If this isn’t love, then the whole world is crazy.” “My heart goes boom tiddy boom tiddy boom tiddy boom tiddy boom tiddy boom tiddy boom boom boom.” The entire genre of torch songs owes its name to the ubiquitous and quite painful phenomenon of unrequited love that cannot be quenched, like the glowing embers of a torch that cannot be extinguished.
Legal experts: Here is a passage from a 1901 English translation of Passion and Criminality in France—a Legal and Literary Study, written by Louis Proal. He was, according to the title page, “one of the Presiding Judges at the Court of Appeal of Riom.”
How comes it that affection may turn to hate, and lovers become the bitterest foes,—that the transition is so easy from love to loathing, from the transports of the most exalted tenderness to the frenzies of the most savage anger? How is it so fond a feeling may grow so cruel and lead to the commission of so many barbarous murders by poison and strangulation, and the infliction of such appalling wounds? Whence comes the cruelty of love and the ferocity of jealousy? Why does the jealous lover strike the very woman he adores? Why does he pierce with dagger thrusts the very bosom on which he has lain, and disfigure the very features he has just been covering with kisses? Why does the woman whom her lover has deserted burn out the eyes that moved her soul to love, and send a bullet through the heart she was so fain but now to feel beating beneath her hand? How is it love may grow so venomous as to put knife and pistol into the hands of lovers and husbands, who after having sworn eternal affection, tear each other’s eyes out at the domestic hearth, and in the very conjugal bed? Why does this passion, capable as it is of producing heroes, so often manufacture only cowards and murderers?
To end our string of questions, why does love if unrequited make people so unhappy that they must needs kill themselves? How is it that lovers, who might well live together, prefer to die together? (preface, 6–7)
Filmmakers: In Fatal Attraction, one night of apparently casual intimacy releases from within the female partner a marauding monster whose need and apparent purpose are to own, consume, or destroy the man who entered her script. Similarly, in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the murder of a bitter and dependent lover (a woman with a clearly delineated “borderline personality”) is excused on the grounds that she had failed to live within the rules of callous and casual “love.”
Not enough? I grew up in the world of grand opera (which may have something to do with my lifelong interest in high-density emotion). Opera is not about “singing.” It is an excuse for singers to let loose the most powerful emotions known to man at their highest range of intensity. Judge Proal’s description of the vagaries of love sounds like the plot summary of any major opera. Death and tragedy hover around romantic love as surely as do the scenes of domestic tranquility with which we prefer to envision it. Sometimes I think that those with the greatest authority about love are the people who have suffered from it the most.
Love varies from one culture to another. It shifts in meaning as we move in one era and out another, changes even within a single relationship as we and it mature. Any definition of love must take into account this inherent variability. My intuition is that love varies so much because it is based on the history of our experiences of innate affect, which will differ in all of the ways I have suggested throughout this book. Whenever we encounter a word with too many layers of meaning it is best to return to the dictionary and find out its history. I rely, as usual, on the OED.
THE LINGUISTS OF LOVE AND HATE
Through all its linguistic travels, love has conveyed the sense of something held dear or precious. Key to our understanding of love are both aspects of that definition—what is loved must on the one hand be experienced as dear and precious, while on the other hand be held so with some degree of constancy. The modem word love seems to have come through the Old English form lufu on the way from its earliest known origins as the Old High German luba. To the sailor, those who prefer land to sea are landlubbers. In Germany, luba became liebe; in Holland it moved to lieven and then liefe. Our word belief originally meant “that which is held dear”; when we “take our leave” of someone we ask that our departure meet with that person’s pleasure. Love and life share no common derivation—the word lif is just as old as the root word luba. What also derived from luba is libido, the Latin word for desire—which became for Freud a biological life force more sexual than loving.
There does not seem to be any accepted linguistic source for the root luba (no word or root known to have preceded it) so perhaps I may be forgiven an amateur’s guess. I suspect that it is an example of onomatopoeia, a vocalization made up to resemble a common sound—like the woosh of the wind, or the tick-tock of a clock. If you’ve ever put your ear to someone’s chest and heard the normal heart, you know that it beats not with a single sound, but with two notes. Generations of medical students being taught the art of the stethoscope have learned to call the sound of the heart lub-dub. Check this out if you don’t believe me. Luba is a wonderfully descriptive word for the heartbeat.
Romantic love has always made the heart pound. (“Hubba hubba,” “Boom tiddy, boom tiddy, boom boom boom. ”) I believe that the intimate association between the emotional experience of love and the physiological effect on the heartbeat of the innate affects accompanying it led our early ancestors to name the feeling for the vital structure so linked to it. Is it only a coincidence that the heart has always been taken as the organ of love? An infinitude of poetry, prose, greeting cards, love songs, and paintings of lovers clutching the left side of the thorax supports my conclusion.
