Depressive Love: A Social Pathology 2017036687, 9781138050150, 9781315169033

Citation preview

Depressive Love

Love and depression are key elements in the cultural script of emotions or affectual life within contemporary Western society, and the two have become intertwined to such an extent that it is informative to talk about depressive love. Indeed, the most common source of depression is intimate relationships, in which one partner is not recognised by the other as being in need or worthy of loving care. This book addresses the question of how it is possible for opposite emotional experiences such as love and depression to appear simultaneously, empirically documenting the phenomenon of depressive love and its implications through studies of art, including music, literature and photography, and the experiences of everyday life, by way of interviews and the analysis of e-mail-, sms-, messenger-correspondence, and other new media spaces. Engaging with a range of sociological, psychoanalytic and philosophical theories of love, depression and emotion, including the work of Simmel, Alberoni, Barthes, Hochschild, Giddens, Luhmann, Beck and BeckGernsheim, Illouz, Bauman, Hegel, Honneth, Ehrenberg, Han, Lévinas, Sartre, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, to name but a few, the author examines the ways in which depressive love is expressed in modern society, asking whether it is a new phenomenon and confined to the West and if not, what is distinctive about depressive love and its associated (dys)functions in contemporary Western society. An empirically rich and theoretically broad study of depressive love as a sign of our times, this book will appeal to scholars and students of social theory and the sociology and philosophy of emotion and interpersonal relationships. Emma Engdahl is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the author of A Theory of the Emotional Self: From the Standpoint of a Neo-Meadian.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ sociology/series/ASHSER1383 Depressive Love A Social Pathology Emma Engdahl The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television Megan Collins Existence, Meaning, Excellence Aristotelian Reflections on the Meaning of Life Andreas Bielskis Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory Martyn Hudson

Depressive Love A Social Pathology

Emma Engdahl

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Emma Engdahl The right of Emma Engdahl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Engdahl, Emma, author. Title: Depressive love : a social pathology / Emma Engdahl. Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Classical and contemporary social theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017036687 | ISBN 9781138050150 (hbk) | ISBN 9781315169033 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Love--Social aspects. | Depression, Mental--Social aspects. Classification: LCC BF575.L8 E54 2018 | DDC 152.4/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036687 ISBN: 978-1-138-05015-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-16903-3 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

vi 1

PART 1

Talk of love in the shadowland of despair

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair

PART 2

The leap of love into the depressive sphere

45

2

47

The leap of love into the depressive sphere

PART 3

A distorted love ideal

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3

89

A distorted love ideal

Conclusion References Index

111 114 119

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a lonely enterprise. Translating it from Swedish to English has not been that; many thanks to Ingrid Unemar Öst who has done the major part of the translation, and has been a sensitive discussant throughout the process. For having read and making comments on an early version of the manuscript in Swedish, I also want to thank Christian Abrahamsson, Mikael Carleheden, Torbjörn Elensky and Gunnar Olsson. Last, but not least, I want to thank my informants. Without you there would be no book.

Introduction

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things… At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (First Letter to the Corinthians 13:4–7, 13)

This is not a book about the biblical texts on love. Do not let yourselves be deceived by the introductory quotation from the First Letter to the Corinthians. This book is really not about love at all. At least not about love as most of us imagine it. The quotation is still relevant, because it is love’s transformation, to a phenomenon with deep relations to depression, which will be depicted here. We will explore the prominent position given to love and depression in our culture’s emotional script. I use the notion of emotional script to refer to different kinds of cultural agreements concerning what emotions we are supposed to feel, and how we are supposed to express them. For example, we are expected to be happy on our birthday, and saddened if someone close to us passes away. Both happiness and sadness can, of course, move us to the extent that we start crying. Yet, to let your tears fall down your cheeks during a funeral is more accepted than letting the same thing happen when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake. It is perceived as strange, if that lump in your throat, or that feeling of having been punched in the stomach, does not dissolve into tears when you walk towards the coffin to say your last goodbye. The notion of emotional script of course covers more than stated above, and it can be interpreted as including all the images, and stories, that surround us, and that express all kinds of different emotions that we use to understand ourselves and others.1 Love and depression are prominent phenomena in our culture’s emotional script, which means that they are occurrences that, in principle, everyone relates to. Who hasn’t heard of those two, in many ways, opposite moods? Many even use their experiences of love and depression to judge their state of

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well-being, mental health and quality of life. Simply put, it is hard to understand yourself on a personal level without thinking in terms of love and depression. One could even say that we are surrounded, and permeated, by ideas on its meaning and significance. The question is, are we are fully aware of the images, and stories, of love and depression that we use to make sense of our reality and guide us through life? What I want to say is that every single human life houses an overwhelming amount of different impressions that awaken a complicated spectrum of emotions. To understand these emotions, which often are what we most deeply identify with, we seek help from our fellow man and from the prevailing emotional script. Our emotions are not mumbling an inherent meaning to us; rather we ourselves, with help from each other, and from our embeddedness in societal values, norms and ideals, give meaning to our emotions. We also tend to feel those emotions that are expressed, and advocated, by the emotional script: “… all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,” as writer Karen Blixen puts it in an interview with Bent Mohn in The New York Times Book Review, 1957. Thus, it is important to unveil the emotional script, if we want to understand our own, and others’, emotional life, or, frankly, understand society to its fullest. We have to make visible the existing, tacit agreements – those images and stories surrounding us, which often act in the dark and therefore become a part of us without our knowing. As you have probably already figured out, I want to say something about love that isn’t easy to grasp from the outside, but rather involves digging from the inside and analyzing what on the outside appears to be shiny and polished. My exploration of contemporary emotional life is driven by a set of rather curious observations I have made over a few years. More precisely, I have observed that stories about love in science, literature, art and, not least, in everyday conversations, often are related to depression. It seems as if love is corrupted in some way and leads the lover into the sphere of the depressive. At times, love is depicted in a manner that makes it possible to speak of love with depression or depressive love. But, really, it is worse than that. If one studies the contemporary emotional script, one can observe how love tends to be misunderstood. Ideal love becomes depressive, which must be regarded as a societal fallacy or short-circuit. Or, to use a more scientific notion, regarded as a social pathology, which is to say, a form of ill health arising during specific societal conditions. More precisely, a social pathology is the state that originates when a societal ideal is misunderstood, or is sought after in such a way as to distort it and annihilates the needs, wishes and desires it was originally meant to fulfill (Honneth [2011] 2014, p. 86 ff., p. 113 ff.). The notion of social pathology has been used for a long time in sociology and it refers to a specific field of knowledge, which is usually also referred to with notions like societal disorganization, social problems and social technology. In an article, published in 1945 in the American Journal of Sociology, Edwin H. Sutherland writes that social pathology “is being studied principally

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as a condition of society, characterized by conflicts of values, rather than as classes of personal behavior” (1945, p. 429). The sociologists Florian Znaniecki and William I. Thomas argued for the diagnosis of social pathologies in their classic study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) by using social psychological theories developed by psychologists, philosophers and sociologists – namely James Baldwin, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley – to understand and explain problems of personal and societal disorganization. Thus, the diagnosis of social pathologies covers both the individual and the society, and takes its point of departure in what binds them together. To understand how individual self-development is made possible, questions concerning the possibility of society must be asked. Znaniecki and Thomas’s study focuses on Polish people that immigrate to America and how they, to a greater extent are affected by each other, and the community they create in the new country, than they are affected by the American government. This results in a situation where the Polish immigrants develop a new ethnic identity as being Polish Americans rather than being Americans. The social integration in the new country, therefore, becomes dependent on the Polish immigrant community. Or, in reverse; social disorganization, or social problems, among the Polish immigrants is often a consequence of some kind of exclusion from the Polish immigrant community. To tie into the idea of social pathologies as results of conflicts of values, it is not unlikely that friction, tied to differences in the values of the Polish community and the values of the American society, can arise within a single Polish immigrant and cause difficulties concerning how to unite these different values in a individually successful way – a way that leads to a prosperous and good life, or, to well-being, mental health and quality of life – outside the group community. In the last two decades social philosopher Axel Honneth has advocated and written extensively on the idea of social pathologies and its meaning in the Humanities and Social Sciences, with a special emphasis on its meaning for the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. In an early text, Honneth ([1994] 1996, p. 372 ff.) argues that the diagnosis of social pathologies includes an idea of normality and is based on an ethic of human self-realization, that is, a prosperous and good life, rather than being based on a moral tied to justice and legitimacy. Honneth links the idea of social pathologies back to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s critique of civilization that “employs concepts such as ‘bifurcation’ and ‘alienation’ as ethical criteria for determining specific modern processes of development to be pathologies” (Honneth [2000] 2007, p. 4). According to Honneth ([2000] 2007, p 4), this tradition has been enriched by the emergence of sociology, which forced it to also consider empirical research. Inspired by the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Honneth argues, in one of his later writings, that social pathologies emerge whenever society falls short of the objectively possible level of rationality – i.e. what in any given culture are possible ways of achieving well-being, mental health and quality of life (Honneth 2008, p. 786). The notion of social pathology and

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normality are thus tied to a conception of rationality and its historical unfolding (Freyenhagen 2014, p. 135). Within the tradition of critical theory, the specific cause of the deformation of rationality in modern Western societies has been understood in terms of capitalism – and more precisely, capitalism’s ways of turning humans into commodities, which only are expected to act like transferable goods on a free market. Georg Lukács described the process of reification as follows: Mechanized practical work and commodity exchange demand a form of perception in which all other humans appear as thing-like beings lacking sensations, so that social interaction is robbed of any attention to properties valuable in themselves. (cited in Honneth 2008, p. 799) In the book Verdinglichung: Eine Anerkennungstheoretische Studie, published in 2015, Honneth further explores the idea of humans as commodities, and its devastating consequences for intersubjectivity and social integration. This reasoning is also recognizable in the writings of sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in the book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983), which has become a modern classic within the research field of Sociology of Emotions. According to her writings, the presence of an emotional script, or feeling rules, leads us to work with our emotions, or trying to control how we experience or express them. We are engaging in what she calls emotional work (with use value/unpaid) and emotional labor (with exchange value/paid), i.e., we manage our emotional experiences and expressions of feelings in both our private lives and in our work lives. To be socially accepted, and integrated in society, we adjust our emotional experiences and our ways to express feelings, to make them fall in line with the emotional script, or the feeling rules that are a part of our culture. In the worst-case scenario, these adjustments lead to what Hochschild calls transmutations, which can be seen as the side effects of emotional work and emotional labor. If we keep smiling all the time, even when we are not happy, chances are we will start perceiving ourselves as dishonest and cynical; like strangers to one another and society. If we instead identify with, and give ourselves to, the forced happiness, we might find ourselves experiencing a feeling of being empty and hollow; a stranger to ourselves. In the worst-case scenario, emotional work and labor leads into the depressive sphere, for example by creating experiences of worthlessness or a feeling that it does not matter what one says or does. This is not strange. Instead, it is completely natural to feel this type of resignation when you are not able to act on the basis of what motivates you, that is to say, on the basis of those emotions that spontaneously are expressed within you, but you are forced to control and transform your subjectivity or actions in accordance with the outer power of the emotional script. At the same time, the emotional script tends to become an integral part of our personality. The sociologist Robert E. Park has described how all of us play different roles in

Introduction

5

our everyday life, to enable us to present ourselves in a way that makes sense and to live up to others’ expectations, and to societal norms, values and ideals. In the end, these roles tend to transform into the actual one we wish to be and the actual one we experience that we are on the inside: our true self. It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role… it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves. In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conceptions that we have formed about ourselves – the role that we are striving to live up to – this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality. We come into the world as individuals, achieve character and become persons. (cited in Goffman [1956] 1959, p. 30). The role-playing that Park argues makes us into persons is controlled by the emotional script and thus demands some form of emotional work to be staged. The cost of the emotional work carried out in our everyday life is hard to grasp – almost invisible – since emotional work and labor seldom counts as labor by the people who possess the power to define what labor is (Hochschild 1983, p. 197).

Depressive love as an ideal and capital I am not going to further deepen the theoretical meaning and significance of social pathologies and the emotional script. Instead, I will provide an example of how love and depression are linked together, thus being sought after and demanded as a kind of package deal in contemporary Western capitalist societies, despite the fact that this means suffering for those people who embody love with depression. I will also provide a short introductory reasoning on how it now has become possible to understand what I call love with depression, or depressive love, as something desirable, and my analysis on this theme will deepen throughout the journey we are about to embark on. In the book Saving the Modern Soul (2008), by sociologist Eva Illouz, we get to meet Eyal, among others, who is a 28-year-old Israeli man. He thinks that emotional complexity is necessary to “get access to certain social scenes” and “belong to certain groups.” I am quite typical of a certain social group, a certain social milieu… I mean to enter a certain social territory, to belong to certain groups, emotional complexity is a must… I saw that movie (Annie Hall) perhaps thirty times. That was a very formative movie for me and for many others… (Illouz, 2008, p. 221)

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Introduction

As we can see here, Eyal is referring to the current emotional script of his time, in the shape of Woody Allen’s movie called Annie Hall, in which he has found a model for what he sees as a contemporary ideal of emotional complexity; a necessary capital for integration in desirable parts of the community (or society). When explaining his thoughts, he mentions his wife’s sister’s husband as an example of the reverse: My wife, Liora, is a clinical psychologist. She has a sister who lives in Jerusalem. Her husband is some kind of redneck. He comes from Moshav (agricultural settlement). He is a stereotypical moshavnic. He lacks any kind of emotional expressivity. He has no emotions. And we make fun of him, all three of us… He never longs for anything, or misses anything, or feels depressed. He does not know the concept of ‘being depressed.’ Where have you seen anything like that? (Illouz 2008, p. 221) Eyal says that the type of masculinity that currently leads to self-realization, or provides status and power in society, demands a rich emotional life. What he is talking about is, thus, a new ideal of masculinity. But, according to him, it is not only men who are expected to be emotional in our society. A woman who does not know what it is like to be depressed is not a contender for Eyal. So that’s the criterion. When I used to date women, if she did not know what being depressed meant – I don’t mean a big clinical depression, but just regular ordinary depression – she would not qualify. She would not be a possible candidate. No way. (Illouz 2008, p. 221) The new masculinity Eyal is describing results in restrictions when it comes to choosing a partner in love. She – in this specific case it is a woman – must be familiar with what it means to be depressed. At first sight, this demand seems incomprehensible, and downright absurd. Depression often brings with it everything from sleeping difficulties to experiences of meaninglessness; not least the experience of oneself being worthless. We could ask ourselves if depression is not in fact the opposite of love. In the same spirit, one could argue that a person who never fully loves, or struggles to be loved, risks becoming depressed. Hence, depression could be perceived as a kind of love pathology that has arisen from the failed struggle of finding, or keeping, love. In more positive words, one could say that depression is an experience that is almost inevitable if you let yourself go in the name of love; depression is an expression of emotional courage.2 This could also be understood in terms of associating the depressive experience with emotional depth: that one has the ability to meet the other in the depths of oneself. This is a theme commonly occurring in poetry, such as in the

Introduction

7

writings of the poet Gunnar Ekelöf, and can be understood as a way to ascribe identification a significant role in love. I cannot love until I can recognize myself in you. More than anything, it is supposed to feel like you are reaching a mutual crescendo in that which hurts. In the poem “Jag tror på den ensamma människan” (I believe in the individual man himself,) which echoes the burdensome loneliness of man, in which men, indeed, can find one another, Ekelöf ([1941] 1967, p. 60) writes: Come to our own communion? Flee the over and the outer way: Whatever is cattle in others is cattle also in you. Walk the wide and inner way: What is bottom in you is bottom also in them. Hard to get used to oneself. Hard to break oneself of oneself. Together, the depressive and the affectionate bare witness to an emotionally complex person, which currently is a successful recipe in the private and public life. The ability to act two-faced represents a specific emotional style, a personal capital that appears in the shape of expressive communication, empathy, flexibility and an ability for critical, and constructive, self-reflexiveness. We can find traces of both depression and love in what is usually described as emotional competence or emotional intelligence. Currently, this type of knowledge is measured using personality tests: a system of classification where some emotional styles are rewarded and others sanctioned. A person capable of identifying, and putting into words, a multitude of emotions is rewarded, while someone that is not in tune with his or her own and others’ emotions is sanctioned. Since many companies use personality tests when hiring staff, the emotional complexity becomes a decisive factor in regard to a person’s perceived employability. Leaning on statistical operations, some have concluded that companies who employ staff with high emotional intelligence generate greater profit than companies with employees possessing a lower degree of emotional intelligence. A study carried out at L’Oreal shows that sales staffers, who have been recruited on merit of their emotional competence, sell goods for 91,370 dollars more a year than those recruited on other merits. For the company, this means a 2.5 million dollar increase per year. Thus, there is considered to exist a direct correlation between emotional style and the economy (Illouz 2007, p. 65). In other words, our ability to love with depression is transformed into a desirable commodity in the marketplace. Depressive love is nothing less than an individual capital, which can be transformed into a social and economic capital. We could even talk about depressive love as a human capital that is being explored in contemporary Western societies, and lately we have witnessed the emergence of a new personality trait that is sought after even though it causes mental suffering and distress.

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Introduction

What questions need to be answered? No matter where I turn, I find my observations of love with depression remarkable, and the following questions come into view: – – – –

What is depressive love? Has depressive love existed during other eras in Western societies? How is depressive love staged in contemporary Western societies? What are the purposes of depressive love in contemporary Western societies?

In the last question, the problem appears at its peak. Could it be that depressive love is an effect of changes in societal structures – an unforeseen consequence of the current ideal of love, which affects the individual in a negative way? There is urgency in answering this question as a part of a comprehensive diagnosis of the general state of contemporary Western societies. Ultimately the aim is to give the actual observation – depressive love –more precise content. What is the solution to the equation of love and depression? In the book, a multitude of images and stories will be presented in a manner that makes it possible to talk about depressive love as a contemporary social pathology – in the meaning of being a kind of ill health arising from specific societal circumstances. A social pathology is here considered to be a state in which the needs, wishes and cravings of people are destroyed; it is a state caused by a misunderstanding, or a perversion, of a societal ideal inherently meant to satisfy or fulfill people’s wishes of, and strivings for, well-being, mental health and life quality. The misunderstanding and perversion of the ideal is based on other, and competing, societal ideals or structures and is not only a question of a cognitive, or individual, misunderstanding. Strong social forces are at work, making the individual comply with ideals in a distorted manner. To answer questions about how to recognize love, and the distortion of love, we therefore have to grasp both the individual and the society.

Methodological reflections The theoretical understanding of depressive love, which is developed throughout the book, is guided by images and stories about love and depression. I use these images and stories as a background and a reference point when I deal with the task of decoding parts of the contemporary Western culture’s emotional script. Some stories about love and depression are given a more prominent position than others. Still others are hardly uncovered. Finally there are stories that do not resonate at all; they are dumb. It is important to point out that even what cannot be said can exist and leave a footprint; absence affects the experience of meaning. This text is far from telling all that is to tell about love and depression. I deal with a specific number of cases, random fragments at a glance, that are put together to create a concept of how love tends to turn depressive in contemporary Western societies.

