True Love as the Love of Truth

Abstract

From the very beginning of our life until its end, we long for the mythical union with the other, which is based on a combination of moments of near-perfect harmony between mother and infant in early infancy and unconscious phantasies concerning an ideal connection and complete satisfaction (Klein, 1963/1997). Simultaneously, there lies a whole set of aggression toward, anxieties of, and defenses against the bad, frustrating object. The struggle and balance between these two attitudes are at the roots of true love. This paper addresses a few main factors that stand in the way of true love and the psychological conditions that might enable love to last: The love for the “otherness” of the other; facing the ethical challenge embedded in sexual lust; and above all and most prominent, the love of truth. A clinical example from Mitchell’s book Can Love Last? will be dreamt into an analysis taking place with the author of this paper, illustrating the main ideas presented and the way they are explored in the analyst’s mind through projective identification and worked through within the analytic encounter.

Keywords:

• Klein
• love of truth
• projective-identification
• psychoanalysis
• true love.

Notes

¹ This paper was first presented at a conference named “Can Love Last—A Conference About Love, Inspired by Stephen A. Mitchell” organized by Bookworm Publishers in Tel-Aviv, July 2015.

² I use “he” as a general term for “the other,” but this material does not fit either gender more than another, and this is critical because we are all the time in a mirror state with our “others,” no matter if “I” am a woman or a man, or whether the other is the same gender like me or not.

³ This idea echoes in Meltzer’s (Meltzer & Williams, 1988) idea about “The Aesthetic Conflict.” Meltzer discusses the willingness to know the object of passion rather than appropriate it. He describes “negative capabilities,” a term Bion had borrowed from the poet John Keats to describe a state of openness, creative perception, the capacity to tolerate not knowing, and mystery. Meltzer proposes that at the core of negative capabilities “beauty and truth meet”(Meltzer & Williams, 1988, p. 27).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Merav Roth

Merav Roth, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and training psychoanalyst, Israeli Psychoanalytic Society; Chair of Postgraduate Kleinian Studies and Chair of Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis—both in Psychotherapy Program, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University. She is the editor of Melanie Klein—Selected Papers, with Joshua Durban (Bookworm, Tel-Aviv, 2013) and author of the book Reading the Reader—A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Literature (Routledge, in press).