You need not accept my idea that our word for love derives from the sound of the beating heart. Yet no one would contest the need to explain either the universal association between love and the heart or the real and powerful effect of love on that organ of circulation. My etymological speculation speaks for the former, while the affect theory of Tomkins defines the latter, as we will discuss in a moment.
Look next at the word hate. Like love, it has come to mean not mere dislike, but malice held with some degree of constancy. Just as love must be fueled by some source of energy to keep it held constant (the law of entropy suggests that everything runs down eventually), hate, too, must be fueled and maintained. Any dictionary will inform us that hate implies extreme aversion, disgust, or abhorrence. It is a complex emotion in which we wish to destroy or to get some distance from its source while also maintaining a relationship with it. Just as we are never free of thoughts of our beloved, we are always emotionally entangled with what or whom we hate.
Yet hate, like luba, has been found in our language as far back as words can be traced, always with the same sort of sound, never associated with any linguistic source other than that sound. Maybe affect theory can offer a clue: Does not the word itself sound much like the noise made when we hawk up phlegm in preparation to spit in disgust or contempt? That association would allow me to define hate as some sort of complex ideoaffective construction in which the cognitive part involved our internal representation of another person and the affective part involved disgust. Romantic hate is a situation in which we remain powerfully drawn to something that must produce an experience of negative affect. Just as the affect (drive auxiliary) called disgust has power directly in relation to the preexisting hunger it must impede, hate has power and durability directly in proportion to the preexisting wish for continued relatedness that it must block.
There are, of course, plenty of situations in which we can hate someone for whom we have never experienced positive affect. Our reaction to any form of severe abuse, to torture or torment, is to hate whomever we define as the perpetuator. We can hate the unknown assailant or the faceless burglar who takes from us by death or stealth that which has given us pleasure. Hate can be associated with a host of invisible unconscious scripts and also with highly visible obvious sources. No matter what examples of hate are chosen for study, always will be found the paired factors of constancy and negative affect.
THE PRECONDITIONS FOR LOVE
I wish to present a new approach to love and a new way to understand the relation between love and shame. Since love is, at core, an emotional experience, my formulation will be based on affect theory. It will take into account the new understanding of child development made possible by this system of thought and discussed throughout this book.
All love is based on the experience of positive affect, of interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy. The part of love that is exciting and makes the heart pound owes its power to interest–excitement; the part of love that makes us feel calm, safe, relaxed, and untroubled owes its power to enjoyment–joy. The pain of love comes from shame affect, for any impediment to either of the positive affects will be amplified as shame and experienced as hurt feelings. Shame always wounds in direct proportion to the degree of preexisting positive affect that it has restrained. It is for this reason that the more we are excited by the person who has become the object of our love, or the more we anticipate the contentment to be achieved from this relationship, so much more are we susceptible to the misery of shame.
It is of interest to enquire why love provides so many examples of the highest levels of excitement and enjoyment to be found in our culture, to ask why love can drive us with such power and intensity. I ask you to understand that it is wrong to think of love only in terms of the positive affects it produces, but to consider the emotional state of the person who is capable of such an intense affective experience.
My definition of love requires attention to the preconditions of love. The greatest of meals prepared by the most enticing of chefs would draw no interest from one with no appetite. Great dining is a dialectic between hunger and the arts involved in the selection, preparation, and presentation of food. What makes us crave love? Who needs love, and why? What is the dialectic of love?
Take, for instance, the nearly universal description of love as the happy “togetherness” that relieves painful loneliness. A patient in therapy confides his experience of falling in love: “Selena causes in me feelings of ecstasy, wonderment, beauty. Merely to think of her brings this combination of happy and exciting feelings. She makes me feel good all over. But when I think that I may never see her again I am filled with terror, anxiety, dread, the feeling that monstrous jaws are grabbing at me. Even worse is the feeling of nothingness, flatness—the idea of life without her. ”
His disclosure provides an interesting example of that feature of the affect system Tomkins calls its correlative property—its ability to imprint other activities with the specific features of whatever affect has been triggered. There is a distinct correlation between the sweetness, beauty, calm, and happiness with which my friend experiences all his perceptions and the affect of enjoyment–joy that has been triggered by love. Equally are all of his actions and thoughts governed by fear–terror when the specter of her absence triggers that realm of affect.