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The method I use is characterized by a strive for polyphony, coexistence and interaction. I borrow the meaning of these concepts from Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ([1963] 1984, p. 5 ff.), which starts with inquiries into the open and endless changing nature of language. Different beliefs and views on love and depression meet in the form of conversation and quarrel. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky is the creator of a new literary genre: the polyconic novel. In Dostoevsky’s works, Bakhtin ([1963] 1984, p. 7) writes: (A) hero appears whose voice is constructed exactly like the voice of the author himself in an novel of the usual type. A character’s word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author’s word usually is; it is not subordinated to the character’s objectified image as merely one of his characters, nor does it serve as a mouthpiece for the author’s voice. It processes extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds as it were, alongside the author’s world and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voice of other characters. We might as well talk about what, since Znaniecki and Thomas, has been called human documents – that is, descriptions of individual experiences, which show that individual actions are the result of interpersonal relations and participation in the social life. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918) is based on everything from brochures, daily newspapers, articles, congregation documents, and law documents, to personal letters, and an analysis of the Polish farmer Wladyslaw Wisniewski’s life story, or autobiography.3 Human documents take on all kinds of different shapes; letters and diaries, biographies and life stories, dreams and self-observations, essays and notes, and photos and movies (Plummer 2001, p. 3). The very diverse nature of perspectives that human documents bring to light become pivotal if we want to understand what it means to be a social being; someone who lives in an ever-changing world, where one constantly has to negotiate the meaning of reality with others. Or, as the philosopher John Dewey ([1927] 2005, p. 32) puts it, when he discusses the psychologist William James’ thinking: “a universe which is not all closed and settled, which is still in some respects indeterminate and in the making… an open universe in which uncertainty, choice, hypotheses, novelties and possibilities are naturalized.” As you probably already figured out, the images and stories I use to grasp the meaning of depressive love are human documents, which I allow to coexist and interact; they constitute a polyphony that can be likened to a community going through psychotherapy. Just as in the classical psychotherapeutic practice, heterosexual women are often the ones laying on my couch, meaning they are the ones sharing their stories of depressive love. This does not mean that depressive love only strikes heterosexual women. We are all, no matter our gender and sexual orientation,

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embedded in the societal transformations which have brought about the kind of conflict that is manifested in the encounter between love and depression. What has been said, written, or caught in a picture, is allowed to stand its ground without judgement or assessment; at the same time, an analysis from a mainly sociological and social psychological perspective is carried out. As you will notice, the human documents have led me to both social philosophical, and psychoanalytical, theories and lines of reasoning. My aim is to grasp fragments of people’s emotional lives and to understand the cultural and societal context they are embedded in, and which shape and make people’s emotional lives comprehensible. Thus, I am not only taking into account human documents, but social structures and history as well, which I perceive to constitute the cultural and social context in which human documents are created. In line with the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who has lamented the fact that human documents have not been given enough attention in sociological research, I argue for a three-fold approach that takes into consideration biography, social structure and history. In the book The Sociological Imagination ([1959] 1970, p. 247), Mills writes: Always keep your eyes open to the image of man – the generic notion of his human nature – which by your work you are assuming and implying; and also to the image of history – your notion of how history is being made. In a word, continually work out and revise your views of the problems of history, the problems of biography, and the problems of a social structure in which biography and history intersect. The human documents, or stories, that I work with to a great extent derive from people whose paths somehow coincided with mine in my everyday life. In this case you can take my word for it; literally. My research approach has been opportunistic, as it is usually named in sociology, which implies the use of your own life experience and the use of the opportunities that appear in your everyday life to deepen the scope of knowledge.4 In my case, this approach has meant talking about emotional experiences with people that I, as a private person, have happened to meet in different contexts and by different reasons, instead of me, as a researcher, beforehand making a selection of, and an agreement with, people to interview about their emotional lives, focusing on their experiences of love and depression. I have intentionally avoided the latter – an interview between a researcher and an informant – since there is, in my opinion, something artificial in a situation like this. In a way, the traditional qualitative interview could be likened to a clinical study where the ones you want to gain knowledge of are separated from their natural context and therefore are not going to behave and act as they usually would do. Thus, my work is to be understood as ethnographic, in the sense of striving to study how people spontaneously, and without reflecting on it, are talking to each other. What are we talking about when we speak of love and depression with others? What does it sound like

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when the loving talks to the beloved? How is meaning created in these conversations? Let me make my reasoning clearer by using a few field notes that I took a couple of years ago, right after I jumped into a taxi to go to a restaurant, where I was having dinner with a friend. The taxi ride had nothing to do with my work or my research. Yet, the conversation that took place during the ride became a part of the empirical data used in my inquiries into the connection between love and depression. The taxi driver namely told me how love and depression had been connected in his life. I jump into the taxi and sit down at the front of the car. I aimlessly talk to the taxi driver who after half a minute asks me what I do for a living. “Write about broken hearts,” I answer after quickly having considered a few other possible answers. “Don’t say that,” he sighs. “I get emotional right away.” “How come?” I ask. He sits silently in a fraction of a second. Then he cuts straight to the point. “My heart was crushed a year ago and I only just recovered from it.” “So you’re feeling well now?” I smile to ease up the mood. “Yes, I just stopped taking antidepressants.” “Serotonin stabilizing?” I ask, and he becomes silent again. “Are you really saying you were prescribed mood enhancing medication for being unhappy in love?” He breathes heavily. “Don’t you get it? She was the love of my life. We shared everything. And then, from one day to another, it was over and in the past. I really understood nothing and I was feeling so bad that I honestly would rather have been dead. I couldn’t get out of bed the first days; had to call in sick. The medication was my salvation.” “Are you serious?” I ask and raise both my eyebrows. He sinks into himself and murmurs that without those little light blue pills he wouldn’t have been sitting here next to me. Then he raises his voice slightly and asks if it’s really that hard to understand. “No,” I answer, with a sincere, serious tone of voice and I turn towards him. “You know, I actually do understand,” I add, wanting to touch his arm with my hand. I don’t do it. I stop myself in the middle of a movement and let the silence spread. Then small talk takes its place until we reach our destination. I throw a glance at myself in the mirror in front of me and ask how I look. “You look great,” he says and removes his sunglasses. While I pay he suggests that I take the number to his cell phone and call him when I want to go back home. “Because you are going back home again?” he asks smiling. “Yes,” I answer and he pulls out a business card and writes something on the backside of it. “You better take the number to my private cell phone so you can reach me any time you want.” He reaches out to give me the card and I take it in my hand. “You. I drive you anywhere you want to go. Just so you know,” he concludes. I get out of the taxi and throw the business card in a trash can, but I feel a little warm on the inside. Then I think, maybe I should have saved the business card to be able to call him and talk to him some more.

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Introduction

To grasp how we talk about love in everyday life, and to identify the factors that are causing our conversations about love to slip into the depressive sphere, I have to a great extent worked with human documents in the shape of Messenger-, SMS-, and e-mail correspondence – that is, human documents typical of our contemporary time period, which people I got to know along the way shared with me. I also use other forms of human documents to be able to further clarify the displacement of love, love with depression, and depressive love, and to be able to bring a depth to the analysis, and, in certain cases, another meaning to the displacement than the one my “informants” are aware of. These other forms of human documents, stemming from literature, art and science, are stories and images of love and depression that constitute parts of the emotional script.5 There is of course an ethical dilemma with the approach. How can the people I met along the way, and got to know, defend themselves from my interpretations of them or from my analysis of their stories? They cannot. The interpretations and the analysis are mine, and are often carried out by seeking support in established scientific theories of love or depression, which I also perceive of as being stories and thereby equal with what is being interpreted or analyzed. On the other hand, everyone has given their approval of me using their conversations about love in my research and presenting parts of it in this context. A possibility to comment on the completed text has also been given to them. Oddly enough, most of them have declined to do so; not wanting to read my analysis of their stories, nor wanting to find out the context I have embedded them in. One of the persons I had a conversation with says: “It feels too bad right now, maybe later, when I have more distance.” In this case, later will be too late. The book will be published, and available to the public. So, what have I done to minimize the violence that interpretations and analysis of statements made by others may bring about, due to the fact that the other always is radically different from oneself ? Except being aware of that circumstance, I have given their statements and stories ample space, allowing them to spread out over the pages in a raw and original version – although, I have made some linguistic improvements to make the text more reader-friendly. I have also allowed these stories, and similar stories stemming from the work of other sociologists, art, literature, or poetry, to guide my choice of theoretical tools; that is, the scientific theories I use to interpret and analyze. In this way, one could say that I have worked inductively, which means that I have drawn my conclusions on the basis of the conversations on love and depression I have gathered over time. But, this is not entirely true. Rather, I have worked abductively; I have drawn my conclusions on the basis of rewrites and reinterpretations of stories, seeking guidance in other stories. I have, in a way, even worked retroductively, meaning that I have identified factors that have to be present for something to even be perceived as love with depression or depressive love.6 Finally, I have made certain that I am being “true” to all of the stories I use, even if I do not make any claims on there ever being an absolute truth in this context. Absolute truth does not exist. On

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the other hand, there is a kind of scientific and (auto) biographical honesty that I have safeguarded. Throughout the book, the reader will be able to distinguish the different stories from one another, and to detect my interpretations, analysis and conclusions. This is important from an ethical standpoint, even though I am aspiring to polyphony. Also, my own life is represented in the stories, which is completely in line with an opportunistic research strategy, and not completely rare among researchers using human documents in their writings. “You must learn to use your life experiences in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it,” to cite Mills (1959, p. 196) one more time, who states that it is an obligation of every honest sociologist to do so, and necessary if you want your imagination to run wild. Despite Mills’ advice, maybe it would have been wiser to refrain from doing so; instead choosing to anonymize myself, and the other, in the short excerpt where I appear as a private person rather than a researcher. I have chosen to anonymize all the other people, whose life stories I have been granted access to and that earlier have not been available for public viewing in the form of empirical research data. I have given this situation a lot of thought; really tried to wrap my brain around it. In the end, I chose to appear as myself. For better or for worse. Thus, in one passage of the book, I am appearing in both my personal and private character. By doing so, I am closing in on the genre of autobiography and am forced to deal with the fact that people I have in my life are mentioned without being provided the opportunity to speak for themselves. This particular case applies to one person, my ex-husband. Like in other cases in this book, my aim is to be truthful. I am not allowing any exaggerations. On the contrary, I am holding back and trying to depict a general course of event, which is informative to understanding love, and how love can turn into depression. My position means that the experiences housed in the book also are mine; I have touched the bottom of myself to be able to take seriously the stories that have been entrusted to me – a responsibility I think is a responsibility for every honest sociologist. The passage in the book is to be perceived of as me taking on just that responsibility, not more, not less. I do what I do best: theorizing – abstracting the concrete in such a way that it, on the principal level, never turns private.7 This is true not only for my story, but for all the life stories included in this book.

Disposition The book consists of three parts, separate from this introduction and the conclusion: “Talk of Love in the Shadowland of Despair,” “The Leap of Love into the Depressive Sphere,” and “A Distorted Love Ideal.” Together, these three parts aim at exploring, and answering, the initially posed questions and they flow between love, love with depression and depressive love. While the first part of the book is focusing more on love than do the two other parts, the third part focuses more on depressive love. At the same time, the different parts overlap each other and the line of reasoning about

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love as a social pathology slightly deepens with every page and throughout our journey Some parts of the book are easy to read, others are harder. There are sweeping passages and there are more in-depth ones. Sometimes the text is demanding to read. This is how I want it to be. My hope is that this book can be read on many levels and read by the already well versed as well as by someone who know nothing yet, but is curious to follow the sequence of events. The book can be read by reason of the depressive love stories or by reason of the theory of depressive love that will develop throughout it. Hopefully it is read out of taking an interest in both; at least that is what has been the driving force behind my writing and the shape it has taken in this particular book.

Notes 1 For an elaboration of the concept of emotional script see, e.g., Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book The Managed Heart. The Commercialization of Feelings (1983). 2 Compare this argument with Ehrenberg ([1998] 2010), and Petersen (2007), who both argue that depression can be understood as an expression of self-realization, which is an ideal in contemporary Western societies. Depression would then be one of the expressions of failed self-realization. 3 For a more elaborate discussion see, e.g., Martin Bulmer,The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (1986). 4 For a discussion on different forms of opportunistic research, see Jeffrey W. Riemer, “Varieties of Opportunistic Research,” in Urban Life 5(4), 467–477, (1977). 5 I have simply collected stories about love and depression from science, art, and everyday life that I naturally have access to and without too much effort can relate to. Most people whose stories I will share in this book are upper-middle-class Swedish heterosexual women. There are few who do not have at least a doctoral degree in the Humanities or the Social Sciences. The material is thus limited and considered as different cases. The generalizations that I do is therefore of a theoretical nature. At the same time it is – and this is problematic and on a scientific level not quite easy to explain in detail – the upper middle class that most often sets the agenda for the emotional script of contemporary Western societies. 6 For an overview of different inferences such as induction, abduction, and retroduction, see, for example, Berth Danermark et al., Explaining Society (2002), Chapter 5. For an in-depth discussion see e.g. Mikael Carleheden, “On Theorizing: C.S. Peirce and Contemporary Social Science,” in Arto Laitinen, Jussi Saarinen, Heikki Ikäheimo, Pessi Lyyra & Petteri Niemi (eds.), Sisäisyys & Suunnistautuminen. Juhlakirja Jussi Kotkavirralle (Inwardness and Orientation – Festschrift in Honor of Jussi Kotkavirta) (2014), s. 128–159. 7 For a developed concept of theorizing and its importance for the Social Sciences, see, for example, Richard Swedberg (ed.), Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery (2014).

Part 1

Talk of love in the shadowland of despair

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair

To develop an understanding of depressive love, we need to first say something about love that is not depressive. How do we talk about love and what do we mean when we say “I love you”? Already the difficulties begin to cumulate. Where does one begin? Where does one end? How many theories, not to mention experiences, of love exist? More than what one single being is able to grasp during a lifetime. That is the only answer I can give you with certainty. Thus, it is not certain that I can provide an accurate description of love. Let me say that it is even unlikely. However, I can ignite your inner, and intuitive, understanding of the phenomena by guiding you through the swarm of voices on love that surround us. Let me start with the legendary words: I love you. From there, we will go further and further until the description of love seem thick enough – thick enough to make it possible for us to witness how love stories slip into the depressive sphere.

Love as affirmation In Roland Barthes’ book, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, we get to meet a blissful blend of characters, all busy with love; alone with their imaginations: The power of the Image-repertoire is immediate: I do not look for the image, it comes to me all of a sudden. It is afterwards that I return to it and begin making the good signs alternate, interminably, with the bad one: ‘What do these abrupt words mean: you have all my respect? Was anything ever colder?…’ (Barthes [1977] 2001, p. 214) This type of question is asked by the lovers in the absence of the loved ones as actual persons; in the company of the Image. I feel a surprising sense of affinity to the immersive solitude of the characters. Everything that happens around them seems to be redundant in relation to being together with their beloved, whom in many cases is not even there other than in the imaginations of the lovers. Love is like the sparkle of a tinder stick. It wanders around, it comes and goes, and it takes new shapes and forms. It interacts with itself: a discourse.

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Love is a circus force. Isn’t it just flying between the trapezes high up in the sky, crying and laughing in a way reminiscent of that of an evil and obstinate clown? Isn’t it a roaring tiger let loose from its cage, riding on the back of an elephant or forever dancing on a tightrope? Love is life! Everything else is waiting, boredom, or abysmal melancholy. Barthes ([1977] 2001, p. 44) gives a voice to the lover: a discourse that is utterly alone and drifts out towards the unreal by its own force of nature. It is clear that there are other people than I that talk to the beloved, whose voice is worn-out and weak: who needs to rest. I am alarmed by everything which appears to alter the Image. I am, therefore, alarmed by the other’s fatigue: it is the cruelest of all rival objects. … I can see that the other, exhausted, tears off a fragment of this fatigue in order to give it to me. … What does this gift mean? … No one answers, for what is given is precisely what does not answer. The desire of getting a response to speech, reciprocity, a simultaneous I love you, is not the desire of just one person, but of many. A simultaneous I love you is not a real possibility; therefore, we have to settle for: I love you. Me too. The desire takes the shape of a pendulum between the two sentences. It is the end of the road. We no longer have to interpret the beloved one’s gaze, movements, tone of voice and various actions. We accept that I love you means I love you. Love works when it’s taking on the only role that’s left: affirmation. Against all wit and moderation, without any outer support from power or its mechanisms, such as science and art, the lover asserts the significance of her or his love. That claim isn’t completely truthful. We do have marriage, which must be seen as the institution of love: as training wheels to support you in your love endeavors. As is well known, marriage does not indisputably stand as the abode of happiness. The playwright and author August Strindberg compared marriage to a cage, where those who are on the outside wish to enter and those who are inside, or stuck within, wish to exit. In his novel Ett dockhem (A Doll’s House), which is included in the short story collection Giftas (Become Married) and is a response to Henrik Ibsen’s play with the same title, Strindberg ([1884] 1982, p. 153, my transl.) writes: Oh, how different it was from before! Old Pall looked so old, and he was disappointed too. It was a pure hell, he claimed, to be married but have no wife! In the shape of assertion, I love you is a counterforce to be reckoned with; an attack against the threat to destroy love – a threat posed by all other acknowledged languages due to the lack of understanding present in their responses to love. Let’s examine the mutual assertion of love as expressed in an SMS correspondence between a Swedish fifty-year-old man and a Swedish

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thirty-one-year-old woman, who both have a doctoral degree and are working within the university sector: – – – – – – – –

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Of course we are suffering. But right now in a civilized way. Without acting out. And that’s good. Love you. Love you. Don’t suffer. Crave! I’m craving! You feel far, far from home. Thinking of you. Thinking of us. Don’t give up! The lack of physical reality is sometimes very heavy to bear. But the words exist. Love you. Love you. Passed by the old yellow house across the street from X and thought that that’s where we should live and conduct our business. You are someplace else. I notice and it’s reasonable. I know. But, yes… What are you doing? I’m writing. And you’re exquisite. If there are no dreams there is no life. And, oh, how much we have been in touch. Love you. Hm… And yet you’re not answering when I call… The phone has been elsewhere. Love you, but sulking a bit. So am I. Why are you sulking? I want to know you more. And it’s mostly your fault I don’t. And you? Because I don’t hear from you. Yes! When you’re in the house in X you can’t answer the phone sweetie. Love you. You are mine. I love you with all my heart. Let’s call each other tomorrow. We’ll become each other’s. Yes. That’s how it’ll be. Love you more than you understand. Love you. If that’s the case, that’s good and then it’s mutual. It has to be. It is the only thing that will do. Tell me you can see us? Together. I can. Yes. Love is for us. We are each other and I love you, love you. Or, what the hell, I love what we are.

I love you is repeated like a mantra by both the man and the woman and all of a sudden it sneaks up on us: the exclusivity. The desire to be the chosen one; to indisputably be the only one, someone’s eternal love. We learn how love contains a will to constantly be in connection with the other, both mentally and physically. For the man and woman corresponding with each other, love is about knowing the other, in the more complex meaning of the word. The physical absence is sometimes agonizingly evident, but the words still exist. Thus, the words are given a prominent place in the act of love and

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the poet is highlighted as being the best suited to express love’s deepest meaning.

The poet’s sense of love To highlight the poet as someone with a special sense of the nature of love is not a new idea; it is an idea found in many different contexts. The question of why the poet is perceived as possessing this almost magical power is essential to us. We can find one well-thought-out answer in the tradition of thought that Charles Taylor (1989) calls expressivism – within which the poet is highlighted as being the one possessing the most refined tools, and creative ways, to put words to feelings and subjective experiences. The poet is perceived as having a unique ability to express what has never been put into words before and thereby able to show us something new about what it means to be human – most importantly, what it means to be a loving and suffering being. Aase Berg (2016, my transl.), who is a poet, writes: … we own the underworld. And then I do not mean crime, I mean the underflows, what I call ‘the unspoken’ in my poems. We master all shades that are not stuck on advertising or porn images, we understand the smallest groan, the smallest breath, the pauses and the comma signs. Of course, the above-described ability does not belong to the poet alone but to all people, to a greater or lesser extent. It is a crucial ability as a person does not know what her emotional experiences mean but must try them out linguistically in relation to others, which is an insight into the origin and importance of language initially developed by the philosopher Johan Gottfried Herder ([1772] 1982, p. 89 ff.). It has thereafter been developed further by, among others, the philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead, who perceives language as a social construction that makes it possible for us to develop an idea about who we are, or who we want to be. Thus, he takes self-consciousness – the ability to make our own unique ways of being, thinking and feeling into objects to ourselves – to be an advanced form of consciousness, which arises through the process in which we, together with others, develop a common language that helps us communicate with one another in a meaningful way. To learn a language that enables you to understand yourself, others, and society is essentially the same as being together with others in a specific culture and a specific society. In his book on mind, self and society, Mead ([1934] 1967, p. 283) writes: A person learns a new language and, as we say, gets a new soul. He puts himself into the attitude of those that make use of that language. He cannot read its literature, cannot converse with those that belong to that community, without taking on its peculiar attitudes. He becomes in that sense a different individual.

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In other words, we partly become who we are through language, which is one of the most important tools we use to reach out and seek help from others in order to find ourselves. If you, as I do, read poems written by poets like Stig Dagerman you might understand that this idea is not totally preposterous. Who does not get blown away by the following lines from his poem Birgitta Svit (Birgitta Suite); and get a sudden insight into the nature of love and suffering, and ultimately about oneself ? All wish to be loved for what they don’t own. The grass for its stature, for its softness the stone. […] Why I want to be loved I don’t want to know. But trembling we pull each other out of our quiver. (Dagerman [1950] 1964, p. 5). In Birgitta Suite, which came to be one of the last poems Dagerman wrote before he took his own life, the effects of love are revealed despite, or maybe precisely because of, his own experiences of lack of it. When we are in despair, we wish that some person could see, within us, those character traits that are yet to be recognized; a wish that can only be realized by the other. In that case, we can reappear in another, and better, place – more ideal for what we wish to accomplish with our lives.1 If we read yet another text by Dagerman, Vårt omättliga behov av tröst (Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable), an even deeper understanding about love and suffering, or, simply about the depressive sphere, can be reached. It appears as if Dagerman himself was a man who suffered from depressive love, and was tormented by his infinite desire for consolation; a kind of desire that towards the end of his life he regarded as something that could only be ended through death. (O)ther consolations … come to me like uninvited guests and fill my room with their vulgar whispers: I am your desire – lust after one and all!; I am your talent – abuse me as you do yourself!; … I am your solitude – spurn the company of others! (Dagerman [1952] 2013, p. 301 f.) Further into the text, depression is mentioned by name: And when depression finally sets in I become a slave to that as well … I become incapable of recognizing anything of worth in myself, except the one thing I dread has already been lost: the ability to squeeze beauty out of my despair, my anxieties, my weaknesses. My depression is a chamber with seven views, and from the last of these I can make out a knife, a razor, a vial of poison … In the end I become a slave of all these instruments of death. They hound me like a

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair pack of dogs. Or am I the dog stalking them? And I begin to sense that suicide may be the only real proof of human freedom. (Dagerman [1952] 2013, p. 304 f.)

Dagerman argues that man’s freedom appears in the shadow of death. However, in another passage, he claims that love, which transcends both life and death as it is unfolding beyond the bound of time, is the most essential thing: Everything significant that I experience, all the wonderful things that happen in my life – meeting a lover, a caress on my skin, help in distress, eyes reflecting moonlight, sailing on the open sea… – all of it occurs beyond the bound of time. … it actually nullifies life’s attachment to time. (Dagerman [1952] 2013, p. 305 f.) Dagerman’s poetry, and in many ways also his own short, intense and eventful life, seems to have been a continuous balancing between Eros and Thanatos: between the strong desire to meet the other – or nature – and the death wish, which in the end (and for each and every one of us, sooner or later) conquers. Nevertheless, the meaning of life is not revealed in the inevitable and irrevocable. It possibly presents itself in the life that is led in the shadow of death, but never in the actual moment of death. I see another, and in its own way more relevant, lead in the quoted passages: the lived loneliness, which is cured only in the confrontation with what, or whom, is other than oneself. The confrontation between two operating forces – a result of what is called intersubjectivity within sociology and philosophy – reveals itself as the source of meaning. There is something destructive in loneliness that ruins the human nature, which is constantly seeking the other in order to find meaning and a sense of community, or comfort, as a cure to the tangibility in being existentially identical with yourself only – that is, you cannot interchange your body and sensuous experiences with others.

