Verbose but inescapable bearers of individual responsibility for our romantic miseries

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"A contemporary Catherine [the heroine of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights] or Emma [the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary] would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers') deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. [T]he search for love [in high modern times] is an agonizingly difficult experience from which few modern men and women have been spared. [...] Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. [...] The Freudian culture in which we are steeped has made the forceful claim that sexual attraction is best explained by our past experiences, and that the love preference is formed in early life in the relationship between the child and its parents. [...] Freud [...] argued that early experiences of loss, however painful, will be reenacted throughout adult life, as a way to gain mastery over them. [...] Freudian culture suggested that, by and large, romantic misery was inevitable and self-inflicted. 

[...]


 Although the original Freudian notion of the unconscious aimed at dissolving traditional authorial notions of responsibility, in practice, psychology played a crucial role in relegating the realm of the romantic and the erotic to the individual's private responsibility. Whether psychoanalysis and psychology intended to or not, they have provided a formidable arsenal of techniques to make us the verbose but inescapable bearers of responsibility for our romantic miseries. Throughout the twentieth century, the idea that tomantic misery is self-made was uncannily successful, perhaps because psychology simultaneously offered the consoling promise that it could be undone. Painful experiences of love were a powerful engine activating a host of professionals (psychoanalysts, psychologists, and therapists of all kinds), the publishing industry, television, and numerous other media industries."




Eva Illouz (2011), Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, London, Polity, pp. 2-4.

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