Notice that, like most lovers, he is almost incapable of thinking about love without dreading its absence. Why does romantic love seem always to imply this dialectic between some sort of pain and its relief? In order to answer this question we must once again turn to the modern study of infant observation and to the interplay of affects between caregiver and infant. It is in the way each mother responds to the needs of her baby that we will find the seeds of love.
Stern points out that
The vast majority of the mother’s time during the infant’s first two months is spent in regulating and stabilizing sleep-wake, day-night, and hunger-satiation cycles. . . . When the baby first comes home from the hospital, the new parents live from minute to minute, attempting to regulate the newborn. After a few days they may be able to see twenty minutes into the future. By the end of a few weeks, they have the luxury of a future that is predictable for stretches of time as long as an hour or two. And after four to six weeks, regular time clumps of three to four hours are possible. The tasks of eating, getting to sleep, and general homeostasis are generally accompanied by social behaviors by the parents: rocking, touching, soothing, talking, smiling, and gazing. These occur in response to infant behaviors that are also mainly social, such as crying, fretting, smiling, and gazing. A great deal of social interaction goes on in the service of physiological regulation. (1985, 42–43)
This paragraph describes the bare bones of what happens between infant and parents during that frenzied period of their first mutual encounters. It is a very important passage, one which exemplifies the basic difference between the European model of child development and the American. Freud, the exemplar of the European system, ignored the social aspects of physiological regulation and made of the infant’s experience a solitary world. Sullivan, the founder of American psychiatry, said that we are born into an interpersonal system, and that right from the beginning of extrauterine life our self system has an interpersonal core. My own recognition of the empathic wall honored Sullivan’s observation that we are born into the climate of mother’s emotions. Both mother and infant are powerful broadcasters of affect, notwithstanding the particular need that has triggered that affect. Initially, at least, they call to each other in the language of affect.
As a matter of fact, infant and caregiver actually create each other in the language of affect. Most of the time we accept the conceit that we create children. But this primitive and simplistic bit of hubris ignores the fact that we become parents only when we have children and that (despite whatever we thought we knew about child-rearing before their arrival) it is our children who teach us how to be parents. Their needs call forth from us the qualities essential for parenting. They find the parent within us, the latent or precursor parent that does not exist until a child is added to our lives.
Yet each of us responds differently to the needs, requests, and demands of our offspring, from infancy through toddlerhood and on into adolescence. Indeed, often we find ourselves being quite different parents for each child! The infant is not born into the neutral and entirely predictable climate of a laboratory. We parents were once infants with a normal assembly of hardware and firmware, all of which was influenced into an adult personality by the software of experience. We parents have our own history, our own highly specific temperaments. We vary across a wide spectrum of dispositions and proclivities, just as do our children.
So infants are born into a climate that took a long time to evolve, even before they popped into the picture. Even though each of them is equipped with the same basic range of hardware and firmware, they differ remarkably. No two babies seem quite the same in their affective output, and this temperament of theirs touches us in surprisingly specific ways. They vary over a wide range, and we vary over a wide range. The possibilities are endless. The permutations and combinations made possible by the huge degree of variability in both parent and child, the very number of possible relationships, are staggering beyond imagination. It is taken for granted that they have to get used to us—but it is a two-way street. We create each other.
Even if we believe that all babies have pretty much the same spectrum of needs, and all parents have pretty much the same spectrum of abilities, the little differences that make us individuals will foster the emergence of hugely different patterns of interaction. Even if I take for granted the obvious untruth that women are adequately prepared to care for their infants by reason of biology (or any other mysterious undefinable force), the rhythm and style of that care will differ from one mother to another.
I suspect that in the affective interaction between the needy infant and the solacing parent we may find the nidus of love. It is obvious (watch any mother and baby) that children respond with positive affect to the reduction of negative affect, to the relief of their needs. Yet I do not think that love is merely the positive affect that we observe in these situations, but a far more complex formation.
Again I draw my analogy from the world of physics and chemistry. No matter how beautiful a crystal may appear, it is not a “pure” substance. Usually, some chemical compound has formed an intricate latticework of molecules around a central impurity. It is the nature of the impurity that determines the shape of the resulting crystal, even though the “contaminant” and the surrounding chemicals are totally different in composition. A lustrous pearl is no more than an oyster’s attempt to smooth away the irritation brought by an intruding grain of sand; without the sand there is no pearl. Love, too, is a beautiful crystal made possible only by its “central impurity.” I believe that the nidus of love is the sequence that results when some infantile need has triggered negative affect and the caregiver provides solace by responding to that affect, determining its source, relieving the underlying need, and accepting the resulting positive affect. Love implies not a positive affect but a series of negative and positive affects linked together in sequence to form a scene. Built from the accumulated scenes of urgent need and solacing relief characteristic for each of us are the scripts that we will in adult life call love.