The existential loneliness The existential identity can be understood as being born and dying alone, which is not to be confused with whether other people are, or can be, present when we are born and die. Rather, it is related to the fact that when we are born it is our body that is being thrown into the world. Ours alone. And when we die it is our body, or maybe we should say our spirit, that leaves the world. Not anybody else’s. In experiencing physical pain we become aware of that fact. It certainly hurts in others to see us fall and scratch our knees bloody against the gravelly asphalt. Yet, it is our knees that are aching and bolting, not theirs. Other people’s compassion surely helps to alleviate the fall, but it does not stop our knees from bleeding. No matter how much we want, or wish, to be able to transfer somebody else’s pain to ourselves in order to ease their pain, it is

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impossible. In physical pain, as in regard to us being purely bodily and sensuous creatures, we are alone. Of course, there are other experiences that remind us that we are existentially identical with ourselves only. For example, when we feel misunderstood; when the world outside is not able to seep into us, or rather, when our way of being, feeling, or thinking cannot get through (Engdahl 2009). Because our body and senses anchor us in the world and provide the perspective we originally experience reality through, it is not only our body and senses that are unique. Our world, or perception of reality, are also different from that of others. Hence, we are differentiated from our fellow beings and our surroundings in two ways. However, life is not as dependent on our existential identities as one might think. To a much greater degree, life, and not least love, is about using our body and senses to help overcome the inherent loneliness in our existential identity. Life, as well as love, is a never-ending endeavor to transcend our loneliness, through communication with others, through trying to understand and making sense of each other. This is the only way we can really influence and be influenced by the community we are a part of; that is to say, the only way we can reach self-realization. At best, we exist in the genuine social – where whatever is existing within us meets what is on the outside and a transcending, or a mutual, influence takes place. But, to make such a dynamic process possible we have to acquire mutual experiences of togetherness that make it possible for us to identify with each other. We have to develop a social identity; a way of being in the world that we share with others. Hence, the problem we face is not, foremost, about differentiating ourselves from our fellow beings, but to communicate, and establish a relationship, with them. As mentioned, when the umbilical cord is cut we are thrown into a world where we’re anchored by our own body and senses (Merleau-Ponty [1947] 1964, s. 12–42). Simultaneously, our body and senses are not enough for our survival, although they are tools for making connections, communicating and interchanging perspectives with the people and the community that we, our body, and senses, are dependent on to survive (Stern 2000, p. xi–xxxix; Engdahl 2004, chap. 6). There is certainly more to learn and discuss from Dagerman’s poetry. But, the poet as a superscript – someone who possesses the true meaning of love – is being questioned. In his song Kärlek är för dom (Love is for them) from 2009, Joakim Thåström sings: “I asked the poets who sat there on a row. They just glared with their bunny eyes. Finally, one of them said: what do we know about that?” The given concept of love as something exclusive, a kind of everlasting twosomes, is also questioned more frequently, and there are those who state the opposite: that everything steady is fugitive and the madness of the romanerotic love lies in the thought of eternity. The lover turns a deaf ear to such statements and refuses to listen. Love comes, love goes, but in relation to the one-and-only, love is everything and will never cease to exist. A parallel reasoning to this can be found in the German sociologist Max Weber’s thoughts on love being the biggest of all irrational powers of life.

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Love persists To the lover, love, or let us say infatuation, is something that is in progress; it is occurring in the here and now. Hence, it is insignificant if statistics show that the number of divorces is higher than ever before; that the phrase “for better and for worse” has been turned into “as long as there is passion and peace.” The pure relationship, an intimacy between two free subjects based on being able to tell each other everything, is only valid until further notice, a circumstance that does not seem to frighten the lover at all. The sociologist Anthony Giddens bears witness to how the pure relationship is becoming the ideal of love in today’s western societies. So do Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1995), also sociologists, when they talk about the normal chaos of love, in their book with the same title. One of their illustrations of contemporary love is the much-quoted postulate of Gestalt therapy; a term that the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Fritz Perls coined to identify the form of psychotherapy that he and his wife, Laura Perls, developed in the 1940s and 1950s: I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, And you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped. (Perls and Stevens 1969, book cover) I myself feel the winds of indifference. A new, and potentially better, longing for love will always manifest itself as close to the breaking point as it can. What if we realized that love is like a rare bird that leaves its red trace far beyond the never-ending market, where the haves constantly want more and are finally bursting out of boredom and loneliness? Yet another sociologist – Mary Evans – is protesting loudly. She does not agree with Beck and BeckGernsheim’s account of how love is viewed in contemporary western societies. According to her, a consensus exists about our deep desire for love and how difficult it is to fulfill. We have bought into the idea that everything ought to be love; love is all we need. The pursuit of love is simply seen as a right according to which we organize our lives. If this meant to be a devotion to reasoned care and commitment to others, there would be some truth to it. But in today’s highly romanticized and commercialized version, love has become a social pathology where “the desire for identification with another person drives us to impossible expectations and occasionally damaging alternatives” (Evans 2003, abstract; compare Illouz 2007). Ultimately, the sociologists Zygmunt Bauman (2003) and Arlie Russell Hochschild (2012) sigh in unison: the transformation of the ethics of production into an esthetics of consumption is a collapse of the Synapse.

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When guided by wish (“your eyes meet across a crowded room”), partnership follows the pattern of shopping … If found faulty, or not “fully satisfactory,” goods may be exchanged by other, hopefully more satisfying commodities, even if an after-sales service is not offered and a moneyback guarantee not included in the transaction. But even if they are delivered on their promise, they are not expected to be in use for long; after all, perfectly usable, shipshape cars, or computers or mobile telephones in quite decent working condition are consigned to the rubbish heap with little or no regret the moment their “new and improved versions” appear in the shops and become the talk of the town. Any reason why partnerships should be an exception to the rule? (Bauman 2003, p. 12 f.) There seems to be nothing better than us thinking that we can buy admirable skills and a loveable personality. The modern consumption process stinks of seduction and destruction. The commercialization of love and sexuality is, without doubt, its last stand. When love is incorporated into the market’s logic, we – both women and men – as love-seeking beings tend to arouse desires without satisfying them. The desire desires desire and we desire to be its immediate impulse. In an instant we become neither lovers nor loved ones. At least, not if we perceive love to be a mutual recognition of each other as concrete beings, with needs that are to be satisfied within an intimate relationship. Man is currently being misled and the confusion is almost complete. Too many people are starving to death in a romantic and hedonistic treadmill, which they fully believe will render them meaning and happiness. Moreover, the fact that there are psychological theories about passionate love, and it being so demanding for both body and consciousness that it is doomed to expire within six to eighteen months, can be interpreted as another lead into the current ideal of love. Despite the fact that some agitated voices have exactly the same argument as what I have just discussed, we must remember that the lover seldom talks like that. Love is not an anomaly, but “a quite normal improbability,” as the sociologist Niklas Luhmann puts it in the introduction to his book Love as Passion: A Codification of Intimacy (1986). The notion that everything ends does not fly with the lover. Love is rather perceived as a cure, or at least as something helping to slow down the aging process and set back death. To have to defend oneself like a criminal put on trial is deeply humiliating for the lover. Many of us are still out there searching high and low for our significant other; the one person who will make us truly human. This heritage, along with many other ideas we harbor in a culturally modified version, stems from Greek mythology. I am foremost thinking of the philosopher Plato’s text, Symposium, dated 385–360 BC, where the poet of comedy Aristophanes, in both a naïve and grotesque manner, speaks of love as an expression of humanity’s sad life condition in an incomplete world where she is forced to find her significant other in order to feel complete:

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, “What do you people want of one another?” they would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: “Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two – I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?” – there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need. And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. (Plato [385–360 BC] 2016)

Maybe love is not eternal, but exclusive after all? Exclusive love still appears to be alluring for some of us. The temptation is not only due to our heritage from the classical literature, but also a result of the twosome being the kind of relationship that is most strongly characterized by closeness and intimacy and that most effectively makes us experience individuality and our own uniqueness. It is only in the space between the one and the other that we can speak of secrecy and intensity in its true sense: an all-or-nothing mentality. There is no intermediary in the twosome. Responsibility cannot be put on the anonymous crowd or the collective. You simply know who gives and who takes. As the sociologist Georg Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 126) argues: In the dyad, the sociological [social] process remains, in principle, within personal interdependence and does not result in a structure that goes beyond its elements. This is also the basis of “intimacy.” The intimate character of certain relations seems to me to derive from the individual’s inclination to consider that which distinguishes him from others, that which is individual in a qualities sense, as the core, value, and chief matter of his existence. At the same time the dyad, or the relationship between two people – which is discussed at length in Simmel’s great work on sociology as the exploration into forms of social life – is the constellation in which we are the most exposed and vulnerable. All it takes is for one person to pull out and the interaction and social exchange dissolve. We are then left with nothing. Thus, in the dyad you are the most important person in the life of the other; indispensable. In the dyad, the self tries to fuse with the other, and vice versa.

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The union between man and woman is possible precisely because they are opposites. As something essentially unattainable, it stands in the way for the most passionate cravings for convergence and union. The fact that, in any real and absolute sense, “I” can not seize the “not-I,” it is felt nowhere more deeply than here, where their mutual supplementation and fusion seem to be the very reason for the opposites to exist at all. Passion seeks to tear down the borders of the ego and absorb the “I” and “thou” in one another. But it is not they which become a unit, rather a new unit emerges, the child. (Simmel [1908] 1950, p. 128) A quantitative leap between two and three is put in play; the dyad transforms into the triad. The triad, or the relationship between three people, is not only quantitatively but also qualitatively another kind of interaction to the dyad. In the threesome we might even see the emergence of new social positions and personalities. Among other things, Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 145 ff.) talks about the non-participant and the mediator; positions, or personalities, only made possible when two turns into three. The third one is, in many ways, an interesting personality that enables distance and a more objective way to look at the most intimate relationship of them all: the dyad. In addition to the one position already mentioned, Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 154 ff.) talks about the elated third (tertius gaudens): a personality trait that is a result of either the competition between two people fighting to win the preference of the third person and becoming enemies because of it, or a result of two people being enemies already and therefore fighting to win the preference of the third one. Furthermore, Simmel ([1908] 1950, p. 162 ff.) talks about the person who rules by disunion (divide et impera). This personality is maybe the most unpleasant of them all, mainly because of its ability to rule by disunion, more precisely by preventing two people to enter into interaction or by sabotaging already existing interaction between them and installing envy, disbelief, or open conflict. The sociologist Francesco Alberoni draws heavily on Simmel’s ideas on social forms in his book Falling in Love and Loving ([1979] 1983). The following passage on the ménage á trois from the book illustrates the qualitative change that happens in the quantitative leap from two to three: Even with three participants – in our ménage á trois – the collective still exists and the experience still continuous if and when one of the three leaves. In the case of the couple, everything however changes. If one of the two leaves the collective is destroyed; only in the couple is the other indispensable, specific, unique, and irreplaceable. (Alberoni [1979] 1983, p. 75) Considering the qualitative change that happens in the quantitative leap from two to three, it is not strange that the lover can become jealous when a third

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party enters the stage and is experienced as someone in possession of something that the loved one needs, but that the lover cannot give, or thinks he or she cannot give. The jealous does not doubt his or her own love, or themself, but doubts the response from the loved one. Two alternatives are at hand: to keep one’s hope and gain certainty of the preference of the loved one, or give up all hope despite the certainty felt in the experience of love. To lose the object of your love is, according to Alberoni ([1979] 1983, p. 160), no less dramatic than a psychological suicide. You simply lose the person through whom you experience yourself.

A truncated love Alberoni exposes the thin line between love and hate; how we come to disintegrate and destroy what we value and hope for. He speaks of he who chops his loving hands off with the sword of disentanglement; he who rips his eyes out because they see the beloved in everyone; he who suffocates his sensuality as it seeks the loved one in everything. He also speaks of he who transforms his beloved into a stone; a strange form of self-reification. In Alberoni’s ([1979] 1983, p. 160 f.) own words: In order to effectively stop wanting and longing for X, we will have to find reasons for falling out of love; we will have to try to remake the past and poison all our memory with hatred. We are puzzled to find, however, that this hatred doesn’t accomplish what it is supposed to. The reason is because the moment we decide to give up on our love, the extraordinary forces at work in the ignition state also halted. The past has become simply ‘what was’, and is inaccessible to the will. When we were in love we could “fix” the past; now, however, we can’t. We are left feeling numb. We desire nothing. We lose touch with that marvelous metaphysical dimension to existence that was ours when we were in love, and return to the superficial world of appearances. Nothing has meaning; everything seems worthless. We go through the motions, copy other people’s gestures, feel what little we managed to “learn to feel”, and speak empty words. In short, we enter a phase of bleak apathy. I fell for this line of reasoning because it can be found in a love story that never was. A story about falling in love, which I happen to know about since it is a part of all the human documents that were made accessible to me by people I met, and got to know along the way. In this specific case, we are dealing with a long e-mail conversation that a Swedish women – I call her Saga – entrusted to me. We also talked a lot, Saga and I. “This is what he wrote,” Saga says, sitting in front of me and showing me a number of e-mails. “He sent them all in a row, because I, who always answered him, turned mute,” she adds.

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Saga is just over forty years old, she has a PhD and is employed by a Swedish university. He, the man that Saga is involved with, is closing in on fifty and is a self-taught intellectual. I call him Richard. It is not easy to follow their textual interaction. There is a lot of information missing. How long had their relationship lasted? Was it really over; a thing of the past? Those are just a few of the questions I did not know the answer to in my hour of reading. On the other hand, it was obvious to me that a third party somehow got involved and came into view, which complicated their relationship. There were other things as well. For the time being, Saga was caught up in a personal crisis; among other things, she was in the middle of a divorce. I was looking for answers in Saga’s pale face, but her skinny arms caught my eye; her hands that were constantly seeking each other out, but in the next moment were separate again; her short, red-painted nails. Her hair was dark, halfway down her shoulders, and was falling down over one of her eyes, making it hard to tell how she was actually feeling. Despite all the question marks, let us look into some of the fragments of what Richard wrote to Saga. There is still something to learn about love from them: It is quite simple. Really. And it becomes clear if one just thinks that love is concrete. You haven’t had issues with sleeping outside your home before. Just do it, like you told me… But maybe it was with the wrong person – and it appears a bit comical in this context that the time spent with me is counted in temporary hours here and there. So, yes – it’s a difference. And I’m glad you could give him what he needed – myself, I now take what I need. I’m not precisely suffering from a lack of social contact and companionship. And it’s simple. I take what I want and do what’s convenient for me. That’s how it is. And then you need to figure out what this difference means: that it’s okay to spend the night with certain people, but not with other people. This is crystal clear to me. And it’s nothing I want to live with. I’m just happy I realized it in time. It saved us both from an ocean of lost time and pain. There’s really nothing more to say other than saying that it doesn’t really matter at all what you say at this point – to me that’s just meaningless formulas without content. And I am a happy person. I’m happy in knowing what’s important to me – and that I’m ready to pay the price for what I choose. Yes, it may seem to be immensely arrogant to write to you and to let you know that I don’t read a single line of what you write back to be. But it suits me, right now. In other words: you can write a million e-mails, it doesn’t mean a thing. Use your time to do other things instead, spend time doing things that gets you involved. It really is completely meaningless, all these compromises, this equation, which is supposed to have a total sum that makes everyone happy.

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair That’s not how it works. And most of all, I’m angry I fooled myself. I won’t do it again. I also get mad that I showed you those pictures of me as a child. That’s how much I believed in you, and I guess that’s alright in a way, since the alternative would be to become cynical, calculating. And that’s not who I will become. But, as I said. I’m mad. I really thought you would seriously meet me this time, but it’s like you suffer from amnesia every time you come back to X. Everything turns into compromises, negotiations. And I don’t want to participate in that, I don’t want to be part of it. Yes, it was a long time ago I was like I am now, mad. But it will pass. On the other hand, a year from now I think you will still be stuck in that fucking limbo of compromises and considerations and live the same type of life, as if nothing mattered, at the very least you yourself. You’re compromising away yourself. And as said, you have my address now. I would be grateful if you sent it (the key to his apartment) back as soon as possible, there are others to give it to. I’ve never given anyone a key before, never. But I really believed in you. And now this. Yes, I really don’t want you to contact me again, I also don’t want to be your friend. That’s how it is. I don’t want to participate in this. It’s so unworthy. And my time is too short. And I will use that time to be with people who understand what I’m talking about, who face the consequences of their decisions. And who live their feelings. You are just afraid. And, of course, you’re a big loss in my life. But I can live with that. I’m no longer going to answer e-mails, FB, SMS. Nada. I’m gone from your life now.

What we learn from Richard through this e-mail conversation is that falling in love is often about harboring a wish to see your dreams of love come true in the shape of something touchable – a materializing of the mental state taking place outside of yourself. Love is perceived as living your emotions intersubjectively with a deep understanding of the nature of the other and to stand for the emotions brought to life by the other as if they were the essence of yourself. Based on the e-mail conversation, I continue talking to Saga, who is still sitting in front of me. She seems to want to know my thoughts on the situation. Was there another; a third person? Yes and no… The story is so much longer than this abrupt ending. I: You didn’t respond at all? SAGA: Yes, after a while. I wanted to explain myself. I: So what did you write? SAGA: I wrote about the person he implicitly claimed came in between us. I wrote about some other things too, which related to other things that happened… He’d given me a key to his home… said I could stop by any I:

SAGA:

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time I wanted… view it as a sanctuary where I could rest and breathe. I was in the middle of a divorce from the father of my children. Spontaneously, I felt truly happy, but on reflection I felt that I couldn’t accept his gift wholeheartedly. I had to return it out of reasons I wasn’t even fully aware of myself. Something chafed. Something was wrong. I simply didn’t understand the meaning of his gesture. Couldn’t embrace it. I then read one of Saga’s responses to Richard. She had also sent several e-mails in a row: I am the one who’s been waiting. I am the one who made room. I am the one who got rid of my earlier life. Because I, by some inscrutable reason, wanted us. What you’ve done I don’t really know. You gave me a key to your home. But you didn’t want to see me. What the hell do I then need the key for? Do you understand so little about people and symbols? You want to clean off yourself from my body. You, who is the only man I’ve ever wanted to give myself to. Freely and forever. You can write page after page and put all the blame on me for not making us happen. I exist and I am the most real thing you’ve met, except for your son. But you’d rather surround yourself with death and misery than a living woman that thinks that you are the most beautiful she has ever seen. If I get scared – what do you know about that feeling? Nothing. You could’ve taken the doubts of that day and said: come! That’s all you had to do. But you had other, more important things to do. And you took my seriousness and worth away from me in that very moment. What do you know about my seriousness and my worth? To you people can obviously have seriousness and worth one day and nothing the next day. That’s not how it works. And I can write more and more and more… But you’re not reading and I don’t want your words… That’s what I felt: I’m tired of interpreting symbols and signals. I want a life. You go ahead, continue to interpret the whispers and calls from the dead. Is that serious?! I’m made of flesh and blood and breathing. You should’ve held on hard to me. Fought for me for one single day. But no, then I lost all seriousness and worth. There is no credibility in that. It just means that I HAD value and WAS taken seriously by you. I am thinking that both of them experienced that they were missing what the other was in need of; doubting that they could satisfy each other; uttermost doubting that their love was reciprocated. Without a doubt, they both wished for a materialized love – a genuine intersubjective meeting, yes, a fusion between body and mind, which would make their emotions run high. For reasons that are not clear in their e-mail correspondence, Saga and Richard cannot make it work. When it comes to the nature of love, something essential can still be found in their exchange; for example, the significance of the meaning of, and the gravity in, the relationship with the other. Once again,

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we hear a love that whispers and calls for selectiveness and exclusivity: the absolute desire that falls short in the end. In the following e-mail – one of many that Richard sent in a row – above all, the seriousness of the relationship is being questioned. Was there anything that was real, genuine or authentic – capable of sustaining the two of them? And then the destruction of the other. Or, more precisely, the detachment of what used to be them by means of making visible the set boundaries that excludes the other – where the I and the You are pushed away from each other. The e-mail is long and filled with repetitions, almost like an invocation meant to not only persuade the addressee about the validity of what is written, but also to persuade the sender himself. I believe what you say, I really believe that we have a totally different way of looking at this. I don’t think you see the difference between what you’re doing and what happens after that. There is nothing to rely on, which lets me know what’s happening, nothing that tells me what’s real. You’ve lost that value, the gravity. And I’m floating around, almost completely invisible in all of this. There’s a kind of love that means that things are unbearably difficult but simultaneously also enchantingly beautiful, I won’t be there to watch you reduce everything to a number of compromises, a fear of a conformity that still transforms everything real into a number of transport routes. I’d rather be alone. For real. The time is too short and I don’t want to spend it making plans that are nothing but air castles. I don’t know what people around you say about all that’s going on. But in my world everything is very simple, extremely simple. I would’ve done anything for you, but not this. It’s simply meaningless. When you left, I said I’ll be here. I gave you this damn key to show you it is just unconditional. It is a gravity that shows the concreteness of love. It is an act without reminiscence and future. Just pure straight raw. A kind of confirmation of where we are at. We. And of what’s happening and would’ve happened. And I really don’t know in what way you’ve taken this thing between us seriously, how you wanted to spend the time we could’ve had here. And no, I don’t mean that you should move in here during this day, I know how it is to get divorced, that it can be like going through hell, that’s not at all what I mean. But I don’t think you still know what unconditional love looks like. I don’t think you’re able to receive it right now. You’re not done with the things you need to do. And I’m not going to stand here on the outside while you’re slipping away, getting lost in a kind of pretend world, where your fear of hurting someone controls everything. Yes, life is cruel. It hurts. You hurt people, you get hurt. And that’s how it has to be. It’s not death. Death is a compromise where you’ve ultimately lost the ability to step up for yourself. You’ve really lost it. And you no longer see it for yourself. That’s what I see. And again, there is nothing I wouldn’t have done for you. Seriously.

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I thought we had a basic agreement. But it doesn’t exist. It means nothing. You’re surrounded by very bad advisors. And you’re on the wrong path. And you’re doing it completely wrong. It’s your life, your decisions. I can live with it. But I’m not going to take part in it. And no, you don’t see what you write to me, you don’t recall what you tell me, everything becomes a temporary escape and therein lays the rest for you. And then it starts over, in the exact same way as before. You can say whatever you want about this. Of course. This is not a court of law. It’s extremely simple. I loved you, just like that. And I’m so wondering what was going on inside of you during all of this? Where were you? What is happening when just nothing else is going on but you’re being drawn in to this damn roaring ocean of death, the underwater currents which keep coming at us when we’re swimming forward. Yes, these were harsh words coming from me. I have more. I have a full encyclopedia about what’s going on. And it doesn’t matter anymore. It was nice to have met you, it was nice to be able to think about what could’ve been if we’d gotten to know each other better. But I’ve walked away, I walked away yesterday, just because of the simple reason that you wanted to return the key. That you didn’t want to carry that meaning. No, it’s fully up to you. I wonder if you’ll ever understand what I mean. I don’t know, I don’t think so. And the worst thing must be that I no longer think it is something to talk about. We tried. It didn’t work out. And I’m not going to watch you go down by participating in this. It’s like a game. It’s like, yes, I don’t know, all I know is that it doesn’t remind me of a love story. So, now I’ll live my life and do as I want, first washing off the memory of you from my body, I let myself find a new space, a totally meaningless space among people I don’t care for – yes, that’s what I’m doing. And then I let it be what it is, kind of like resting, maybe. I’m so completely mad at all this. I don’t read your e-mails, don’t want to know what’s going on with you at all. But you’re not a happy person. You’re a person in pieces. And we could’ve been each other’s, in all seriousness. I know that. I also know we could’ve been happy. I know that. Really. But I don’t want to anymore. It’s unworthy. You’re falling into pieces, all the time, but no one around you provides an opportunity for you to heal, starting to heal, you’re on duty everywhere, serving all but yourself. It’s mesmerizing to be alive, the gravity, the great happiness that is out there, deeply embedded in the darkest. I know we could’ve taken part in it if it just would’ve been for real and not just words, which become hollow, meaningless. Yes, I’m so fucking mad. If you can’t see one thing or another, that’s not my problem. It’s just that nothing in this entails a space that you’re preparing for us. And so, that’s it for me. I’m nothing, but just being the one who loved everything within you, I even loved about you what you think no one can love. But it’s true. I wanted all of you, not just one single part, not just

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Talk of love in the shadowland of despair words, not just negotiations that ended the same way: you not wanting to hurt anyone. For example. But this someone is also I. And I’m hurt by getting rejected in the way you reject me, as if it wasn’t serious, a life. No, now I’m fed up with this. It’s just meaningless. We have a different view of everything. And I will go out to be in the other place, with people who don’t mean shit to me. It’s the only simple thing to do. That’s what you’re doing. And this is the last you’ll hear from me, I can easily promise you this. And I never never want to hear from you again, never more want to know that you exist. I really was completely open, completely unconditional, as it should be. But now I don’t want it anymore. Now I see it so clearly, I’ve seen it before and know exactly how it’ll end and I don’t want to experience that. It was a very very long time ago I was as mad as I am right now, meaningless. Just like that. So meaningless, actually like violating the very handhold of love’s nature and make it into a compromise. I don’t want you to contact me anymore, never again. And yet, I wish you all the best and hope you’ll heal and become happy in everything that is you.

Here, the absolute sin, which Alberoni is talking about, is committed: the destruction of all worthiness and hope: the objectification of the other where her intentions, expressed in words, are perceived as being meaningless, a sort of shape without content. Or, let us say, something that does not affect, since what is expressed is not experienced to be in compliance with the emotions at hand. The all-or-nothing mentality of the dyad is made visible in the view of the compromise as a gross violation of love, or rather, of the nature of infatuation: the actual foundation. In this sense, there is something absolute about falling in love, which significantly differentiates it from love.

The creativeness of infatuation According to Alberoni ([1979] 1983, p. 80 ff.), one can only fall in love with one person at a time. On the other hand, you can love many. We can love our mother and our father; our daughter and son; our significant others and our friends. Clearly, there are one, two, three, or maybe even four or more people that we truthfully can claim to love. Love is more stable than infatuation. Falling in love means a reconstruction of one’s emotional life and one’s identity; yes, even of all relationships one is involved in. A new direction of life is being staked out. The loves of two people – completely different projects – are integrated to one new extraordinary life. To be infatuated with more than one person at once would mean a split of the soul, making it impossible for the individual to travel the seemingly single road that leads upwards and forward. Alberoni ([1979] 1983, p. 81 ff.) even goes so far as to claim that when one’s infatuation with the other results in a common child the infatuation dies, no matter how strong it may have been. Thus, the long-awaited child may in

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certain cases be experienced as a curse; an irrevocable betrayal, which calls forth feelings of abandonment. Under all circumstances the child is a new love opportunity and most likely an infatuation that sheds a new light on life. Yet, another restructuring of all of the individual’s relationships will inevitably take place. In other words, infatuation is to be understood as a beginning stage, but not just any beginning stage. In our beloved’s response we discover our own value and worth, no matter how petty and small we otherwise tend to appear in comparison with others. In many ways, love leads us to a creative discovery of both ourselves and the other. When the philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus ([1963] 1979, p. 277) discusses what computers cannot do, in order to understand the meaning of being human, infatuation is described as a world disclosure: When a man falls in love, he loves a particular woman, but it is not that particular woman he needed before he fell in love. However, after he is in love, that is after he has found out that this particular relationship is gratifying, the need becomes specific as the need for this particular woman, and the man has made a creative discovery about himself. He has become the sort of person that needs that specific relationship and must view himself as having lacked and needed this relationship all along. In such a creative discovery the world reveals a new order of signification which is neither simply discovered nor arbitrarily chosen. After that moment of world disclosure the infatuation, or may we call it love, is kept alive by the hope of its return; the moment when the falling in love reoccurs. I find it easy to grasp this line of reasoning since my almost twenty-year-long marriage was sustained by the very idea of the return of infatuation, or the chance of falling in love once again: a kind of continuous rebirth of both myself and my husband. If only we did this, or that, our world in fragments and pieces would contract like a heart and make us breathe as one and the same. Splinter would once again become glass. I used to make an effort, kind of being a pain in the ass, to light a spark to my ex-husbands feelings; to make him confess his love for me. I know how it sounds. Nonetheless, I wanted him to tell me he loved me, as if those words were moist flower petals that would softly enclose my inner self. Once more, the effect of assertion to dissolve anxiety is proven. But, I wanted more than that. I wanted him to take my hand, lie down next to me and do nothing else but to stay. “That is not how I express my love,” he said. “I do other things, like shopping and cooking.” He was an everyday hero, as my mom puts it. “If you were a little more home oriented,” he used to say, “maybe I would have more energy to be the one you wish and crave for.” It is possible that he was right and that things would have been perfect, or at least better, if I perceived his doings as expressions of love and if I would have done better to satisfy

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him in the way he needed me to. But, but, but: “[e]ven for the most tired human being love is an awakening.” The senses are on edge and everything is experienced as more intensely vivid, pleasurable and vibrant. I never gave up my own vain wishes of remaining and resting in that state. Just like the poet Maria Wine writes in the poem “Överge inte vårt ögonblick så snabbt” (Do not abandon our moment so quickly), I wanted us to “lay silent next to each other for a moment and slowly grow out of the joy of the moment cooled by its caress that sail through the room like a gust.” Why couldn’t we “listen to the echoes of the words that fade away in a purring silence” and in the silence “dedicate our moment to a pray for its return with all its lightning joy”? What I did not fully understand was the realization of the poem’s last line: “the outside world is always left, but our moment (that is founded on the ruthless law of the meeting: the forever threat of farewell) might never find its way back” (Wine 2011, p. 497, author’s translation). We – my ex-husband and I – could so rarely find rest in each other. We talked about everything, but we shared very few experiences of an emotional nature. We lived side by side: parallel lives. If I cut myself on porcelain and it bled, he turned away to avoid having to see. If I cried, he was angry and asked me to go elsewhere. When I was in despair, I was thought to be mentally weak or disturbed. I do not know how it happened. Somewhere along the way the caring for one another, and more, got lost. We, who always had praised ourselves for being uncensored and able to analyze everything in each other’s life, did no longer understand each other. Our language turned mute. The only thing left was empty greetings and a fear of losing what we knew we had; many years of persistently trying to stick together. No matter what happened it was us; in our view it was a testament to the authenticity of love. Maybe it was me who let the petrification go into full effect – too many others were allowed to come between us in our so-called open relationship. I justified the increasing, and finally almost abysmal, distance between us with it being my husband’s stupid idea to have an open relationship, where no one owns the other and therefore both actively and reflexively choose to stay, or more correctly stated, choose to come back. In a way, our contract was well in tune with the pure relationship that Giddens (1993) views as a contemporary love pattern. That is, a democratic closeness to a chosen other, where the aim is to tell each other everything and work together to set up the rules. There is something beautiful in this idea of love, because it is sprung from an ideal of equality between woman and man, or, rather, between humans. Yet, it is a kind of contract that can be understood in financial terms: I only stick with this relationship for as long as it gives me what I need, as long as the price to pay is not too high. Preferably it costs less than what it tastes like. Then it is perfect. This was not the case for my ex-husband and me: we paid more than any of us could afford, more than we could endure. We hardly survived. We made each other inhuman by asking the other to get rid of an important part of the self. We said that we loved each other (or, it was mainly me who said it) but

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we did not make room for one another in the imaginary sphere. It was a struggle on life and death, and we both lost. Neither of us were recognized for what we so desperately needed and identified as being the uniqueness of ourselves. We simply could not tolerate our radical differences and did not survive in keeping our personal identities intact. In a way, this process is a type of test that all couples in love undergo to reach a more stable form of intimacy than infatuation: love. To love is not just to lose yourself in the other; it is also to find yourself from this newfound spot in the world. In many ways, love is about seeing the other’s radical difference as the limit of yourself.

And everything shall be love or facing the vulnerability of the other And everything shall be love, like the poet and author Kristian Lundberg named the standalone sequel to his autobiographical novel, The Yard. “It is all very simple, to not say straightforward,” he writes: For several years I have searched for her, written about her, thought about her. And by coincidence she contacts me – at that point it is more than sixteen years ago since we last met – and I immediately suggest a meeting that I later cancel out of fear of facing her… so ridiculous. So enormously lame and boring. I do this over and over again. Suggest a meeting, a place and a time – then I cancel the whole thing. (Lundberg 2011, p. 169, author’s translation) Poor him – Lundberg – who is not courageous enough to face what he in despair writes about. So lonely and abandoned, I’m thinking, and I’m wishing him courage: a heart beating slowly. Somewhere towards the end of the novel, Lundberg puts his experience of love into words – it is the grace that so many of us, more or less desperately, want to find as a constant; a basic chord making it easier to breathe. Now that she sees me too I dare to walk further and further away, and I walk through the dark forest, I walk back and I see the creatures standing on the side of the trail and it does not bother me, and instead of shaking out of fear I whisper her name, over and over again, then I smell the scent of her hair… (Lundberg 2011, p. 169, author’s translation) Lundberg’s view on love may be related to what is called secure attachment within the psychoanalytical tradition, or more precisely the object-relations school. Secure attachment means that you are able to keep the loved one with you inside and thereby feel loved even when you leave, or when the loved one is absent. Attachment is defined as a “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings” (Bowlby 1969, p. 194). It is a deep emotional bond that connects two persons with each other across time and space over a longer

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period of time (Ainsworth 1973). In Lundberg’s writings, however, the secure attachment is not present as the rule, but as the exception. Love is symbolized by a shining face: a hope sprung from the despair felt by the one who from early years has had their ability to connect with someone damaged and is, thereby, forced to live with a continuous lack of trust. To use the terms developed within the object-relations school, we are faced with ambivalent attachment, which is shown in symptoms such as severe distress when the loved one leaves, and the inability to soothe oneself and depend on significant others (Bowlby 1969; Ainsworth 1973). What happens if you throw a baby to the ground? Lundberg asks. That is a fundamental question if one wants to understand a human being as an individual with a personal identity; someone capable of influencing the development of herself, others and society from her own position. I am speaking of the development of a positive relationship towards oneself, or about self-realization. According to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the type of recognition it takes to give and receive love is a necessary premise for man’s development from a biological organism to an individual with a personal identity. Distinctive for love is the recognition of each other as needing and desiring creatures with an ability to dream and fantasize. In the mutual emotional affirmation that love demands, the involved parties are united through their very needs, wishes and desires. If these are neglected, the person is offended in regard to her being an individual with a personal identity. This is, among other things, what is happening with a baby who is thrown to the ground. Honneth (1995, p 131 ff.) speaks of love as being the kind of recognition that guarantees the individual both physical and emotional integrity and is crucial for the individual’s self-confidence. For every time the other turns away and denies the child the care it needs, it gets harder for the child to give and receive the love that makes a human being free to go out into the world and show her true or authentic self; namely, what Giddens perceives as a sign of ontological security and which parallels secure attachment. To gain ontological security we need to free ourselves from the influence of the primordial object of love – usually the mother – in a manner secure enough to be able to inhibit the wish to destroy it. In this way we learn to separate inner reality from outer, and the self from the other; qualities such as the ability for empathy and morality thus emerge. Following the feministand psychoanalytical-oriented sociologist Nancy Chodorow, Giddens (1992, p. 115) argues: An early sense of self-identity, then, together with the potential for intimacy, is first of all developed through identification with a pervasively important female figure. To achieve a consolidated sense of independence, all children must at some point begin to free themselves from the mother’s influence and thus disengage from her love. It follows the route to masculinity, rather than to femininity, which is a detour. The origins of

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male self-identity are bound up with deep sense of insecurity, a sense of loss that haunts the individual’s unconscious memories thereafter. Basic trust, the very source of ontological security, is intrinsically compromised, since the boy is abandoned to the world of men by the very person who was the main loved adult upon whom he could count. Between adults, violations of the other or the self as an individual, with a self or personal identity, lead at best to what Honneth (1995, p. 95) calls a struggle for recognition. Such a struggle can be understood as a discussion on how the situation which we mutually find ourselves in is to be defined. Who are you? Who am I? Which one of each other’s needs, wishes and desires do we have to meet in order to express our love? Let me reproduce a passage from such a conversation, which took place through SMS correspondence between a forty-year-old woman and a sixtyyear-old man, both Swedish with higher education degrees. I call them Amanda and Gustaf: Okay, then I know your position. Your view of women is unacceptable to me. That’s how it is. Despite my valiant and persistent efforts. You have nothing left to give. I think you could afford some honesty, to give us something of worth. I’ve had so many hopes tied to us and would truly like if my memory wasn’t just unpleasant. I want us to be a beautiful love story. For you to be a man I always wanted. At least give me that. Call! I love you. GUSTAF: We’re not getting through to each other. You no longer possess a language. Our problem isn’t about a view of women, or issues tied to equality between men and women. But, it is about us not having seen each other, not trusting each other, not been caring for each other, and lost our language, which was the foundation of our love. And you don’t love me. On the other hand, I think you love your child. AMANDA: You’ve also lost your linguistic magic. And you don’t even want to meet me to restore it. You know nothing of my ability to love. Nothing. Unfortunately. GUSTAF: It’s the same disgusting hatred as the last time. I can’t reach you and you can’t reach me. Once we did. It was fantastic. AMANDA: You know, I thought you knew me and I thought you could be there. For me. You’re right. All I have is my scraps with fragments of love. No. I don’t hate you. I’m deeply hurt and sincerely sorry. GUSTAF: We have to live with our loneliness. We can manage. AMANDA: No. It would’ve been so much better if you spoke truthfully and just admitted that you don’t have any energy left to try to restore us and love me. Your talk about loneliness is just a façade. Words. You don’t take a single loving initiative. It’s okay. I’m not going to die. Even if that would’ve been flattering to you. Go now and I’ll find my way to love elsewhere. AMANDA:

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Go ahead. … We can no longer talk. The words are dirty. Despite of that I reached out my loving hand. But you didn’t hold it. That’s the truth. GUSTAF: No. AMANDA: Yes. I wrote that I loved you. I called you the minute I got home. I waited for you to take the initiative. I wished fervently for you to do that. But you couldn’t even pick up the phone and answer or call me back. And that’s how it goes. Over and over again. Don’t you miss me? Don’t you want anything? You’re going to live like you do right now? Is that how you want it? Really? GUSTAF: We both need to be loved unconditionally. We both prioritize work and we don’t make one common decision. Ten minutes ago you were going to start loving X again. What do you think about how all of this sounds to us? AMANDA: You thought it was a good idea. How do you think it sounds? I’ve said that I love you. You don’t even want to call. What do you expect? GUSTAF:

AMANDA:

What we are reading in the above conversation might from time to time seem to be just a long and painful goodbye. But, the conversation does not have to be understood in those terms. Despite the signs of anger, hesitation and resignation, the conversation may also be interpreted as an attempt from both parties to express who they are and what they need. How can two people, despite their differences and shortcomings, reach that point of understanding each other? As is well known, love is in many ways a battlefield. In some cases, the failure to recognize a person as a concrete and needing being leads to a severed self – the possibilities for self-development and self-realization are thwarted. The person in question cannot develop a positive self-relationship and neither can he or she affect the surrounding world from his or her own position.

The victim and the executioner We could take this as far as speaking of the victim and the executioner, that is, if we talk about the unreasonableness in meeting as two active subjects that are acting in the world. Two lovers are never equally enamoured of each other, never equally satisfied with desire; one of the two will always be cooler and less obsessed than the other. One is then the operator or the executioner, the other the surgical object or the victim. (Baudelaire 1864/1982, p. 16, author’s translation) If we perceive it like this, there are only two ways to exist in relation to the other. Either one transforms the other into a passive object that is to be observed and understood, or one self becomes dependent on the other to

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bestow meaning upon the self: sadism or masochism. We recognize the view presented in the lines below, from the philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known book Being and Nothingness, first published in 1943: Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me… I am possessed by the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it is, sees it as I shall never see it… makes me and thereby he possesses me, and this possession is nothing other than the consciousness of possessing me. (Sartre [1943] 2001, p. 227) To recognize the other as a subject and to recognize oneself as an object is in this version a failed project. With Baudelaire’s and Sartre’s line of reasoning, the idea of love as an intersubjective experience becomes irrational. Instead, I argue that depressive love is a consequence of the abandonment of the struggle for recognition, which for Sartre results in the dialectics between sadism and masochism. In contrast to Sartre and Baudelaire, most researchers in the field argue that love is the most fundamental form of togetherness, in which we transcend the loneliness caused by our existential identity. As I have come to understand this dilemma, it is in the reduction of the self to either object or subject that we can begin to understand the distortion of love, which we today put into play and thereby cause love to transform into a social pathology. In depressive love, we remain imprisoned in the loneliness our existential identity brings about, that is, in the void that may arise because we are existentially identical with ourselves only. To get stuck there, just like being encapsulated in yourself, is problematic since our comprehension of social reality becomes skewed. In many ways, depressive love can be understood as an inability to be authentic with and through the other. One can neither rest in the other, nor in oneself. That takes two individuals, with their personal identities kept intact; which admittedly can be lost temporarily, but are always recovered. Before I further develop this line of reasoning, we are going to take a look into how depression is currently identified and diagnosed in western culture.

Note on the psychology of depression The depressive state of love can currently be recognized through the types of symptoms that come with depression, which we rather recently have learned about through the spread of information on how depression is diagnosed within psychology and psychiatry. We increasingly understand ourselves by means of a diagnostic language consisting of codes in the form of different symptoms. The two dominating diagnostic systems are the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) published

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by the American Psychiatric Association and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) published by the World Health Organization. ICD-10-codes are generally used in primary health care, while DSM-V-codes are usually used in psychiatric clinics and in scientific contexts. Even if the diagnostic criteria are not the same within the two systems, they both require the patient to have been in an ill condition for at least two weeks to make the diagnosis of depression. DSM-V especially emphasizes that the condition must have caused a change in a person’s mental state. If the person has not experienced any previous episodes of hypomania or mania, ICD-10 places the diagnosis within the scale of a mild, mildly severe or severe episode. Thus, a distinction is made between different stages of depression. In this context, we will only touch upon the criteria for mild depression, since that stage is the most relevant as an indicator for the emergence of depressive love as an ideal in contemporary society. ICD-10 uses an agreed list of ten depressive symptoms. At least one of the following three symptoms needs to be present most days and most of the time for at least two weeks: persistent sadness or low mood; loss of interests or pleasure; fatigue or low energy. In addition, one or more of the following symptoms also needs to be present: disturbed sleep; poor concentration or indecisiveness; low self-confidence; poor or increased appetite; suicidal thoughts or acts; agitation or slowing of movements; and guilt or self-blame. Even if the symptoms making possible a diagnosis of mild depression give us an understanding of the nature of the phenomenon, it does not tell us what causes the condition. In his theory of the struggle for recognition, Honneth (1995, p. 131 ff.) speaks about the violation of the intersubjective recognition that love expresses – different forms of physical, and let me add, emotional or psychological, violence – which lead to a loss of self-confidence. Of course, physical and psychological violations are a way to misrecognize the individual as a person with needs. But, they are far from telling the entire story behind the causes of depressive love. To comprehend depressive love as a sign of the times, we must also unveil the normative transformations that have occurred within contemporary western societies. We must point to specific temporal and societal causes for love being misinterpreted, or sought for, in a way that makes it depressive, but also look at how depressive love is experienced by the individual. Which function does depressive love fill, both in society and for the individual? Let us take a closer look at the ways in which love is being distorted today. At the same time as a clearer picture of the causes of depression becomes visible, we will also gain a deeper understanding of the nature of love; not least of depressive love in contemporary western societies. The next part of the book begins with what Bauman perceived to be the logic of love and the way it is being crumbled into pieces when incorporated into the logic of the market. The aim is to make visible his interpretation of the transformation of the emotional script during modern times. The

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reasoning leads to the formulation of some concrete questions, such as what kind of person you need to be in order to cope with intimate relationships in the era of “dating apps.” What happens if you fall for and get emotionally involved with your Tinder date; will it be more like a shooting star or a sparkler? I will simply try to clarify what the distortion of love really means. Let us talk about sex and suffering; the role these phenomena play in contemporary western culture. Let us, as well, close in on a more psychoanalytical understanding of the sphere of depressive love, to finally touch upon the presence of depressive love in other eras than the contemporary one.