Anybody who studies the affect system comes naturally upon the concept that events are colored by the affects they trigger, and that what is stored in memory is not merely an event but a combination of our perception of that event and the affects that accompanied it. In an attempt to bring order to experience, we humans, from infancy through dotage, link together in memory the sequences of affect that characterize significant and recurrent interactions.
Not surprisingly, since it was he who first recognized the nature of the system, Tomkins has devoted a great deal of attention to this latter phenomenon, which he has described as script theory (1979, 1987b, 1991). You will recall that we defined the firmware mechanisms, the drives and the affects, as groups of innate, prewritten scripts involving a number of actions taking place at far-flung sites of action. The process of growth and development creates software scripts, sequences of lived moments characterized by a variety of needs, affects, and responses.
Once again let me interpolate a bit of history. The word biology is of more recent origin than you might guess. It was coined in 1802 by the German writer Gottfried Rheinhold and brought into English about a decade later. It was constructed from the Greek root words for life (bios) and for scholarly discourse (logia). Central to our understanding of what it means to be alive is the concept of irritability, the property of response to a stimulus. Whereas the anatomist might tear apart the remains of a life form in order to determine its structure, and the chemist degrade its tissues in order to ascertain the nature of their components, the biologist kept the organism relatively intact and prodded it into a response. The study of life was initially the study of stimulus and response.
Psychology has always considered itself a “life science.” It was in such a philosophical climate that the early psychologists began their study of the psyche. Since the psyche—this soul-like essence that made us human—could not be removed from the body and studied as a part of the anatomy or degraded to find its constituent molecules, it had to be analyzed on the basis of its properties. The brain was considered as a “black box” into which we could never peer, its dauntingly complex mass of circuitry too mysterious for the assignment of specific structures to particular practices. There was no apparent connection between the construction of the brain and the fine points of human behavior. Thus, one wing of psychology was born as a method of analysis based on the evaluation of stimulus and response. This form of early psychology involved the search for discrete events that might act as a stimulus to the psyche, and the analysis of its response.
Freud made a huge leap forward by insisting that the psyche was powered by invisible programs operating out of awareness, and that the language of stimulus and response could not explain the phenomenology of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has encountered massive resistance for two basic reasons: First, many people were repulsed by Freud’s insistence that the basic driving force was sexual in nature, preferring to avoid the data he amassed; and second, psychology has always seen itself as a science like other sciences, with “real” data capable of study from without, rather than the highly suspect subjective feelings of individual humans in analytic treatment.
I suspect that Bowlby, who was initially trained as a psychoanalyst, felt so uncomfortable about psychoanalytic dependence on anecdotal data that he swung the pendulum in the direction of pure external observation in the spirit of stimulus-response psychology. “Science” must be based on replicable experiments. Koch’s postulates required that the bacillus you isolated from an animal that died of a disease be capable of causing that disease in another subject. Much of psychological science looked with disfavor on the use of Freudian archaeology to derive ideas about the nature of the inner life. It could not accept psychoanalytic inferences that were incapable of being tested from infancy forward. The arrow of time moves only in one direction, and experimental science depends on that inviolate truth.
LOVE SCRIPTS
Now comes Tomkins, who links the wide range of subjective experiences to what can be observed with ease—the facial and other bodily displays of innate affect. And, further, he points out that affective experiences themselves can be linked into structures held within the mind and remembered as scenes. In this new psychology, a stimulus triggers a mechanism that involves a whole series of responses stored as firmware; sequences of these affective responses become linked together to form a scene; and sequences of scenes are then linked together to form a software script. From a simple psychology of primitive biological stimulus and response we have evolved to a computer-language-based system through which any piece of behavior, feeling, or experience can be understood by analysis of its component scenes.
Stern underscores the importance of our ability to collect experience in the form of remembered scenes. He suggests that the infant is capable of storing them as internal “Representations of Interactions that have been Generalized” (1985, 97–99), for which he creates the acronym RIGS. Through these RIGS the infant assembles a set of rules about the nature of life. Such internal formulations allow it to know what to expect when in situations that resemble but are not precisely identical to those in which they were deduced. Just as Basch defines an emotion as the combination of an affect with our retrieved memories of previous experiences of that affect, Stern defines a RIG not as a specific remembered experience but the summation and integration of a host of experiences—that from which we can make assumptions about a new but related experience.