Note 1 The day before Dagerman took his own life, he stood outside his beloved balcony and prayed on his bare knees hoping for the grace to appear. At least that is what is rumored about him.

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Part 2

The leap of love into the depressive sphere

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2

The leap of love into the depressive sphere

The logic of love According to Zygmunt Bauman (2003), love has, or at least had, its very own logic. Like death, love is never completely comprehensible. It is something that occurs. In the there and then, love is simply a state of being; a mystery. Therefore, we can only learn to love in a very limited sense. It is even difficult to escape the forces of love, which we partly unconsciously are moving towards. It is only through the experience of love in itself that we can gain knowledge about the process we are involved in. We can listen when others talk about love, but that is not the same thing as the insight into love we gain through our own experiences. With references to Plato’s the Symposium, Bauman ([2003] 2015; p. 2 ff.) describes love as the creation of, rather than the quest for, beauty. Thus, as already mentioned, love is a creative urge. Just like other forms of creative activities, one never knows where or what love leads to. One love is never like any other love and each love includes at least two persons, who in some senses are unknown to each other; strangers. Therefore, love is and remains a mystery – a leap of fate, as the American philosopher and educationalist John Dewey would call it. The promise of the possibility for all of us to be able to learn the art of love is nothing more than a simple attempt to transform love into a commodity. Do not fall for the imperative of making love to a wish without waiting, a fight without blood, happiness without tears. Never ever imagine that you can achieve results without effort. What a shame! It is almost like advertising in a society where we consume to develop a sense of self. Only in its distorted form – as a commodity – does love become something you can learn. Only then does love appear to be regulated by certain rules and thereby appears to be a relatively secure and stable process. During uncertain circumstances, which we know is a necessary prerequisite for all forms of transcendence, learning is, nevertheless, often counterproductive. Because we are still not machines, and hopefully will never become so, the free market’s every step towards a problem-free and effective love life is nothing more than a pleasant illusion that we are prone to stick with, in order

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to avoid taking responsibility for what it means to become and stay human. Let me tell you how I understand this: the whole idea, or promise, of a problemfree and effective love is a load of crap, which some more-or-less anonymous power “out there” uses to get to our money, but it will never nurture our reasons for living and learning. Hence, let us look at this type of promise that easily reaches all of us and manages to penetrate the noise of our everyday life. I am here specifically thinking about the abundance of advice and findings on the fastest way to become lucky in love.

There are no free lunches Every now and then I receive love advice in my inbox from someone who calls herself Linda; she electronically contacted me after I read an online article about love. Exactly who this Linda is cannot be determined, but it is not hard to figure out that this is some kind of advanced advertising. Yet I am intuitively imagining Lisa to be a woman who knows a thing or two about love and is willing to guide me and others who, for whatever reason, googled love. Her approach gives me the feeling that she is a friend in need who has solutions to anything causing me, you, or anyone else, to involuntarily get caught in the iron cage, shaking the bars of solitude. Without charging anything, Lisa offers advice to those that are unlucky in love. As mentioned above, her messages show up every now and then, probably not as a result of randomness or spontaneity; I rather think it is the result of some kind of trade-off theory designed to make us dependent. You know how obsessed one can get when rewards are given in an unpredictable manner. One is held in suspense as any moment can turn out to be the one in which things are about to happen: all of sudden it is happening! Exactly when is nearly impossible to figure out in advance. It does not happen once a week or every second day; it is more like it happens when you least expect it. It is a surprise and it makes you happy. That is exactly how Lisa expects to catch me, you, and many others: get us hooked. Hooked to the extent of sooner or later being willing to pay for more than what she is seemingly giving away. So what is the point? What can she teach us? A lot or nothing at all. It depends on how one interprets what we call love. One thing is for certain: we often end up far away from interpreting love as a creative act, in which we appear to be chosen and unique. The advice is of a universal kind. It works for each and every one of us, no matter where we are. It is almost like we are treated as human beings without personality traits. However, the distinction between men and women is razor-sharp. Lisa offers advice to women about men. And men – especially their brains – function in a totally different manner to women, we are taught promptly. Being able to understand what separates men from women is deemed to be the key to a successful love life. The advice is of course more precise than that. Among other things, Lisa lets me know that there are two peculiar mechanisms that are causing men to act impulsively in the presence of a

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woman: emotional unison and the establishment of oneself as a valuable asset in his consciousness. Impulsiveness is apparently deemed to be a good thing in a relationship: something women want and are looking for. Lisa takes impulsiveness to be a crucial ingredient for love; a sign of deep and intense emotions. Literally: “If you ever want a man to feel a deep intense, almost addictive love for you, then you need to become emotionally in-tune with him.” With emotional unison, Lisa refers to an emotional rather than rational understanding of one another. One has to connect to the man’s emotions rather than his senses. The emotional connection is absolutely critical to get him to where you want him to be. According to Lisa, shockingly few women understand that the way to a man’s heart goes through his emotionality. Instead, they dress sexily, cook delicious food, and try to use logical arguments to get the man of their choice to choose them. But everyone knows that there are many women who do everything right but still do not succeed. While others – who do not seem to check any of the boxes – get their man to do the most peculiar, not to say embarrassing, things just to be allowed in their presence. What separates these women from each other? “THE EMOTIONS,” Lisa writes in capital letters. The first group of women simply cannot understand that that’s what it’s all about. They have not understood the most important point: the crucial significance of emotional unison. Furthermore, emotional unison is embarrassingly simple to obtain; a tiny trifle that Lisa promises to teach later on. However, before doing so, she wants to present the second crucial mechanism: to get the man you desire to perceive you as being an invaluable asset. Thus, this involves teasing his animalistic instincts. He will simply chase you as mercilessly as humanly possible. Let us examine this reasoning in its full length since it says something about how we, in our culture and in popular scientific or we might even call it commercialized terms, perceive what is required of a woman to get a man to remain in an intimate relationship. Apparently diamonds are not just a girl’s best friend, but also what can spark a light to a man’s desire and love. Thus, women should strive to reach the quality of a rare diamond; a diamond that is hard to get a hold of. Why are diamonds so valuable? Is it because they look pretty? Is it because they’re expensive? The fact is, diamonds are valuable because they’re rare and not easy to acquire. They’re perceived as something very valuable. In order to make a guy go almost nuts about you, you need to present yourself as a super valuable asset, exactly like a diamond. You need to position yourself in a way, that he would be absolutely scared to lose you and would even fight to keep you for as long as possible.

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The leap of love into the depressive sphere You see, something weird gets triggered inside a man when he knows that you’re this valuable asset. His animalistic instinct awakens and he feels a strong inner drive to protect you, fight for you and never let you go. Every guy is a born hunter, they all have a hunter instinct embedded deep within their subconscious mind and this only awakens when a woman presents herself as this special prize to be won. During this process, a man can’t help but act on this instinct and will chase you as hard as humanly possible. In fact, he will feel absolutely lucky to have you around him and will even value whatever time and attention he gets from you.

If I, you, or anyone else, after this introductory address want to know more about how to acquire the quality of a diamond, and how to acquire emotional unison, we just have to click a link and pay with our credit card. To become diamond-like is apparently easy and can be done in a snap. Lisa’s message, which to a large extent aims to convey that one with the right knowledge or technique can satisfy one’s wishes and desires without any further ado, is not unique in our culture. Unfortunately, one encounters similar messages in much more serious contexts. It can even happen when one is in the middle of a personal crisis that is serious enough to require health care. Let us read a story told by a thirty-year-old Swedish woman, which shows how deeply rooted the idea of fast solutions to every serious problem has become in Western societies. When I stopped breast feeding my daughter, I suffered from serious sleep deprivation. I simply couldn’t sleep. Not that I had issues falling asleep; that it took me a long time. Neither was it like I woke up several times during the night or dawn. No, I didn’t sleep at all. Ultimately the situation became unsustainable. After all, I had a fewmonths-old child to care for. When I finally went to seek help at the medical center the doctor didn’t understand me at all. I think that he thought I was a hysterical academic. High achieving, he said about me. So I really didn’t have any problems: it would all work out. After diligent tries I pulled myself together and told them about all the horrible things that had happened in my life. I tried to make the hospital staff understand. But there was no help to be found. At least that’s what the doctor I met said. What the hell was I going to do? I realized that I could neither do my job, nor take care of my child if I didn’t get some sleep. My body was, in fact, failing in even more ways.

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I called my mom and cried. Then she suggested I take a taxi to go to the psychiatric emergency room. Like, there you’ll get a prescription of sleeping pills. I did as she said and made my way over there. I felt like a misfit and wasn’t able to identify with the other people in the room who, just like myself, were waiting to get rescued from themselves or a life without worth and quality. But I was almost ready to do anything to get a full night’s sleep. After a while’s wait, I don’t remember how long, I got to see a psychiatrist. He had kind eyes and tangled hair. I instantly liked him. We talked about everything: like life. Towards the end of our conversation he said he rarely met someone as mentally healthy as I was. But if I thought sleeping pills would help, he would of course prescribe them to me. I got Stillnoct: pills to help with insomnia. They didn’t help at all and my desperation rose to unimaginable heights. I went back to the medical center and had already been prescribed pills for insomnia, so all of a sudden it was no longer a problem to prescribe me medicine. I got a new kind: well-established sleeping pills that, among other things, had been tried out on Finnish prison inmates for many years. Imovane, they were called. That didn’t help either so I got a prescription of some shit that I was supposed to combine the pills with. Allergy pills or I’m not sure what it was… everything was a mess. Finally I slept due to a strange mixture… but everything lasted and I was fragile… I got to go to a sleep evaluation lab, but I was mistreated there. I hardly slept at all even though I was overdosing pretty much every pill I was taking at that moment. Nothing of this represents a solid foundation to analyze my type of problems from. That’s something I learned afterwards… when I moved to another city and met with a new doctor. Anyway, I got ten cognitive behavior therapy sessions to ease my pain… and when I met the therapist she said: “This is simple. We’ll sort you out in no time.” I couldn’t believe it. Hadn’t she heard a single word of what I just told her? Yet, I put my last hope in her being right. What if it were this easy: if we were as uncomplicated as wished for by the contemporary society and our culture? In human life nothing carries any weight. It is as if we never wish for or desire anything beyond the ignition state – the infatuation, where the impossible is made possible. Fix me! At the same time, we are expected to constantly feel a certain degree of despair, or desperation, to feed our cravings for quick fixes. In many ways, the business model behind the mobile application Tinder is also an illustration of this shade of the community spirit, which, without doubt, is finding its way into the emotional script of our time.

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To sparkle like a tinder stick By swiping your finger over your cell phone screen you can, with the help of Tinder, choose who to get in touch with by looking at a constant stream of pictures of people in the surrounding area or, really, of people anywhere. By swiping your finger to your left you indicate a no thank you, without making the person you rejected aware of it. A match is only made when two people mutually swipe their fingers to the right when they see each other sparkle on the screen and further communication between the two of them is then made possible. You have to trust your gut instinct at the first glance. I do not know how many people have devoted themselves to Tinder, but according to Tinder’s website 9 billion matches were made before the end of 2015. This practice has resulted in hopes of lifelong intimacy and romantic proposals for some. Printed words on a picture of two young and beautiful women of different ethnic origin say: “Without Tinder it would never have been possible for us to meet.” It is beautiful. No doubt about it. In the article “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’” by journalist Nancy Joe Sales, published in Vanity Fair’s September issue, 2015, another picture of the availability of potential partners on Tinder is made visible: it’s too easy, it’s too easy, it’s too easy. Maybe there is some truth to Lisa’s advice about making sure you are diamond-like. A man in his twenties talks about how hard it is for him to settle down when without any effort he can hook up with a girl and have sex with her within twenty minutes. What he says makes me think of the song Another Night In by Tinderstick that illustrates the opposite and still the same: Doesn’t matter where she is tonight Or with whoever she spends her time If these arms were meant to hold her They were never meant to hold her so tight “It’s just a numbers game. Before, I could go out to a bar and talk to one girl, but now I can sit home on Tinder and talk to 15 girls,” a second one says. “I’ve gotten numbers on Tinder just by sending emojis,” says a third one. “Without actually having a conversation – having a conversation via emoji,” he continues. But that’s not the kind of woman you marry, they all agree. It is more about immediate satisfaction, according to the men from the article, who are all in their twenties and live somewhere in the New York metropolitan area. “It’s instant gratification,” a Brooklyn-based photographer says, “a validation of your own attractiveness by just, like, swiping your thumb on an app. You see some pretty girl and you swipe and it’s, like, oh, she thinks you’re

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attractive too, so it’s really addicting, and you just find yourself mindlessly doing it.” The young women from the article agree: It’s, like, fun to get the messages. If someone ‘likes’ you, they think you’re attractive. It’s a confidence booster. It is not strange that Bauman sarcastically speaks of the love of our time in terms of top-pocket relationships, I think, while continuing to read the article and at the same time obtaining information on everything from the top-ten mistakes a woman can make to alienate men to how I can find great love, or get an SMS-mortgage. As I see it, this stream of information aims to trigger my social responsiveness, that is, my urge to call out just to get a response and by only doing so get the feeling that I am recognized. It’s easy. But it’s not about love. “We don’t know what the girls are like,” says one of the young men from Sales’ article “And they don’t know us,” says another. To get emotionally involved with the other is seen as an obstacle that needs to be overcome by the young women from Sales’ article. “It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” says one. Another says: It’s not like just blind fucking for pleasure and it’s done; some people actually like the other person. Sometimes you actually catch feelings and that’s what sucks, because it’s one person thinking one thing and the other person thinking something completely different and someone gets their feelings hurt. It could be the boy or the girl. A researcher, who is being consulted for Sales’ article, states that the use of Tinder is showing the same patterns as the consumption of porn. The increased availability, made possible by technical developments, has a backlash – psychosexual obesity: The appetite has always been there, but it had restricted availability; with new technologies the restrictions are being stripped away and we see people sort of going crazy with it. I think the same thing is happening with this unlimited access to sex partners. People are gorging. That’s why it’s not intimate. You could call it a kind of psychosexual obesity. As Bauman (2003) has come to understand it, sex has been included in a sort of mall shopping mentality. Shopping for sex doesn’t even need to include having sex. “It’s a recreational activity. It’s entertainment,” as journalist Louise France put it in “Love at first sight,” Observer Magazine, already in 2002. Internet dating or dating app culture does not necessarily mean that we have more sex. Some statistical data points in another direction. “Number of

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sexual partners increased steadily between the G.I.s and 1960s-born Gen X’ers and then dipped among Millennials to return to Boomer levels,” psychologist Jean Twenge (2015) concludes on the basis of her and her co-author’s analysis of changes in American adult’s sexual behavior and attitudes, based on the General Social Survey, an almost annual, nationally representative survey that’s been administered between 1972 and 2012, including data from 11 million respondents. However, and this, I think, is one of Bauman’s more interesting arguments: internet dating and the industry of dating apps would not flourish if it weren’t aided by “the removal of full-time engagement, commitment and the obligation ‘of being there for you whenever you need me’ from the list of necessary conditions of partnership” (Bauman 2003, p. 66). None of the women or men from the article speak of the abomination that they perceive as being an emotional involvement with the other. Hence, we are dealing with a phenomenon in total opposite to the absolute sin, which Alberoni describes when speaking of infatuation: the destruction of the other. The ability to move on without feeling remorse and anguish – to leave the other behind – seems to be an ability one has to practice and master pretty well to make it in the current free relationship market. To fall crazily in love is not on the agenda for any of these sparkling people. Infatuation and love are not even being quietly mentioned. It cannot be found on Tinder. Maybe these young people find themselves somewhere other than in the sphere of infatuation or love; on a stage that is more appropriate for today’s twenty year olds, who are mainly expected to work on their self-development. Maybe sex is seen as a better companion than love when it comes to inventing yourself. At least that thought has crossed Giddens’ (1992) mind. He argues that sexual experimentation can make possible both the invention and development of the self. He calls this type of self-searching plastic sexuality. However, we need to make it clear that the young women from the article seem relatively unsatisfied with the sexual partners they hook up with through Tinder: A lot of guys are lacking in that department… What’s a real orgasm like? I wouldn’t know. I know how to give one to myself. Yeah, but men don’t know what to do… Without [a vibrator] I can’t have one… It’s never happened with a guy. It’s a huge problem. It is a problem. There seems to be strong agreement among the women concerning the fact that men are lacking something when it comes to sex. Maybe the philosopher Michel Foucault is right when he argues that the only new sexual pleasure invented during modern times is our willingness to talk about it. We have, accordingly, gone from ars erotica (erotic art) to scientia sexualis (science of sexuality).

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From the art of love to telling the truth about sex According to Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 57), civilization has installed a completely new desire within us – the desire to talk about our sexuality and to tell the truth about the sexes. We have developed what he calls a scientia sexualis. Hence, we have not invented new ways to enjoy or find pleasure in the sexual act; we are finding pleasure by talking about it. In many other societies, for example India, Japan, and China, ars erotica has developed as a way to find the truth about sex and pleasure. In ars erotica one finds the truth about sex in the sexual pleasures, a truth that can only be discovered through practice and needs to be experienced in practice. With the help from a master, who carries within the big secrets, you are let into a mystery, beyond absolute law, beyond the allowed and the forbidden, beyond all kinds of criteria to determine its usefulness: The effects of this masterful art, which are considerably more generous than the sparseness of its prescriptions would lead one to imagine, are said to transfigure the one fortunate enough to receive its privileges: an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits, the elixir of life, the elixir of death and its threats (Foucault [1976] 1978, p. 57 f.) Who can object to a truth like that? It is really only a few of the people I have spoken to about love who could object. But this desire is not unique to humans in contemporary Western societies; on the other hand, the pleasurable search for the truth about sex, or more correctly, the search for pleasure in the form of confession, probably is. Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 18 f.) finds the roots of this novelty in medieval Christianity and its requirements of confession. The exhaustive and periodic confession became an obligation for all Christians after the Lateran Council 1215. Thereafter, a change took place, following the Reformation, and this change was furthered by the Council of Trent – a split into what Foucault calls “confessions of the flesh,” which is part of the “technologies” of the modern self. The division that then occurs between Catholicism and Protestantism should not be underestimated. However, Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 19 f.) argues that one common trait still remains. Both sides develop methods for soul-searching in the shape of self-examination and penance. Among other things, it determines how you are supposed to speak about, and explore, sex and bodily pleasures. To receive the forgiveness of sins, you must not only realize and confess to being a sinner; you must also describe in what way and to what extent you are a sinner. Thus, it is not enough to admit that you are dreaming about having sex with X. You must also describe how often you are dreaming about having sex with X, how much you are enjoying the dreams about having sex with X, and what type of sex you are dreaming about having with X. Furthermore, you should describe your current relationship with X

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and in turn, the relationships X is having with other people. Perhaps you are even feeling a little bad for having these dreaming desires? Everything needs to be answered to make it possible to determine the degree of sin and the extent of the penance. At the end of the eighteenth century, the confession was, however, breaking away from the church setting – that is, the priests were ousted by teachers, doctors, economists and lawmakers, not to mention the emergence of the many different kinds of therapists, who took their place as the receivers of confession. Sex, and the sexes, thereby becomes a concern for society as a whole. Today we find the confessor and the receiver of confessions in each and every one of us. One could almost argue that all the people want to know, and get to know, everything when a steady stream of people post pictures and stories about their everyday life on social media. The question is, what does this kind of confession reveal about, and for, us? The development of the word aveu (avowal/confession) and its legal status can give us some directions. From having the meaning of indicating a person’s confirmation of another person’s power, status and identity, it now indicates a person’s capability to describe his or her own way of being, feeling, and thinking. Confession is no longer about conveying the truth about others, but about conveying the truth about yourself (Foucault [1976] 1978, p. 58). Furthermore, since the Christian confession, the truth about ourselves has become an issue revolving around sex and the sexes. It is the sex life that you are, above all, expected to be covering up. This gives the confession a specific shape and effect. For a long time, confession was something that only existed in the confessional. The ideal was to dissolve the truth and have it disappear as soon as it was openly declared and admitted. The role of the Christian confessional was to make the sin appear as something that never took place. In contrast to theology, the science that treats the active human being – the subject – as its object grew stronger by archiving and cataloging the truths revealed through the confession. Kaan, Krafft-Ebling, Tardieu, Molle, and Havelock Ellis are just a few of those who built the archive of sexual pleasures that has been a part of the emergence of the humanities (Foucault [1976] 1978, p. 63 f.). All of these men were on the lookout for peripheral sexual phenomena and registered them as perverse; these were used to help determine different individuals’ personalities – yes, even their true nature. Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 42 f.) uses the sodomite and its transformation into a homosexual as one of many disparate examples: As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present

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in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature… The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. According to Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 43f.), everything from Binet’s fetishist and Krafft-Ebing’s zoophiles and zoosexuals to mixoscophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles, sexoestethic inverts, and dyspareunial women came to be regarded as different species rather than a vague group of relapsing sinners. Thus, the pleasures of the sexes have not only been made visible by separation, they have also been tied to the body and transformed into something deeply characteristic of the individuals in question. Foucault (1997, p. 77) argues that, during the modern era, we have started to believe that our sex is the most important clue to finding the truth about ourselves. This has led us to believe that talking about the quirks of our sex is the best way to get to know ourselves and others. And as if that was not enough, we moreover seem to think that talking about it liberates us. The question is, however, whether the power lies within the speaker or the listener. Perhaps power even lies within the time and society which once forced the confession about ourselves out of us, a confession we today are ready to voluntarily give. As Foucault ([1976] 1978, p. 59) sees it, we have become a “confessing animal” by living in a confession society. If that is true, one can rightly state that society has offered us a technique to help us explore and judge ourselves. It then becomes crucial to realize that this technique, which from the beginning was intended to discipline our desires and our bodies to become docile tools in the honor of God, has undergone a transformation during the modern era. From being a tool to control the population, it has become a tool to incite us to invent and discover desires we did not even know we had. At worst, it is not even a question of desires, but about wishes. Simultaneous to the idea of the confession as an act of liberation, an ideal of sexual liberation has emerged. This is at least as demanding to live up to as the ideal of sexual restraint. How many of us are not pondering the fact that there must be something wrong with us if we do not have sex often enough? At the same time, few of us know what “often enough” means. You could think: more is better. But not even that is correct. There are, quite simply, no clear guidelines. There is, rather, a feeling of, in principle, everything being wrong and this leads to a dissatisfaction that is ultimately directed towards oneself. On this note, we are closing in on another contemporary Western invention: suffering as a focal point in the story of ourselves. The inner and personal suffering has developed parallel with, and through, the triumphal march of psychoanalysis, or with help from the self-help culture that has been established in its wake.

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The rise of mental suffering The strong influence that the culture of self-help has had on us rests on the idea that everyone – no matter where we come from and what we have been through – can reach success and happiness through willpower and self-control. Even if the doctor and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wished to democratize the treatment of those that suffered mentally, he was much less optimistic. According to him, people without financial-, cultural- and social capital have very little to gain by being separated from their neuroses. In 1883 Freud wrote, among other things, the following to his future wife Martha Bernays: The mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity, we economize in our health, our capacity for enjoyment, and our emotions. We save ourselves for something, not knowing what. And this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. … Why don’t we get drunk? Because the discomfort and disgrace of the aftereffects gives us more unpleasure than the pleasure we derived from getting drunk. Why don’t we fall in love with a different person every month? Because at each separation a part of our heart would be torn away. … Our whole conduct of life presupposes that we are protected from this poverty … The poor people, the masses, could not strive without their thick skins and their easy going ways. … Why should they scorn the pleasures of the moment when no other awaits them? (Freud 1992, p. 50) As Freud understands it, a person’s ability to help herself is conditioned by her social class. Success is not an aim in psychoanalysis; the focus is rather on establishing an ability to be able to live with one’s mental conflicts. This ability can seldom be established through pure willpower or self-control, but through long-term psychoanalytical therapy and work. With psychologists such as Carl Rogers, an unconditioned positive view of oneself was being advocated and gained public interest. Out of different reasons, to build up neurological defenses toward one’s greatness as a human being is associated with illness. Health and self-realization thus become one and the same thing (Illouz 2007, p. 44f.). The importance of self-realization was echoed in the 1970s political criticism of capitalism: the artistic critique. Unlike previously, self-realization and health are no longer phrased using materialistic terms; that is, they are no longer phrased in the shape of a social criticism against capitalism. Yet, what selfrealization, and health, really mean is not clear. Just as in the case of the different sexual behaviors, a multitude of emotionally unhealthy behaviors are identified; that is, deviations from the ideal of self-realization. A distinct example is that the lack of intimacy becomes an overriding framework for the therapeutic narrative. The recurring talk of people, who for different reasons

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are afraid of commitment or in other ways are incapable of intimacy, as failing people, is one of many indications of this. The lack of a functioning relationship is all of a sudden perceived as being a personal failure, in contrast to previously when it was rather looked upon as a social or societal failure. There are many names for this abomination: “ontological insecurity,” “sick,” “neurotic,” “misfit,” “dysfunctional,” “uptight,” “frigid,” etcetera. In the book Cold Intimacies (2007, p. 46 ff.) Illouz argues that Foucault is mistaken in stating that the therapeutic narrative, that is, the story we create about ourselves with help from psychoanalysis and self-help culture, revolves around the pleasure of telling the truth about sex. Instead, she argues that the therapeutic narrative revolves around a multitude of mental sufferings, which result from an unidentified ideal of mental health and self-realization. In a therapeutic conversation, the aim is to make repressed experiences of personal suffering accessible. In this way, conversational therapy can be perceived as a process that brings forth suffering and is a co-creator of that same suffering it is aiming to cure. During contemporary times, this creates a tension between the victim story as a focal point of therapy culture and the extension of human rights, the commercialization of mental health, and the regulation of the psych-professions. The relatively newfound freedom that is a part of the idea of everyone’s self-realization thus has a downside: mental suffering. At the same time, the right to talk about suffering is democratized. Not everyone is rich and famous. But everyone can and has the right to talk about their suffering. In fact, modernity in the form of capitalism and consumerism has made us hypersensitive, rather than rational. The analysis cannot, however, end here. We must acknowledge that cultural practices, such as psychoanalysis, always have meaning for their practitioners and must moreover be justified by them. As in all cultural practices there are winners and losers; those who are included, and receive parts of the economic and social privileges that are being generated, and those that are excluded. As I discussed in the book’s introduction, the psychoanalytical practice (and to some extent also the self-help culture) results in a specific emotional style: a social capital in the shape of abilities such as expressive communication, empathy, flexibility, creativity and self-reflection. It is often described in terms of emotional competence or emotional intelligence, something that is called for when, for example, personality tests are used. In other words, the emotional style brought forth by psychoanalysis is not only a social capital, but also something that more directly can be transformed into economic capital. In today’s society, it is specifically this type of emotional style that is considered to make us employable. It is required for qualified networking, which is important in times when project-based employment is becoming more common. In addition, as I described earlier, based on statistical calculations it has been stated that companies which hire employees with a higher degree of emotional competence generate a higher profit than companies with employees that have a lower degree of emotional intelligence. Thus, there is a direct correlation between emotional style and economics. Moreover, emotional competence

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and emotional intelligence can be linked to social class, according to Illouz (2007, p. 62 ff.), who argues that it is often members of the wealthy middle class that have psychoanalysis experiences and who display the above-mentioned preferred emotional style. It is us, who belong to this class, who are able to best handle the strains that intimate relationships bring about. I do not know if Illouz has enough empirical support to make the above claim. But, I do know how reality unveils when you fall in love with a person you met on Tinder, since I have gained insight into, and analyzed, an extensive Messenger correspondence that covers this in length. Hence I know something about how the loving speaks. I can also confirm that a certain amount of suffering permeates this type of love speech. Sexuality is also present, simultaneously; and when you find the right one, you let yourself loose. Or, perhaps more accurately, fabulous love-making is taken as a sign of having found the perfect match in the love market. As far as I can see, much indicates that the truth about sex and sexuality, as well as suffering, plays an important role in the contemporary human being’s story of herself, that is, for her selfunderstanding. Of course, the speech is not univocal, but from what I have heard and gained insight into during the last few years it seems like the women and men from the Vanity Fair article are right about it often being a mistake to hold on to the idea of your Tinder fling as your future significant other: the person who will make you viable and whole. For many – yet, not for all – this form of romance is divisive rather than healing.

A shooting star To grasp and make visible the repetitive pattern I have observed many times – a kind of broken resonance –in the following I will reproduce a number of longer passages from a conversation, ranging over a couple of months in duration, between two Swedish women in their thirties. Let us call them Clara and Ann when we follow them on their Messenger journey that ends in tones of melancholia. I will analyze the content of the conversation by mainly using the thoughts on depression that Kristeva is developing in the book Soleil Noir: depression et melancolie (Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy) from 1987. I went to Zack [an American man in his forties that Clara met on Tinder], we had amazing sex, which we always have. He tells me in bed that he will go back to San Diego this Sunday for a new job that was way too good to turn down; two months with a good salary and a free car and accommodation. Since he is a freelance musician he couldn’t get that type of job in New York during those months. ANN: Hm… That was still kind of fine. He has to work. CLARA: Yes, but now he is here [in New York] for a few days and is working on a musical and is so stressed about it, and everything with the jet lag and stuff, so he has difficulties sleeping and didn’t want me to sleep with CLARA:

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him. He really is stressed out and neurotic and sensitive, but that’s also why I like him. ANN: Yeah, but consider yourself too. Does he at all have time for you in his life? And what space do you give yourself in your life? It seems to be all about him. CLARA: He said he wanted to meet this Friday and we said that I could visit him in San Diego in August, cause I can, I’m going to California anyway and haven’t decided when I’m going. But I haven’t heard from him since I left him on Tuesday and I think he simply dumped me in his own way… and that’s probably how it is then… ANN: Yes, then that’s how it is. CLARA: I’m really sorry about it… and that I could have these strong feelings for him for a long time without him feeling the same… that I can fool myself this way ANN: But Clara, I don’t think you love him. Not with the way he treats you. He’s only hurting you. You have to watch out for yourself. CLARA: I don’t know how to watch out for myself, it’s simple like that. And I should really only focus on how I feel in this and as you say what space do I occupy in my own life and in his if I want it that way. But he has been truly passionate with me and for me. ANN: Okay, but let that go for a while and focus on everything else in your life except just him. For real. It’s important. CLARA: We’ve been in touch pretty much every day since January [for six months]… ANN: Yes, and you can continue to stay in touch. But what does your connection look like? What do you talk about? CLARA: I have never felt this way for any other but him, that’s how it is. Not even for Viktor [a Swedish man in his upper forties that Clara earlier had a longer relationship with, but left him because she found out he was cheating or at least suspected he was]. There is an attraction and electricity between us that I’ve never experienced before. My body is totally addicted to him. ANN: Is that so? That’s bad. CLARA: I know… but as I said… I just have to get that it is over and also take care of myself and my needs, I know that… but he is just totally my type… complicated, neurotic, hyper sensitive, super bright, super creative, super talented, self-absorbed, egocentric and I’m going to fall apart if he doesn’t contact me again, or doesn’t want to see me Friday or have me come to him in August… ANN: Narcissist, how sad. CLARA: Yes, self-absorbed and low self-esteem, maybe not really narcissistic. ANN: Shit the same! You can’t be thaaaat dependent on a guy no matter what. CLARA: No, I know, I really have to stop that… but he’s not a regular man… At the same time Anders [a Swedish man in his forties that Clara earlier

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has had a relatively short and shallow relationship with and who back then didn’t want to get any more serious than hooking up when convenient in time and place] is sending pictures of the nice little cottage he’s building. ANN: It is possible that Zack isn’t a narcissist. But, why is he so important to you? Try to answer honestly. CLARA: Because he is just as fine as I have tried to describe him. It is something so special between us and I haven’t experienced that before. He reaches places in me and parts of my personality that no one else has even come close to before. Sounds like a cliché, but that’s how it is. And I don’t want to lose him, but realizing that might happen. Yet I think he feels the same way for me. Or at least that’s what I have thought because he told me so. ANN: Well, I think you have to deal with your feeling of abandonment. CLARA: Yes, I know. And it will never happen. I will probably continue like this for the rest of my life; like getting involved with men who don’t want me in a deeper sense because I can’t or don’t dare to love someone or let myself be loved for real. It’s depressing to realize that and to realize that I probably never will have a functioning, healthy relationship with any man. I’m getting suicidal just by thinking about it. I will always be truly alone. ANN: Maybe. Or you are working hard to put words to your feelings of abandonment and by doing so objectifying them and distancing yourself from them. CLARA: I know that Anders wants me in a deeper sense now, but my body doesn’t want him anymore… ANN: Of course you won’t be alone forever Clara. CLARA: Yes, that’s how it’s going to be. Ann, I know it. This was just like another confirmation of that fact. I wish that my body wanted Jules [a colleague in his fifties who lives in New York]. He wants me too, but it [Clara’s body] doesn’t want it, so it’s like not possible. My body just wants Zack. ANNA: Don’t listen to your body then. Give it a chance with Anders. Get a life here [in Sweden]. CLARA: That’s not possible. If I don’t want to have sex it won’t work. And I don’t want a life in Sweden. But it’s all so freaked out. I’m such a freak, for real. I must get myself together. I won’t text Zack anymore, I’ve said and done all I can to keep him. ANN: Good. Then that’s a closed chapter. CLARA: Yes, I know! ANN: Put a parenthesis around all men for a while. Promise me. Enjoy your wonderful life instead. CLARA: Yes… I should… but I don’t have a wonderful life… If Zach doesn’t get in touch with me again I will fall apart for real and not want anything more to do about love. I’m too broken to love.

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Already at the beginning of the conversation between Clara and Ann we can see the contours of Clara’s unwillingness, or even inability, to accept losing the object of her love. At the same time, she fears that this is exactly what will happen. Maybe it has happened already? Zack has probably left her behind. Moved on as if nothing happened. No! Clara cannot handle that thought. It remains impossible to fully think that; unbearable. Zack awakens emotions within her that she has never been in touch with before. What Clara fails to see is that she is captured in her own affections, which brings to the surface traces of distant memories of long-lost love objects. She is carrying all of these – a time gone by – as if they were stored in her body. Zack is bigger or more than anything she has ever experienced before when it comes to love: “complicated, neurotic, hyper sensitive, super bright, super talented, selfabsorbed, egocentric.” But, just this combination of personality traits will, according to Clara herself, destroy her. Does she wish for her own destruction? Is she enjoying the idea or does it not matter to her any more, because she thinks she is “too broken to love” anyway? As we will see further along in Ann and Clara’s conversation, there is a certain clarity to Clara and her knowing she is deemed to lose the one, or the ones, she loves. It might well be the case that Clara is mourning more intensely when she sees the shadow of a long-lost love. Maybe that is the process we are witnessing in her love speech. In Kristeva ([1987] 1989, p. 5) we find support for such an interpretation. At the same time, melancholy or depression is for Kristeva, as it is for Freud, an inability to mourn. The depressive melancholy is an expression for the fragile self that is fused with the other: originally the mother. It is probably more likely, or at least just as likely, that it is this process we are witnessing in Clara’s talk. But what are the foundations that lay the ground for the inability to mourn a lost love object, for example the mother: weak parenting, biological sensitivity? That question is Kristeva’s ([1987] 1989, p. 9 f.) and she argues that the sphere of melancholy, or the depressive sphere, is a shadowland between the biological and symbolic. Thus, she does not separate one from the other. Neither will I. I will only try to reach a deeper understanding of the love speech in front of us. In Kristeva’s ([1987] 1989, p. 9 f.) thinking, melancholy and depression are intertwined since she argues that there are no clear borders between what in psychiatry has been called melancholy and the type of illness which only responds through administration of chemical therapy. Instead of separating different types of depression and determining the effect of different antidepressants or mood-stabilizing drugs on their symptoms, Kristeva adopts a Freudian perspective. She explores the depressive melancholy composite by taking as a starting point object loss and the linguistic modification of signifying bonds. According to her, it is the inability to do the latter that distinguishes the depressive melancholic person. That person is not able to put into words her experience of shortage or despair – the loss – in a meaningful way.

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Naming is not experienced as a reward for the depressive melancholic person, but as a punishment that in many cases is anxiety-provoking. Thus, the thought process deteriorates: it becomes slow and sluggish, just as the psychomotor activity does. Alternatively, on the contrary, the thought process and one’s associative abilities are accelerating in an uncontrolled manner. Regardless, the intolerance of object loss and the inability to find consolation or compensation in language use distinguishes the depressive melancholic person. Before getting deeper into Kristeva’s thoughts on the composition of melancholy/depression, we will return to Clara and Ann’s conversation, which still, a few days’ later than when we last visited it, revolves around the object of Clara’s desire or love: Zack still hasn’t contacted me. And I haven’t been able to refrain from sending e-mails and SMS. I have zero dignity, but he has zero maturity. ANN: Precisely! Fuck him. You have to. CLARA: I know. But I don’t get any of it. How did this happen? Why is he treating me like dirt? Why am I allowing myself to be treated like dirt? There must be an end for this kind of thing on my part. After my e-mail and after my last SMS where I ask him to respond to whether he wants to see me tonight and that I understand if he doesn’t want to and in that case I will throw away his number and do my best to forget about him and leave him alone if he just tells me if he wants to end it with me or not, I receive this response: Hey thanks for writing. I really think the world of you and would love to see more of you, opportunities permitting. I don’t want anything serious, though. And it feels like it’s getting more serious than I’m up for. As I’ve said, given the opportunity for us to spend time together – where we live in the same city, for example – that would be one thing. As it stands, the only time we’ve had in the same city has been burdened by the fact that one of us has just crossed several time zones to make it happen. This does not, in my experience, lend itself to casually getting to know and enjoy one another. I’m totally attracted to you and would love to hang out when we can – naked and otherwise. Unfortunately, tonight is not going to work. As for California, let’s discuss a few weeks down the road. OK? Thanks, Z1 ANN: Dump him!!! CLARA: Right? I’m not going to answer and say nothing right? ANN: Say thanks, but no thanks! CLARA: What is he really saying here?? Why does he say he’s attracted to me and wants to hang out? He simply can’t take that I’m completely dumping him? He doesn’t want to lose my affirmations and he thinks I want to meet him on his terms in California. ANNA: He wants to have sex when the opportunity permits it. I’m sorry to have to say it. But I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how it is. Clara, he is actually pretty honest and types it like it is. What more is there to get? CLARA:

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Yes, you’re right. That’s how it is. I thought it was more, we’ve had a deeper connection than that. I thought… So, who the HELL does he think he is??? The worst is that I can’t stand the thought of not having any more contact with him… I can’t stand the thought of completely dumping him. ANN: Then you must take what you can get and stick with it. CLARA: But I’m not getting anything… and what I get is so fucking immature and unfinished and undignified. I must dump him. I know. It’s going to take some time but I have to. ANN: Yes. Just do it! Please. CLARA: Or maybe I’m also just on this maturity level, that thought is frightening to me. What never can become real; just being thought. ANN: Come on! CLARA: But I wanted more with him… ANN: Make sure you get it then. You are the best and deserve it. CLARA:

About a month later the conversation continues in a somewhat tentative manner, but almost instantly it turns its focus to Zack. Meanwhile, Clara has not once contacted Ann. I haven’t heard from you in some time and just wanted to check in. Maybe you’re talking to someone else? CLARA: I’m not talking to anyone. Miiiiiss you! ANN: But how are you doing? I worry when you disappear like that. For real. CLARA: Awe, don’t worry. Just working a lot and I’m making a new plan for my entire life basically. I’m actively looking for jobs here [in New York] now and don’t want anything else but to move here when I’ve gotten a job. I’m also spending time with friends here and it just feels natural to move here now. Zack is in California, did I tell you that? And Anders just wants me back. ANN: Ok. Then you’re doing fine. Great! CLARA: Yes, I’m doing fine, I just don’t want to go back to Sweden… Don’t know how I will cope with life there until I get a job here. ANN: Hmm… Take Anders back into your life. CLARA: Yeah… I don’t want Anders back even if he has tried to be super-sweet and showed a new self-awareness. But I don’t believe in us anymore, not like a third time. He probably just wants to hunt, all the old will repeat itself when I’m fully in it again. Anders hates New York, just that thing. ANN: Ok. CLARA: I’m going to visit Zack in California in San Diego for a couple of days next week… ANN: ??? CLARA: Zack, good how we’ve been going back and forth. We’ve hardly seen each other all summer since he was only in New York for a few days and then he was working and could hardly see me, then he went back to the same spot in San Diego for a new gig that is going until September. ANN:

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A few days later the conversation continues. At the beginning Anders is mentioned. He has started to act in an unpredictable manner, according to Clara. All of a sudden he has begun to send naked pictures of himself. Anders is going nuts, e-mailing and sending pictures (naked pictures!!!) almost everyday. ANN: What! Naked pictures? Of himself ? Help! I want to see. CLARA: Yes, and he says that he only wants me bla, bla, bla, and that he will make me his queen and that we would have 50 years of love together… He’s gone crazy. But I’ve said that I have to live in New York and he must let go and move on and find a new love… ANN: Oops! CLARA: As said, I don’t know what he’s doing. He wrote on my wall here on Facebook as a comment that he thought we should go to Morocco (because I had written for fun in my status on Mission Impossible that I want to go to Morocco). ANN: As if it wasn’t enough that he exposed his genitals. CLARA: Haha, yes, he has sent naked pictures of himself, sweet ones, not only of his genitals but of all of him in the countryside – with a remote control. A bit like Näcken [Poseidon] or Evert Taube. ANN: Geez! Have to see. CLARA: I feel a little sorry for him now, but he will find a new love soon. He should’ve realized what he had when he had me. ANN: Yes, he should’ve. Now he can only blame himself. I think you were lucky not ending up in a serious thing with him. CLARA: Yes, I was. It’s good. Besides, he has a drink problem, but it’s only me and his mom who’ve understood that. Don’t tell anyone and if you tell Fredrik [Ann’s boyfriend], promise not to spread the word… And I really can’t get excited about him anymore… ANN: I won’t say a thing. CLARA: I think he will soon find a woman that is 20 years younger. It will probably work out… This Friday I’m going to Zack in San Diego… Staying until Tuesday. But Zack is who he is and we’ll see what happens after that… it will probably just fade away… But I just want him and can’t get excited about anyone else right now. Sigh. ANN: Hm… Just take care of yourself. CLARA:

A week after Ann finished off by urging Clara to take care of herself, Clara picks up the conversation again: Yes, Zack yes… oh my god… we’ve been going at it, mostly with our phones and he’s now after many months back in New York for a few months before he’s going off for the next gig and the first thing he does is pick up the relationship with his ex that he said he’d ended… just because she’s “conveniently closeby”… and if I had only lived there things

CLARA:

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would’ve been different he says… but like hell it would’ve. He’s immature and way too self-absorbed and sensitive and very very creative and intelligent. Why, oh why am I falling for that type… but I’m deadly in love with him. Don’t want anyone else, so I’m making all the mistakes one can make… Tried to date others but my body only wants him, what the hell is wrong with me?? And Anders… poor thing… has tried to get me back all this time until just recently when he realized it is over and that he himself is partly to blame. Now he’s unfriended me on Facebook. I actually think he in a way was serious about wanting me back “for real” and take his chance on me and as he said, to live many many happy years together. He was totally ready to share everything with me and to be a real man and partner. He was even prepared to give me another child, at least he said so… And I actually believe that he’s truly unhappy now, for real… but I don’t want him, I feel nothing for him anymore and it’s so damn nice. And how lucky I was that we didn’t end up together when I wanted us to. It would’ve only ended in misery… ANN: But you never want anyone who wants you… that’s not good at all… CLARA: No I know… but one day I will!! Or I’ll be lonely for the rest of my life. That’s something I’m beginning to accept. Although, if Z wants me for real one day, then I want to marry him and spend the rest of my life with him… That’s just how it is. ANN: Yeah, that’s what you say now… CLARA: No, somewhere inside me I know that’s how it is and it feels really good. I think it’ll be us in the end. Haven’t felt such a peculiar and sensible confidence before, despite the mess we’re in right now. We have a connection I’ve never had with anyone else and when we are together in real life it’s incredibly intense on all levels. And when we’re apart it’s like we can’t let go of one another even though we know that that might be the best thing to do right now. Maybe he’ll mature… In lack of something better: a soulmate and the most intense sex I’ve ever had. I think he feels the same way. I think he also feels like we are something completely unique together. ANN: Yes, maybe… CLARA: Or he doesn’t and he’ll manage to push me away and will end up regretting it for the rest of his life. ANN: If he feels like you’re completely unique, why isn’t he taking a chance on you? CLARA: He’s really afraid and wants to be in control. I don’t think he’s met someone like me before. You know European with all that comes with that and having a higher education and such… People like you and I don’t grow on trees!!! People like us are, like, MUCH of EVERYTHING. ANN: en he should nurture you. Demand it! Like, MUCH of EVERYTHING… CLARA: Yes, let’s see what happens. But he has to realize it himself too and if he doesn’t then that’s the way it is.