In his work on script theory, Tomkins explains that scenes are linked together to form a script only when the child has discovered that in its life certain scenes follow each other with such regularity that rules for their association and governance can be determined. Using videotape analysis of mother–infant interaction, Demos (1983, 1988) has been able to demonstrate that individual mothers have highly specific styles of responding to infantile affect display, creating for their children sequences of negative and positive affect conforming precisely to Tomkins’s predictions. A script is a sequence of RIGS connected by rules worked out through experience; it connects past and present to suggest, define, or determine a particular future.
Finally, Tomkins asks us to recall that, although each affect is an amplifier of its stimulus conditions, when groups of affect-based scenes are linked to form a script, these groups or sets of scenes themselves generate affect. He introduces the term affective magnification to differentiate between the type of urgency produced by individual innate affects as amplifiers of their stimulus conditions and the higher order of increase in significance conveyed when these scenes are grouped and thus magnified. Each experience of innate affect is a moment of urgency created by amplification. In a script, whole groups of experiences are made incrementally more urgent because they have been magnified by affect. Affective magnification is a higher order of action than affective amplification.
Love, then, is an example of a script in which the most important scenes of need and nurturance have been assembled and magnified with tremendous intensity. For each of us, love will depend on whatever scenes, whatever interpersonal interactions of nurturance, have become generalized. Love is not merely a RIG, but the result of a series of RIGS nested within each other, all magnified by the positive affects of excitement and joy that we anticipate will reward our experience of anguishing loneliness and need.
“The fear that men have of a woman’s anger—that unbelievable fear that a man has of a woman’s rage—where in hell does it come from?” asked a 49-year-old businessman during a psychotherapy session just the other day. He is Taipan, supreme leader of an industry. His next statement reveals more of the script from which this fear derives: “From our earliest moments as boys we are taught that men are superior to women, that we are more powerful and more dangerous. But when a woman screams at me I have no power. All I can do is hope it will end soon.” Vaguely, he knows this has something to do with his expectation of love; empirically we know that he is drawn to certain women, all of whom humiliate him similarly and from whom he derives calm and surcease only by escape. He and I wonder together what might be his function in this drama, what role he plays in each woman’s script. “Why is it that you can see a little shrimp of a woman hitting her son (who looks like either a mountain or a linebacker) as hard as she pleases, totally knowing he will not hit her back?” asked another patient. Both forms of interaction are based on the scripts for love that have evolved within each of the participants described.
All of the early experiences of need form their own inner representation. The infant’s experience of the mother who responds with alacrity, who most easily enables the baby to achieve self-regulation when needy—this feeling forms the core of what it means to be loved. The infant’s experience of the mother who does not come, the mother who is unresponsive to the infant’s urgency, the mother who responds angrily to its need, forms the nidus of what it means not to be loved. When, with evident relief, lovers say, “At last I’ve found you,” they describe the astonishing degrees to which can be magnified these paired experiences of loneliness and redemption.
EMPATHIC FAILURE
Study, for a moment, this next statement of how it feels to be lonely within a crowd. Born in an upper-class family, to a narcissistic mother whose self-absorption had left him either in the care of servants or (when in her company) bereft of affective communication, the writer tries to tell us what it was like to be an infant with no bridge. He describes what was, to him, the most painful part of his early childhood:
Little by little I began to realize where I was and to want to make my wishes known to others, who might satisfy them. But this I could not do, because my wishes were inside me, while other people were outside, and they had no faculty which could penetrate my mind. So I would toss my arms and legs about and make noises, hoping that such few signs as I could make would show my meaning, though they were quite unlike what they were meant to mime. And if my wishes were not carried out, either because they had not been understood or because what I wanted would have harmed me, I would get cross with my elders, who were not at my beck and call, and with people who were not my servants, simply because they did not attend to my wishes; and I would take my revenge by bursting into tears. (25–26)
But this poignant description of empathic failure comes from no ordinary child. Speaking is St. Augustine, a child early in the fifth century, who later discovers or recognizes God as the polar opposite of his unempathic mother. The God of Augustine reads him in every pore, fills him with the feeling of being understood. This perfect empathy is the central meaning of love in Christianity. The God of Abraham and Isaac exemplified his love as power over our enemies, as might arrayed on behalf of those who honored him, a paternal God of right and wrong who struck fear into the hearts of those who stood in opposition.