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The leap of love into the depressive sphere Your men usually do. But too late, when you’ve moved on… And if he doesn’t, yeah, then he wasn’t the right one for me after all. Then all I’m feeling is temporarily transient, but I really don’t think so. Not this time. It’s fundamentally different from what I felt for any other of all my men. So… I really hope it’ll be us. And now Anders is sending an SMS telling me he misses me although he removed me from Facebook. Poor him…

ANN:

CLARA:

The conversation between Clara and Ann continues in a manner that isn’t distinctively different from earlier. At the same time, Clara’s intolerance towards object loss clearly grows stronger. She knows very well where Zack is at in the relationship. He has, with all necessity, explained himself on that point. “I don’t want anything too serious, though,” he bluntly writes. Which is precisely what Clara’s friend Ann also perceives and confirms? “He wants to have sex when the opportunity permits it. I’m sorry to have to say it. But I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how it is.” Yet Clara isn’t receptive to what any of them say and seem to honestly mean. Instead, Clara shows both grief and aggression towards the object of her love, which according to classic psychoanalytical theory is a symptom of depression. Thus, the depressive state houses an ambivalence. The accusations of oneself, which depressed people often express, are within psychoanalysis often perceived as being an accusation towards the other. This movement is found in black and white in the above passages from Clara and Ann’s conversation. Whatever Zack is incapable of giving – if anything at all – is “so fucking immature and unfinished and undignified,” Clara writes. A confusion between the other and the self is taking place. Perhaps that is why we here are dealing with “what never can become real; just being thought,” as Clara put it. Karl Abraham (1924) and Freud (1917) talk about the desire to swallow the other or to fill one’s holes with what one lacks, as a strategy that depressed persons use to be better able to live with the other that he or she cannot tolerate. Chopped into pieces, chewed and spitted upon; everything is better than an absolute loss of the love object. In the conversation between Clara and Ann, both idealizations and defamations take place. In one single sentence Clara manages the feat of both idealizing and defaming Zack. “He’s immature and way to self-absorbed and sensitive and very very creative and bright,” she writes to Ann. Thereafter she defames herself: “Why, oh why am I falling for that type… but I’m deadly in love with him. Don’t want anyone else, so I’m making all the mistakes one can make… Tried to date others but my body only wants him, what the hell is wrong with me?” When Clara, on the other hand, claims that Zack probably never met someone like her, an idealization of the self takes place, which also includes Ann. “I don’t think he’s met someone like me before. You know European with all that comes with that and having a higher education and such… People like you and I don’t grow on trees! People like us are, like, MUCH of EVERYTHING…”

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According to classic psychoanalytical theory, we could further understand the aggression directed towards the other as a sort of extension of an unexpected sexual desire: a displacement of the real loss that is manifest in the anxiety of losing the other by surviving yourself. “Maybe he’ll mature,”m Clara writes. “In lack of something better: a soulmate and the most intense sex I’ve ever had. I think he feels the same way. I think he also feels like we are something completely unique together.” Without a doubt this is the voice, or more correctly, the writings, of an abandoned subject. However, the subject is not yet separated from the object of love, since the object of love is kept alive by being incorporated in the self. It is this type of depressed and melancholic person Kristeva describes as suicidal, meaning they wish to disappear, since the other, which is being housed within them, is evil but at the same time a part of their individual personality. Clara is far from being the only one, amongst all I’ve spoken to, who brings life to this train of thought. Yet another Swedish highly educated woman in her thirties, whom I’ve been in contact with and call Elin, expresses herself in the following manner: X has already deprived me of my dignity and pulverized me into nothingness. Something is seriously wrong with me, but we already knew that. I’m depressed and just care about him so damn much. Can’t bear to fail in love like this but can’t see the end of it. Can hardly breathe tight now because of all anguish and sadness… How can it be that X just don’t want to see me… He’s still crushed by his ex he said on the phone yesterday. She was a 22-year-old drug addict… Like, what the hell! I’m too good for him… right??? And to not just be able to say you don’t want to hang out anymore and I have said way too many great and honest and bleeding things… Can someone shoot me now? He really despises me now. I am such a fuckingstupidmoron. Fuck, shoot me, please. X should crave for, and beg and cry to hang out with ME! And if he’s not doing that, then he’s not worthy of me. Fuck, I’m so damn tired of diminishing myself and being self-effacingly destructive. ENOUGH NOW!!! Elin speaks of herself as being depressed. She thinks, just as Clara, that there is something seriously wrong with her. The fact that Elin expresses herself in this manner is not necessarily a result of her frustration with the other. It could also be a result of a more primitive self that is hurt, incomplete, and empty: a narcissistic wound. In more modern psychoanalytical treatment it has been noted that depressed people do not always consider themselves to be wronged or offended, but instead experience that something is seriously wrong with themselves. Thus, it has been suggested that the melancholy/depression composite is the most archaic form, or expression, of the non-symbolic unnamable narcissistic wound, which is so valuable to the melancholic depressive person that no one on the outside can be used as a reference point. The depressed mood is and remains the only substitute that the melancholic depressive can relate to and

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it is being nourished and kept alive in the absence of any other substitute. The thought of suicide is, in such a case, not a disguised act – a tragic and illconcealed wish to kill the other – but a fusion between the depressed mood and the despair felt by the depressed melancholic person and it goes beyond the impossible love, which is always to be found somewhere else. The depressed is not, in this case, mourning an object, but the Thing. The real thing is not given any meaning at all, because it has been separated from the object of love and desire. According to Kristeva ([1987] 1989, p. 146 ff.), this is precisely what the poet Nerval is trying to grasp when he speaks of an event with no presence; a light with no representation. The Thing is the imagined sun; simultaneously shining and black. I imagine myself, the black sun, as the sharp and penetrating light that is recurring in so many near-death experiences. You are not dreaming of the sun, but of an even stronger light. If I have understood psychoanalytical theory correctly, the problem seems to be that no erotic object can replace what was originally lost, which for the person in question leads to one disappointing love following after another. Alternatively, the depressed will fall back into loneliness with the unmentionable Thing, which can only be recognized in experiences of discouragement and despair: the substitute of the Thing. Kristeva ([1987] 1989, p. 163 ff.) parallels the depressed with an atheist robbed of all meaning. At the same time, the depressed is also a mystic, since she stays wounded and captive by, and in, her own affections. The affective is therefore the depressive’s business. Without any trust in the healing powers of language, the melancholic depressed person cannot physically unite with the other (over time), nor can she psychologically process its loss. Expressed in more Hegelian terms, the melancholic depressed person is stripped of the possibility to rest upon the other and from that position finds herself to be someone who is able to love and be loved. Let us return to Clara and Ann’s conversation, an additional month after our last encounter, to take stock of Clara’s thoughts when she realizes it is over between her and Zack. Let us, after this, put all the different pieces from the conversation together and, unfortunately, from doing so we will see how one bad relationship follows another and how discouragement and despair seem to be the very lasting feelings in Clara’s experiential world: It is over with Zack. He turned out to be exactly as immature as I feared but as I hoped he would turn out not to be. He has hurt me and treated me like shit. I’m so fucking sad and so fucking disappointed and everything feels SHITTY. He’s probably had a girlfriend this whole time and just had me like an erotic adventure and so when I’m only a few blocks away from him he freaks out cause he can’t handle his feelings and the mental issues involved in keeping his girlfriend and me apart, I’m fairly certain that that’s what happened. And it feels SHITTY, to have been deceived and scammed by him… And I hate it. And to not have meant more to him than some kind of fictitious adventure when I was so

CLARA:

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fuuuucking in love. And when I should’ve taken all the warning signs seriously like everyone else said and did… I’m such an idiot Ann. But NOW it’s OVER with him. ANN: I thought it was over a long time ago. He’s never been serious. Now stop chasing idiots and let yourself be chased and just be with men who love you and aren’t afraid of doing or saying so. Just that. HE is a shit. Not you. CLARA: Yes, but somehow I believed him when he was sweet in his SMS and talked about how the long-distance thing was a hassle… But huuuuugs… sure he’s a SHIT!!!! I lend myself to being so fucking fooled… But it’s nice that he shows his true face and ass, it actually wasn’t me who was an idiot but him being a real asshole. And all the time and energy and money I’ve spent on him… what a fucking loser he is…!!! I’m deeply saddened by him and I want him. After all he has been in my phone since January and we’ve met rather consistently and the sex have been insanely good… But I now think that Zack is incapable of feeling deeper feelings for anyone, that he’s extremely egocentric and manipulative with control needs and obsessions; an extremely troubled guy with multiple diagnoses. Meanwhile Anders has been in touch consistently and misses me a lot… And a couple of other men here in New York, who absolutely wanted to meet with me this week… So THERE ARE real men who actually WANT to see me. And I’ve wasted my time on that fucking asshole…

Love puts existence into play Sociologists like Hochschild (2012) and Illouz ([2012] 2014, p. 159 ff.) advocate that today we are more vulnerable and exposed in our love relations than we were just a few decades ago. Our whole being – everything we are and are given the opportunity to be recognized for – is put into play according to them. The only recognition of utterly personal value to the individual is love. That seems to be the case with Clara. On the other hand, the idea of man’s vulnerability, as a needing and desiring being, is not time dependent, but rather universal. We have already discussed Hegel, who was clear that love is the most elementary form of recognition, which other forms of recognition like rights and solidarity rest upon and have been developed from (Honneth 1995). Today it seems like an inverse process has taken place in so far that justice and solidarity have become the foundation of love as the form of recognition that the adult person’s self-esteem is dependent on. Hegel has, once again, been turned upside down, but in a way that differs from Karl Marx’s well-known way.2 It is, namely, the personal life, rather than the cosmic order or social structure, which is in focus in today’s Western societies. In the past, a person’s dignity was maintained despite the inherent troubles of love. The suffering caused by unanswered love was invigorating and cleansing. Something as peculiar as mutual tragic love was even desirable;

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Tristan and Iseult. To endure suffering got you to grow closer to God. Thereafter, love, in its increasingly secular forms, became an expression and a confirmation of a person’s social position and gender identity. However, there are few reasons to question the fact that it hurts when our luck in love fails us, no matter the community spirit or era we exist in. Already in the classical literature we can find the concept of love melancholy, which to my great surprise is not something one speaks of today. Love and depression are instead destined to stand side by side in art, science and everyday life, without being connected in one word, or two, as an expression of a uniform phenomenon: love with depression or depressive love. This indicates that we are not fully aware of the ways in which love tends to be misunderstood in our time. Both love and depression are central emotional phenomena in the emotional script, but there are very few, if any, who explicitly talk about the consequences of this fact.

The antique roots of depressive love The relation between love and illness, madness or suffering, is relatively often discussed in classical literature. The love poetry of Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) is well known. The three-part book Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), where he gives advice on how to become a gentleman, meet a girl and take care of one’s hygiene, is still copied and used as dating advice, not least on the internet.3 But in contrast to the one who really suffers from love, who loves because that is all he knows, Ovid suggests that one is supposed to pretend to be up to the hilt in love; worship and see the other as God-like, in order to seduce her: All lovers should be pallid, it’s chic to be pale; Only a fool denies it, pale skin rarely fails… Look lean, it suggests passion… Night after sleepless night, Loss of appetite, Worry, love-sickness, they all make The young lover thin as a rake. For your purpose, look so pitiful that you move the world to exclaim, ‘He’s in love!’, Ovid advises the aspirant libertine. (Tallis 2005, p. 95) However, the epic poem Metamorphoses, which includes fifteen books and over 250 myths, as well as spanning from the creation of the world to Ovid’s own complicated time that was marked by the death of Julius Caesar, is for us modern Westerners by far the most important source from the GreekRoman mythology. The poem depicts the cruelty of jealous gods, as well as monsters, magic and illusions. Yet, it mainly deals with the pathos of love, often with reference to Medea. In the poem’s seventh book we find the following passage: Medea, you struggle in vain: some god, I do not know which, opposes you. I wonder if this, or something, like this, is what people indeed call

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love? Or why would the tasks my father demands of Jason seem so hard? They are more than hard! Why am I afraid of his death, when I have scarcely seen him? What is the cause of all this fear? Quench, if you can, unhappy girl, these flames that you feel in your virgin heart! If I could, I would be wiser! But a strange power draws me to him against my will. Love urges one thing: reason another. I see, and I desire the better: I follow the worse. Why do you burn for a stranger, royal virgin, and dream of marriage in an alien land? This earth can also give you what you can love. Whether he lives or dies, is in the hands of the gods. Let him live! I can pray for this even if I may not love him: what is Jason guilty of ? Who, but the heartless, would not be touched by Jason’s youth, and birth, and courage? Who, though the other qualities were absent, could not be stirred by his beauty? In the book From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (2012), the literary scholar Clark Lawlor argues that “depressive love melancholy” – which, without arguing for it, he distinguishes from, for example, Medeia’s heroic, tempestuous and burning love – was a relatively unusual phenomenon in the classical literature. On the other hand, love melancholy was given an increasingly prominent place towards the end of the classical era. In The Ethiopian Story, by Heliodorus, we encounter Chariclea who falls in love with Theagenes, but suffers from love melancholy when she loses the object of her love. A wise doctor sets the diagnosis: Can you not see that her condition is of the soul and that the illness is clearly love? Can you not see the dark rings under her eyes, how restless is her gaze, and how pale is her face, though she does not complain of internal pain. Can you not see that her concentration wanders, that she is suffering from an unaccountable insomnia and has suddenly lost her selfconfidence. Chariclea, you must search for the man to cure her, the only one, the man she loves. (cited in Lawlor 2012, p. 30 f) If a reunion, which is suggested as the cure by the doctor, was possible in all existing cases of melancholy we would not have much to speak about. Now, that is not the case, which many already in ancient times experienced. Claudius Galen, one of the most influential doctors in ancient times who, among other things, attended to the emperor of Rome, clearly saw the connection between love and melancholy. His approach to melancholy became the dominating line of approach during medieval times and for a long time to come. Galen identifies three types of melancholy: in the brain, in the blood, and in hypochondria (the area just under the rib cage). An abundance of black bile was believed to be produced in the hypochondria, a consequence of a digestive problem, and like a smoky steam the bile spread to the brain where the melancholic mind formed. The causes of this process could be of various

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kinds. Galen mentions, among other things, dark wine and aged cheese, as well as too much anxiety or lack of sleep. However, specific importance was attached to love, or rather, to the frustration of the desiring subject (Lawlor 2012, p. 30). Above all, what must be noted is that Galen transfers melancholy from the lost object of love, or other situations of loss. That is, from something that is on the outside or between the suffering subject and its surroundings, to the suffering subject’s body “where it bubbled and burned in the spleen.” Galen is thus handing us an approach which stubbornly lingers and that has had a major breakthrough in our time; namely, the idea of the single individual’s body as the limit of the self, whereupon the idea of our body as something that is sick from the beginning rests. In front of us we see a closed body rather than a body open to the cosmic ether, or to others and society – this is a view that Aristotle, among others, argued for, and accordingly so did the neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, not to mention the type of social psychology I myself am advocating (Lawlor 2012, p. 60 f.). During the Renaissance, Robert Burton was probably the most famous person who in real life was suffering from depression, “but Hamlet is the template of the melancholic man of distinction for years to come, just as Ophelia becomes the archetype of female lovesickness, a blend of passionate sexual desire and virginal purity that ends in suicide,” which Lawlor (2012, p. 70) is absolutely right in pointing out. At the same time, Burton is one of the authors who devoted the greatest attention to love melancholy in the history of the world. Hence we will study his life and living, or rather his life’s work, The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621 and which Burton, according to his own statements, busied himself with in order to escape his own, from time to time, severe melancholy. It will become clear that love melancholy was not just a condition that women were considered to suffer from, which is the impression you easily could have gained from reading Lawlor’s literary historical analysis of melancholy. As we soon will become aware of, Burton’s view of love melancholy is much wider than Lawlor’s and it basically includes everything that has ever been thought about love melancholy.

Melancholy brought me to life, but also killed me Burton was schooled in Oxford, where he later became a librarian at the Christ Church College – a position he kept throughout his life, in addition to a few secretary positions and a position as a vicar at St. Thomas’s Church. Rumor has it that, in 1640, he took his own life by hanging himself in his office. It is not entirely unlikely that this is the case since it was a crime to kill oneself and therefore it was not something that one spoke openly about. Besides, Burton was highly critical of the statutory penalty for suicide, which among other things could result in the dead body being openly burned, in the street, with a pole pierced through the heart (Vitelli 2011). If one did not have

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the right to end one’s own life, one could hardly be considered to be a free person, according to Burton. He was, in many ways, ahead of his time when he considered the individual’s freedom to be a crucial right. As is well known, freedom became the enlightenment’s slogan and modernity’s biggest issue. However, we do not know much about Burton’s private life, other than the fact that he got married and spent his whole entire life as an adult working on his big book on depression. As I already mentioned, the book was first published in 1621 and was thereafter revised five times during Burton’s lifetime, since he felt obliged to add more material (Jackson [1983] 2001). In the third part of the book, the phenomenon of love melancholy is discussed thoroughly and at length. Burton was afraid that he pushed his exposition of love melancholy too far (a fear that was shared by Holbrook Jackson, who edited the edition from 1932). In principle, none of the ideas on love and its downsides were put aside. Thus, we get to partake in everything from what Burton himself perceives as superstition to science, in order to reach the deeper meaning of melancholy: its cause and effect. During his journey, Burton is both laughing and crying over humanity and over a single individual’s nonsense and shortcomings. He is, however, fully aware of his sorting issues and is excusing himself in every way possible for his lengthy and rich descriptions, but at the same time he emphasizes that the importance of the subject legitimizes his expositions. With words borrowed from Jacobus Micyllus’ self-defense in his translation of the Lucian dialogues, Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 4) writes: “Love is a species of melancholy, and a necessary part of this my treatsie, which I may not omit.” Further down the page he uses the words of Langius: “Cadmus Milesius, writ fourteen books of love, and why should I be ashamed to write an epistle in favour of young men, of this subject?” Burton is not alone in seeing the importance of speaking about the greatest and/or most all-embracing: love, out of which everything we now see as the individual and society are created, continues to grow strong. As evidence Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 17) presents, being faithful to his own style, a number of quotes: Love, saith Leo, made the world, and afterwards, in redeeming of it, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son for it”… Out of love God created, and for his love of the creation – the people in particular – God sacrificed his son. I’m repeating the quote in my own way, because to sacrifice your own flesh and blood must be extremely hard; undoubtedly a perspective worthy to use when trying to tackle the deepest meaning of love. I am not, however, going to take on the difficult task of reproducing Burton’s exploration of the great texts on love that were available in his time, but suffice down to grasp the keynotes of his reasoning. Burton takes his point of departure in the idea of love being universally defined as a kind of desire. At the same time he wants to distinguish between the two. In the writings of Leon Hebreaus, who wrote plentifully on love,

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Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 11) finds the idea that love and desire are both intertwined and distinguished: Love is a voluntary affection, and a desire to enjoy that which is good… Desire wisheth, love enjoys; the end of the one is the beginning of the other; that which we love is present; that which we desire is absent. The very thought and distinction of the object of love (or more correctly the subject of love) as present and the object of desire as absent is still to this day a useful distinction. It is mainly in our guise as desiring beings that we are perceived to contribute to the consumer society, where our personal identities are deemed to be more dependent on what we consume than on what we produce and where we always are expected to wish for change. Burton does not develop his thoughts on the distinction between desire and love in relation to consumption, which is not particularly strange since he lived his life long before the emergence of the consumer society. Instead, he develops his thoughts with the support of Plotinus, who argues that love can be a God, a devil, or a rational passion; presumably a mix of all three since they all rise from the desire of both beauty and justice and therefore should be understood as conscious actions aiming at that which is good. Thereafter, Plato is quoted and he frankly calls love “the great devil,” because, without competition, it reigns in the sphere of passions. To love is, according to Plato, to demand the presence of the good. Burton shows how this line of thought has spread by sharing more quotes, among them a quote from Austin who thinks that love should be understood as the heart’s desire “for something which we seek to win, or joy to have, coveting by desire, resting in joy” ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 11). To distinguish between different kinds of love, Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 15 f.) turns back to Hebraeus, who in his investigation of the fusion between the Greek word philo and sophia, that is, philosophia, which means “friend of wisdom” or “love of wisdom,” , talks about natural, sensuous and rational love. Natural love and natural hatred are considered to originate in sympathy and antipathy in both human and inhuman beings. Heavy bodies are pulled downward like the stone to their center. The fire is pulled upwards towards the sky and blends its smoke with the clouds. The river flows out and becomes one by the sea. The sun, moon and stars never cease to circulate as they seek perfection. Even the wine and olives manifest this kind of attraction to each other. Between the wine and the bay, however, there is antipathy. There is nothing with the bay that appeals to the wine. Sensual love belongs to the wild animals that enjoy multiplying and adhering to their own. The pig likes pigs and the worm when it’s split in two. Like the dog, it also sings to its lord. There’s a reason why the dog is called man’s best friend. In closeness to the flesh, this kind of love binds its bonds. The rational love belongs to God, the angels and men; the ones that can enter the gate of pearls. Either it’s the Trinity; the love of God and his Son as