Carl D. Schneider, both a psychologist and an ordained minister, has written about the role of shame and guilt in contemporary religion. He points out that, should we dare to compare ourselves to God, we would recognize immediately the immense disparity in our sizes and realms of power. God is huge, we are tiny. (I have always liked it when friends placed on their boats the plaque that reads, “Oh God, thy sea is so vast and my craft is so small.”) The proper relationship between man and God is one of awe, writes Schneider, for awe involves the mature sense of shame relative to one who looms so far above us. You will remember that I define guilt as our label for a specific named group of situations in which shame is triggered along with fear. The God of Christianity creates an atmosphere of awe and shame within the umbrella of love, while the addition of fear within the system attributed to the more warlike God of Judaism adds the dimension of guilt. One is alone with neither realization of God; one is with God quite differently within these two systems of worship.
There are, of course, lots of ways of being alone. Not all aloneness is painful—the infant spends about half its waking time in solitary activity, apparently quite happy to be alone. The shift from “being alone” to “painful isolation” seems to occur when the infant needs something that cannot be provided in the absence of another person. It is then that affect is mobilized to amplify need, and whatever had been desired now becomes urgently needed from another.
Again recall that offhand remark of Robert Frost that so charmed me more than 35 years ago—he said we longed for “A world where ask is get/And knock is open wide.” It is an insight meaningless without an understanding of affect without comprehension of the magnification provided by certain scripts. When there is no gap between “ask” and “get,” when no affect is triggered by insufficiency, there need never be pain associated with the state of aloneness. But when need itself becomes defined in terms of the solacing other, aloneness becomes isolation and abandonment.
The number of possible scenes beggars one’s imagination. Countless times the infant needs or wants something and mother is right there, attendant and ready and capable of providing whatever is required. But no mother can be eternally available, no caregiving system totally and constantly attentive and always exactly right in its assessment of the infant’s needs.
There are so many subtle gradations of maternal unavailability. Sometimes the most sophisticated, competent, and loving of mothers finds it literally impossible to know why a baby is crying; sometimes it just takes time to figure out what will provide solace. Maternal attention can be demanded and received and still actually ineffective—we can feel “alone” and unattended even when someone is there! And mother may be in the next room, or asleep, or out of the house, or depressed and inattentive, or angry for her own reasons and therefore unable to commune with her infant, or mildly ill, or seriously ill, or any of a myriad of perfectly understandable but nevertheless “imperfect” mothers.
Viewed from the vantage point of an infant whose needs are amplified by negative affect, each variant of maternal imperfection is capable of producing the experience of painful isolation and the subsequent group of affect-loaded ideas we call abandonment. The infant really can’t understand why its needs have not been met. In a sense, all experiences of unmet need can be interpreted in terms of their similarity to the type of unmet need resulting from abandonment.
Examining carefully the situations described above, it seems clear that there is one group of “abandonments” (states of painful isolation) caused by actual maternal absence and another caused by insensitivity. Using the language of affect theory, we might say that insensitivity is a static word that describes what happens when there is a failure in the dynamic and fluid process of affective resonance. Stern describes this sort of unavailability as a failure of attunement, reserving the term “misattunement” for situations in which the caregiver seems to tune in to the affect display of the infant but then fails to deal sensitively with this information (1985, 148–49, 211–14). Within the system of Kohut’s self psychology both types of interaction are described as “empathic failure.” All of us are talking about the same problem. Sometimes the caregiving adult is right there, in the immediate vicinity of the needy infant, and that adult is just as unavailable as if he or she did not exist.
So the concept of abandonment must take into account both physical isolation and empathic failure. What else must we add to the picture? What other situations will the infant experience as the absolute or relative absence of human contact?
LOVE AND SHAME
Here is where we begin to think about the role of shame in interpersonal life. Up to now we have concentrated on the internal experience of shame, on what shame does to our self-concept. When shame affect is triggered in an interpersonal context, all of the physiological reactions and all of the steadily increasing number of psychological meanings attached to that affect will now take on a special significance in terms of the relation between self and other.
If self is defined by all of the mechanisms described in the previous chapter, and if other is defined as what remains in the interpersonal field when the self is subtracted, then to the extent that shame alters the nature of the self it will alter the way we identify the other. If shame creates a sense of a defective self, it therefore creates in us a sense of an other who sees us as defective, no matter what that person really thinks of us. Whenever we experience shame in the presence of another person, we experience that person as holding all the beliefs about us that shame has already created within our personal psychology.
It is beyond the scope of this present book for me to suggest the full range of possibilities inherent in that statement. Let me repeat one more time my basic thesis about the adult experience of affect: Each of us grows up in a particular family that lives in a neighborhood as part of a definable culture brought into existence during a specific era. Each individual will form, for shame as well as for each of the other innate affects, a lexicon of ideoaffective complexes based on the interplay of nature and experience, of hardware, firmware, and software. Our lifetime of shame experiences will form our archive of shame and thereby influence for each of us the development of the self. But this schedule for the development of the shame-related self will also create a highly particular catalogue of others.
Of course I am aware that there is much more to the nature of other that created by our personal experience of shame. Our sense of other is formed in an immense range of interpersonal experiences. But the idea of an other who sees us as bad, or defective, or incompetent, or damaged, or small, or stupid; the idea of an other whose eyes are the symbol of all that is revealed about us when we are shamed; the idea that a major defect in the self is a just and reasonable rationale for our exclusion from the society of all previously loving or accepting others—all these are only constituents of the huge roster of possible relationships between self and other formed by the sting of shame.
Shame haunts our every dream of love. The more we wish for communion, so much more are we vulnerable to the painful augmentation of any impediment, however real or fancied. To love grandly is to risk grand pain. Intimacy with the other validates the value of the self, and any impediment to intimacy causes severe injury to self-experience.
“Y’know that funny stage when you really start to like someone and you get all sort of awkward and clumsy?” asked a young woman the other day. She referred to the fact that with each increase in mutualized positive affect comes an increasing likelihood of shame. “Remember the yucky feeling you get when someone you like is with someone else?” asked an adolescent girl. “You weren’t good enough, or something.” When in love we tend to disavow any understanding of our beloved that might become an impediment to interest and enjoyment. True love will not look at its own diminishment.
Shame becomes the most social of the negative affects because it modulates, regulates, impedes, contains, the interest and enjoyment that power all sociality. Just as the experience of shame pulls us from social interaction, it calls attention to and helps define social interaction. If shame is the affect of withdrawal, of sinking down and slumping, of physiological removal from interaction of the face (and therefore the quintessential definition of what it means to lose face), it is still and always an affect made painful only to the extent that interest and enjoyment remain. We experience shame only as long as one of the two positive affects remains active, for shame is only possible in the context of positive affect. We cannot feel shame where there is nothing to lose. Whoever feels shame the most is the most desirous of positive affect; whoever feels shame the least has renounced most successfully the goal of positive affect.
It is to protect ourselves from the pain of love sought and love refused that we steel ourselves to withhold interest, to remain aloof and immune to the entreaties of the possibly loving but possibly shaming other. Social life demands the development of highly ritualized forms of address, social dancing around issues of trust and safety within relationships all refined to protect us from the pain of shame. Any time someone says, “You hurt my feelings,” that person has experienced shame affect: not embarrassment, humiliation, mortification, or “shame,” but an otherwise unnamed assembly of shame affect as an amplified impediment to the mutualization of positive affect expected within a loving relationship. (Only a few of the recurrent and repetitive experiences of affect get to be named.) Most of the bad feelings that accompany social interaction are based on shame affect. And whenever someone seems particularly available for social interaction, remarkably unprotected and unshielded from our intuitively friendly and loving forays into his or her inner world, unusually willing to commune with us on the basis of positive affect without the distancing maneuvers we experience as off-putting defensiveness, we compliment that individual as being “vulnerable.”
One of my favorite passages in Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving is the section, early in the book, where he asks us to understand the distinction between “falling in love” and “standing in love” (p.3). Most of what I have discussed above relates to the problems of falling in love, of finding and holding within a relationship some person with whom we can hope to stand in love. Freud taught us that central to the ability to stand in love is the willingness to ignore those characteristics of our beloved that might lead us to reduce our investment in each other. But Shakespeare said it best of all in Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
SHAME AND THE SADNESS OF HOLIDAYS
Shakespeare makes us think about the qualities necessary for the permanence of love. Yet even within a system of permanence, even where there is consistency of relatedness, there is some fluctuation in the climate of our emotion. Look, for a moment, at the mild, seasonal variations of love that occur in our culture. “This must be a difficult time of year for you,” dozens of people tell me every year around Christmas. “Isn’t this the time when you therapists get the most business?” What are they saying?
Holidays like Christmas, Passover, and Thanksgiving imply that whole families will get together and share their warmth and love. Yet these occasions are really organized for the benefit of children, who (when it is done well) remain blissfully unaware of the stagecraft required to mount such productions. “I created Christmas for 22 years. Every year my children saw Christmas exactly as I hoped they would. Every aspect of it let them know what it meant to be loved, to understand the love of Jesus, and to feel completely safe and secure,” said a recently divorced Irish Catholic gentleman the other day. “Now where do I go?”
Around the time for each of these celebrations one can discern a rising tide of nostalgia for holidays past. Yes, we all know that there were always some discomforts associated with each of these historical events, but by and large we recall only the best portions of them. (To me, nostalgia implies the retroactive disavowal and falsification of negative affect. “It was a nice picnic. There were no ants,” replied Tomkins instantly when I mentioned this to him some years ago.) For a great many people, holiday-time is a period during which we are flooded with (both real and “adjusted”) memories of situations characterized by the mutualization of positive affect.
And the nearness of Christmas makes us uncomfortable because it releases from within us all the ignored and suppressed wishes for love that buzz around inside us. Christmas makes people unhappy because of the disparity between the degree of interest and enjoyment theoretically available and the amount really attainable. It is a perfect and specific example of a situation in which desire outruns fulfillment, in which our wish for the communion of positive affect is impeded by the harsh reality of everyday adult life. The “depression” of Christmas, or Passover, or Easter, or Thanksgiving, the sadness that afflicts so many people, this complex assortment of ideas, memories, and affects, is a prime example of a situation dominated by shame affect but bearing no resemblance to what we call the shame family of emotions. There is a good deal of distress affect in this seasonal sadness, mostly because it simply won’t go away—this steady-state discomfort triggers distress. But the impediment to positive affect triggers shame affect, and that is what makes some people so miserable around the holidays.
The countervailing force that mitigates the abject state of isolation associated with social shame is the sense of communion inherent in love. (Abject is derived from roots that mean “to throw down. ” It is a synonym for downcast, and of nearly identical origin. Both words describe the physical actions associated with shame affect.) Earlier I suggested that the adult experiences of shame and pride could best be understood as poles of a shame/pride axis—that nearness to one always meant distance from the other. Now I ask you to accept the idea that adult life places us within a social matrix, the poles of which are defined by nearness to love or to social shame. Why is it easier to speak in terms of the polarity of love and hate than that of love and shame?
This circuitry is capable of further analysis. A few pages back I suggested that the word hate itself actually derives from the drive auxiliary of disgust; that (in common language) to hate someone means to wish that person destroyed or in some other way driven from our system. When a small child says, “I hate spinach, ” she means that this innocuous vegetable triggers disgust. Exile, excommunication, and disgrace are understandable within the spectrum of shame but by no means fully explained by it unless we add the concepts of dissmell and disgust. Just as the child comes to understand the innately scripted feelings associated with dissmell and disgust and learns that an offending foodstuff can voluntarily be avoided when it smells bad or expelled when it tastes bad, the child generalizes from these experiences of food-centered repulsion to form a system of interpersonal distancing and rejection based on dissmell and disgust.
When another person defines me as bad or offensive, exposes me as having qualities found dissmelling or disgusting by that other, I experience the peculiar triune assemblage of negative affects to which we referred earlier. Since the other person has defined me as a bad-self, I now experience self-dissmell, self-disgust, and (as I, too, look at me) self-shame. No matter how solid my self-image before this moment of shame, what is now revealed will be those elements of my character the “significance” of which I had avoided.
Here again is one of the central aspects of the adult emotional experience of shame. Whatever portion of us is revealed during a shame experience causes the unfolding of a process that brings from their hiding places a host of other hidden memories. Our ability to group memories, to order our experience so that it may be handled in some intelligent manner, this very facility that allows us to organize our internal world becomes the source of the very images we would most like to forget. Shame can be triggered by exposure of the self to the view of others. But it triggers further exposure of the self to the self, maintaining and amplifying shame, creating shame-filled moments or even shame-dominated moods. When it is in the presence of another person that we have been shamed, it is to that other person that we attribute the pain of shame and against that person that we must defend ourselves.
In order to deal with the experience of social shame, we must develop scripts for the detoxification of this assemblage. Although the fantasy of perfect isolation from the shaming others remains the most sturdy emotional defense against shame, it becomes less and less possible as we grow up. In the chapters that remain, we will discuss all of the ways that people defend themselves against this noxious interpersonal experience. We will address the effect of shame on our entire culture.
Yet before we can discuss such matters there is one more facet of shame to take up. Have you noticed that so far I have ignored the one aspect of shame most often associated with it? Certainly no book on shame can be complete without some reference to the relation between embarrassment and sexuality. I have taken great pains to distinguish among the many faces of shame so that they might be evaluated independent of each other. So much attention has been given to sexual shame and the ways we handle sexuality that, for some, sex and shame are practically synonymous.
By now, of course, it should be quite clear that the sexual drive is but one of the life forces capable of assembly with shame affect, just as it can be linked with excitement, or fear, or anger. Intuitively, we can guess that anything so capable of engendering excitement and enjoyment is likely to be associated with the affect that amplifies impediment to those affects. The revolution in our understanding of child development has affected our understanding of much that has to do with sexuality, and it is to this stream of data that we now turn our attention.