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manifested in the Holy Spirit. Or it’s the love of men as part of God’s creation. Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 16 f.) writes: Amor mundum fecit, love built cities, muni anima [the soul of the world], invented arts, and all the good things, incites us to virtue and humanity, combines and quickness; keeps peace on earth, quietness by sea, mirth in the winds and elements, expels all fear, anger, and rusticity… Love is the beginner and end of all our action, the efficient and instrumental cause, as our poets in their symbols, impresses, emblems of rings, squares, etc., shadow unto us. Hence, love is attributed to both power and glory. Yet, it has many distorted faces, like madness, and can lead us straight to hell. In that case we are no longer dealing with the highly ranked rational love, but rather what Burton calls love melancholy. As far as Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p.141) can tell, love is a burdensome phenomenon or state of mind. … the symptoms of the mind in lovers are almost infinite, and so diverse that no art can comprehend them; though they may be merry sometimes, and rapt beyond themselves for joy, yet most part, love is a plague, a torture, a hell, a bitter-sweet passion… fair, foul and full of variations, though most part irksome and bad. For, in a word, the Spanish Inquisition is not comparable to it. In this context, it must be clear to us that the attitude towards love melancholy in Burton’s time was anything but unison. For those who were inclined to stoicism, that is, for those who valued emotional control or thought that chastity was desirable, love melancholy was an evil thing, most certainly a sign of bad character. For those who viewed passion and strong emotional experiences as signs of a refined soul, which had the ability to treasure the beauty and the good, they viewed love melancholy in a completely opposite manner. These opposite manners to relate to love melancholy can most clearly be traced back to, on the one hand, Galen’s dismal view of the melancholic as an ill and miserable person, and, on the other hand, Aristotle’s and Ficino’s more glamorous view of the depressed as an inspired genius – two different views that, not in an entirely unproblematic manner, coexisted side by side during the Renaissance (Lawlor 2012, p. 60). If Galen and his followers, who were anti-Plato, advocated the idea of a closed body that was already potentially ill, the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist tradition stressed introspection and privacy. As far as I can see, Burton is closer to Galen than the other two, at least when it comes to his view of love melancholy as a very ominous state. Like Galen, Burton was strongly influenced by the humoral pathology developed by Hippocrates in 400 BC, in which one started from the four body fluids of blood, mucus, yellow bile, and black bile, when evaluating the health, as well

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as the temperament, or the personality, of a single individual. Diseases were considered to originate from a state where the four body fluids were out of balance, and if the black bile was the one dominant body fluid then the person was deemed to be melancholic. Even though persons with a melancholic temperament were considered to have certain common traits, such as a tendency for introspection, reflection, and isolation, each individual’s melancholy was perceived as being unique. In its negative form – where, among other things, blind lust, painful and unrequited love, and unfulfilled desires were included – long-lasting love melancholy was considered to be a condition that required medication. The love melancholic was not only showing bodily symptoms: pale, skinny and dehydrated, as this type of person normally appeared to be. The love melancholic also got hit mentally. Not only could the love melancholic injure themself; in the worst case scenario, they could commit suicide, just like Dido did when instead of marrying a second time she chose to be faithful to her first husband, and ended her life with a sword. The affected person could also injure others, in the worst case murder them, as Medea did when out of despair and driven by the desire for revenge on her husband she killed their two sons. Burton ([1621] 2001, part III, p. 187 f.) provides a long list of people who killed themselves and others. And, no, it is not only women on that list. Catiline killed his own son for his love to Aurelia, who refused to marry him as long as his son was alive. Alexander started a fire in Persepolis to please one of his concubines. Constantine Despota got rid of his wife and threw his children onto the streets for his love of a woman whose beauty had put him under a spell. In his expositions on women who lure men into depravity, Burton sometimes comes off as directly misogynistic. As a man you’d better keep all women an arm’s length away from yourself. Or not quite. Finding a good wife is at the top of the list of cures for men with love melancholy; only then can we find total abstinence from the object of our unhappy love. “He who fights and runs away /May live to fight another day; /But he who is battle slain /Can never rise to fight again” as the saying goes. As I see it, we once again end up with what Alberoni, much later than Burton, saw as the repeal of all value and hope: to transform the other into a stone. Thus, the stone seems hard to get rid of, since it is constantly singing beautifully about how it wants to be loved for its softness or even is experienced as soft by the love melancholic who gently strokes it against its cheek. Love melancholy is an infatuation with obstacles that one has been caught in and never succeeds to overcome. Most likely, Burton’s approach to love melancholy – which was also considered to be cured with the help of work, diet, bloodletting, and by drilling thee small holes in the skull – was the dominating approach during medieval times and the Renaissance, as I have already implied. At the same time, it was the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonist tradition that formulated the idea of melancholy as something desirable: an ideal.

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The craze for love melancholy According to Lawlor, the real craze for love melancholy started in Italy but quickly spread to the north, through networks of intellectuals and aristocracy. During the latter part of the sixteenth century, the melancholy ideal was mainly established in England. The sensitive young men, which during this time were frustrated at trying to climb the social ladder of English hierarchy, and in certain aspects remind me of Eyal who I discussed in the introduction to this book, were supposedly Shakespeare’s inspiration when creating the character of Hamlet (Lawlor 2012, p. 62). Back then, as now, there was a demand for a certain type of emotionality to get access to certain social groups and contexts; an emotionality that established itself in, among other things, literature, and thereby can be perceived as an emotional script, that is, instructions on how you should feel and how you should express your feelings. Lawlor argues that the Renaissance’s melancholic Hamlet and suicidal Ofelia opened up a more benevolent view of melancholy, which in England came to be perceived as a kind of nerve disease characteristic of English civilization; The English disease (Lawlor 2012, p. 73). But it is only during romanticism that love melancholy reaches its climax. Poets like Charlotte Smith, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge all suffered from melancholy or depression, which was taken as a sign of their sensibility and genius. This contributed to the popularity of psychological suffering during the enlightenment (Lawlor 2012, p. 89 f.). If Hamlet was previously, and to some extent still is, the literary icon of a melancholic young man, a new man enters the (German) literary stage: the young Werther who represents Hamlet’s as well as Ofelia’s melancholy.

Hamlet and Ofelia in one and the same person In the spring of 1772, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is working as a trainee at the Holy Roman Empire’s Supreme Court in Wetzlar, he falls in love with Charlotte Buff (“Lotte”), who is engaged to another man. Despite knowing that the love between the two of them – Johann and Charlotte – can never be realized, Johann is not capable of letting her out of his sight so he ends up spending the main part of the summer together with her and her fiancée. However, the fellowship turns out to be so painful and unbearable to the point where he has to leave and is forced to go back to Frankfurt. A short time afterwards he hears a rumor that Carl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a lawyer in Wetzlar that Goethe is familiar with, has shot himself to death due to an impossible love or deep infatuation with a married woman. Inspired by Rousseau’s romantic letter novel Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloise (Julie, or the New Heloise), published in 1761, he lets his own and Jerusalem’s impossible love stories come to life in The Sorrows of Young Werther. In letter format Werther, uncensored, spells out all his feelings to a friend. No passions are alien to him.

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The leap of love into the depressive sphere On December 4th (Book II), Werther writes to his friend: I implore your attention. It is all over with me. I can support this state no longer. Today I was sitting by Charlotte. She was playing upon her piano a succession of delightful melodies, with such intense expression! Her little sister was dressing her doll upon my lap. The tears came into my eyes. I leaned down, and looked intently at her wedding-ring: my tears fell – immediately she began to play that favourite, that divine, air which has so often enchanted me. I felt comfort from a recollection of the past, of those bygone days when that air was familiar to me; and then I recalled all the sorrows and the disappointments which I had since endured. I paced with hasty strides through the room, my heart became convulsed with painful emotions. At length I went up to her, and exclaimed with eagerness, “For Heaven’s sake, play that air no longer!” She stopped, and looked steadfastly at me. She then said, with a smile which sunk deep into my heart, “Werther, you are ill: your dearest food is distasteful to you. But go, I entreat you, and endeavour to compose yourself.” I tore myself away. God, thou seest my torments, and wilt end them!

On December 6th (Book II), Werther writes to his friend again: How her image haunts me! Waking or asleep, she fills my entire soul! Soon as I close my eyes, here, in my brain, where all the nerves of vision are concentrated, her dark eyes are imprinted. Here – I do not know how to describe it; but, if I shut my eyes, hers are immediately before me: dark as an abyss they open upon me, and absorb my senses. And what is man – that boasted demigod? Do not his powers fail when he most requires their use? And whether he soar in joy, or sink in sorrow, is not his career in both inevitably arrested? And, whilst he fondly dreams that he is grasping at infinity, does he not feel compelled to return to a consciousness of his cold, monotonous existence? Nature also sparks strong feelings deep inside of Werther: Must it ever be thus, – that the source of our happiness must also be the fountain of our misery? The full and ardent sentiment which animated my heart with the love of nature, overwhelming me with a torrent of delight, and which brought all paradise before me, has now become an insupportable torment, a demon which perpetually pursues and harasses me. When in bygone days I gazed from these rocks upon yonder mountains across the river, and upon the green, flowery valley before me, and saw all nature budding and bursting around; the hills clothed from foot to peak with tall, thick forest trees; the valleys in all their varied windings, shaded with the loveliest woods; and the soft river gliding along amongst the lisping reeds, mirroring the beautiful clouds which the soft evening breeze

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wafted across the sky, – when I heard the groves about me melodious with the music of birds, and saw the million swarms of insects dancing in the last golden beams of the sun, whose setting rays awoke the humming beetles from their grassy beds, whilst the subdued tumult around directed my attention to the ground, and I there observed the arid rock compelled to yield nutriment to the dry moss, whilst the heath flourished upon the barren sands below me, all this displayed to me the inner warmth which animates all nature, and filled and glowed within my heart. (August 18th, Book I) In an attack against the reasonable people, whom he perceives to be indifferent and incapable of compassion, he defends suffering, intoxication and madness. The young Werther is, above all, a person who takes his own emotionality seriously. One could say that he is being true to himself and his inner emotional compass: an authentic and brave young man. Goethe’s debut novel, which was written during only two months at the beginning of 1774 to be published in the fall of that same year, was not only a love story based on Goethe’s own emotional experiences that needed to be enunciated and take shape outside of his own mind. The story of the young Werther, whose love for Charlotte S. (“Lotte”) ends with a fright when he – dressed in a blue tailcoat, yellow vest and pants – shoots himself in the forehead just above his right eye, was also an attack against the then established bourgeois society. What kind of space was there for the poet, or more generally speaking, for the soul of an artist in this new societal order? Goethe, who had been a student of Herder’s, came to mainly address this question from the perspective of what impact intersubjective understanding might have in a society that puts the question of individual freedom on its agenda. Above all, it was the uncompromising character of the young Werther – with the self and its impulsiveness and emotionality in focus instead of virtue and duty – that caught the attention of a whole generation. So much so that it is alleged to have caused a European suicide epidemic. Almost immediately, the novel was translated into French and a little later, in 1779, into English. It cannot be concluded that young men in fact became more inclined to shoot themselves after reading about the sorrows of young Werther. There is, however, no doubt that Goethe, through Werther’s letters to his friend, managed to represent the spirit of his own time in an ingenious manner. In many books, such as Thomas Mann’s and Ulrich Plenzdorf ’s, Werther’s voice cuts through. Goethe’s Werther is also one of the literary characters that Barthes refers to most frequently in A Lover’s Discourse – Fragments. He was, supposedly, also a love melancholic. A Lover’s Discourse – Fragments is even considered to be the result of the depressive state Barthes went into when, at the age of sixty, he fell in love with the then twenty-two-year-old writer, Hervé Guibert. The following is the author Torbjörn Elensky’s description of how they met:

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The leap of love into the depressive sphere Barthes had read the young author’s first book, and wanted to discuss it with him per correspondence. Well, stranger coincidences have happened. They got in touch, became friends; but Roland was apparently attracted by Hervé, and made physical advances – which, however, were vehemently rejected. According to Guibert Barthes would write a preface to another book of him, but in return he asked him to have sex with him. The young writer was certainly not willing, because he was attracted only by the older man’s brain, nothing else. The result of their contact was a few letters, and an intellectual exchange that gave some results, as well as a Fragment for H., a kind of private post scriptum to A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, addressed to the younger man, from the elder, in which he accuses him for having rejected his physical advances too brutally, when he had received what he himself wanted, which was only intellectual exchange. No feelings and definitely not sex.

The increased vulnerability in intimate relationships Even if love melancholy, in different shapes, has been a topic since medieval times, I argue that Hochschild and Illouz are on to something when they speak of an increased vulnerability in intimate relationships, which results in an increased tendency to love melancholy or what I call depressive love. As I see it, increased vulnerability arises because, to a greater extent, we tend to build ourselves up by adding layer upon layer of lost love objects, or rather memories of those we have loved but lost. To avoid sorrow we internalize the absence of our loved one, not seldom in the shape of a non-existent love or lovelessness: an internal deficiency that we constantly return to and turn into self-hatred, which is a specific form of narcissism. This makes it hard for us to cope with the loneliness. Encapsulated like this inside ourselves, we are confronted with the experience of being rejected and unloved. The hatred and the aggression remain hidden, since in this state we refuse to see ourselves as separate from the love object we at birth were totally dependent on: the mother. We do not know that all the hatred, or all the aggression, we keep inside ourselves cannot destroy the love object. The loved one is still there as something independent from ourselves, as the other who potentially can fulfill needs we cannot fulfill ourselves. To ignore this; that is, to ignore what is left from the other’s care and life-changing gesture, means to transform love and the indestructible desire for the other into melancholy or depression. The actor Liam Neeson’s update, which was shared on Facebook and reached me through a friend who sent it to me on Messenger, highlights such an approach and its distortion of love: Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.

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The depressive melancholic can never reach outside or beyond herself, but is caught in the loneliness, the rejection, the loss, and possibly even in the jealousy. It is not the object of love that has been lost. It is the ability to love that has been transformed into stone and gone mute. It has become impossible to express needs in a way that the other can comprehend and use as a basis for action. The language is dead and the intersubjective world is objectified. The art of grieving has fallen into oblivion and a fright of tears – a physical reaction telling us that the others have become closer to us than what we ourselves could imagine – has developed. Hence, we could say that Illouz in a way is mistaken when she writes about why love hurts. Is it really love in our time that she is exploring, or did she find the trace of the ways in which we are misunderstanding love? If Neeson is right, it is only in a misunderstood version of love (seen as an ideal) that we wound and harm ourselves, that is, that love hurts. To ask oneself why love hurts would therefore be equal to analyzing a social pathology caused by our culture’s emotional script. To speak of depressive love and the suffering it causes, instead of speaking of love that hurts, is then partly a way to show that you are speaking of an ideal that is partly misunderstood or practiced in a way that distorts it.

To stay or leave Either the depressed moves on as if love never happened: I am not going to like it if I stay here. Or she forever dwells: here I am, and this is all I know. In the first case there is happiness – truth and love – around the corner. Not least, that is what the digital market lures us with (Jagger 2001; Arvidsson 2006). Suffering will be extinct and desire will be lured back. And in the midst of all this, the individual’s personal identity is less and less valuable, which might lead to both despair and desperation. In a capitalist society, of a kind we are living in today, this is not necessarily regrettable or wrong. You can sell almost anything to people that suffer, if it helps install in them a sense of hope. This has been known to advertisers ever since Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays went into the business and mass consumerism rose to the forefront. In a way, a greater focus on individual suffering and the rise of the consumer society go hand in hand. We tend to desire our own experience of lack or loss, simultaneously as we wish to be the one, or be what, the other is missing or uses to fill his or her own experience of emptiness. The intrinsic value of love has transformed into usefulness and value, and you tend to take it instead of giving. Get rid of your own lack by consuming: make the desired a part of yourself. The longing for love tends to be engulfed in the sensation of consumption and we lose our possibility to close in on our emotions. The sensation is, however, a particularly lonely experience, which we can only tackle in private. We must then value and affirm what separates us: the difference.

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The ethical dimension of love The philosopher Martin Buber ([1923] 2000, p.11) speaks of I-Thou as the primary word that can only be pronounced with the whole essence of a person. Love as a feeling houses an ethical dimension. Understood this way, love cannot be reduced to an affirmation. We must stop all the: I love you! Love me? This is not where we stand. The direction has to be to the other. To speak in the feminist and literary scholar Lucy Irigaray’s voice, it is about avoiding cultural cannibalism: to eat or be eaten. The philosopher Jacques Derrida may be wrong when he says that that is the route we all must take: to eat or to become someone’s meat. In short; it is a question of eating well (Deutscher 2006). As Emmanuel Lévinas ([1969] 1979, p 207 ff.), also a philosopher, understands it; the other speaks to me in a manner that anticipates language and our common perceptions. The other is beyond me, on a higher level that is and will forever stay incomprehensible to me. The other cannot be reduced to a finite entity, over which I can have power, or that I can capture conceptually. Hence, we must concentrate on our ability to receive and stay open to the other, in order to be able to be affected and moved by the other. As I see it, we need to focus on the emotional experience as it plays out when we cannot run along, but when we have to stop and ask ourselves: Who are you? Who am I? Which opportunities can we realize in a shared future? It is a kind of passiveness that anticipates our failure to act and it is naturally something other than the affective, which Kristeva argues that the melancholic depressed is captured in. Despite of all that, I know that the idea of the importance of emotionality seems false to overactive minds. I know that it does not correspond with Sartre’s anthropology, but maybe with his view of emotions as magical transformations of one’s world; when the other enters into one’s life in a way that closely resembles a divine decree or a creative act, as has been discussed earlier. In relation to this very process, however, there is something in our society that poses problems. Problems that serious that some of us simply cannot overcome them, but are stuck in the distorted ideal of love, which is offered to us as an alternative. Depressive love is thus a way to find the rhythm in our culture. Yet, in that tempo we can neither become lovers nor loved ones. At least, not if we perceive love to be a mutual recognition of each other as concrete human beings with needs that can be satisfied in an intimate relationship. When love is commercialized it is desymbolized, which means that it loses its meaning or significance: “Human beings no longer have to agree about transcendent symbolic values they simply have to go along with the neverending and expanded circulation of commodities,” writes Dany-Robert Dufour (2008, p. 5) about the desymbolization of the world in the book The Art of Shrinking Heads. We can find a similar line of thought in the writings of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who thinks that there is a risk that love will be destroyed in today’s society. As we will learn in the next part of the book, Han writes

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about a societal pace, where anything that hinders social acceleration – that is, the increasing rampage and pace of social change – needs to be razed to the ground and eliminated at any price. At this pace, the human value is reduced to achievement. Passionate love – Eros – is threatened; at the same time, love is our only way out. Yet, let us not just look to Eros. Almost all the different kinds of love, which were elaborated upon and discussed in ancient Greece, and which we still carry within us in culturally modified versions, are a target here. In my discussion of Han’s line of thought in the next chapter, I will mention something about three of them: Philia, Eros, and Agape. Thereafter I will give some examples on how depressive love is expressed as a partly unarticulated ideal in today’s contemporary society. Finally, I will relate my reasoning to a few current social structures, which means I am posing the question of what society has to gain from a distorted love ideal. Put in different terms, what can depressive love in its current form tell us about our society and the consequences it brings for us?

Notes 1 Zack’s texting is originally written in American English; hence, it is not translated from Swedish as is the case with Clara and Ann’s texting. 2 Marx believes in a famous parable that Hegel’s idealistic dialectic must be turned into a materialistic one: “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell,” Marx writes in “Afterword to the Second Edition” ([1873] 2015, p. 15), in Capital. First Book. 3 See, e.g., http://mentalfloss.com/article/51032/11-dating-tips-ovid%E2%80%99s-arsamatoria and http://blogs.transparent.com/latin/5-dating-tips-in-latin-from-theroman-poet-ovid/.

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Part 3

A distorted love ideal

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3

A distorted love ideal

The disappearance of love In the book The Agony of Eros ([2012] 2017), Han argues that love and, by extension, also poetic and political forces, are destroyed in today’s Western or capitalist societies. He describes these societies as achievement societies where human value is reduced to what is being produced and delivered. We can compare his description to what was earlier mentioned in relation to Dagerman’s poetry. In short: a human being that, just like a stone, wants to be loved for her softness will perish in a society that reduces her value to achievement, performance and ability only. To draw the complete picture we will return to yet another passage from Dagerman: A human life in not an achievement either, but rather an unfolding toward perfection. Even perfection is no achievement, because what is perfect is even so at rest. … What is essential is that we do what we do while retaining our underlying freedom. (Dagerman 1952/2013, p. 306) Today, the freedom, which Dagerman tries to grasp and that ultimately is about being able to freely love and be loved by the one who is utterly different from you but at the same time both needs you and knows how to satisfy you, has a gun pointed towards its head, according to Han. What is holding the trigger is the widespread idea of your own performance as the most valuable asset for happiness and success. Anything that comes along and invites resistance must be razed to the ground and smoothed out, so that we can quickly and easily move along and do exactly what we have set out to do. In such a public climate there is no room for differences or surprises, which has devastating effects on love, since love is founded on an encounter with what is unfamiliar to us. Eros, which in ancient Greek meant the most transcendental kind of love, often leads to an obsession with another person who constantly manages to escape one’s control. The chance of liberation from self-absorption is then refreshingly great. In many ways this goes for all the different kinds of love

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that we today refer to ancient Greece, but which also seem to be a heritage, in a culturally modified version, that we have not yet managed to shake off. Let me, therefore, also say something about Philia and Agape, before moving along. The concepts will appear in the analysis of the examples of contemporary depressive love, and we will see how their different meanings are being distorted.

Philia, Eros and Agape1 Philia denotes the love between friends who develop strong emotional bonds to each other out of common interests and social activities. Friendship is a mutual love, founded on the recognition of one another on the basis of a common value system. In addition to this, Philia requires an actual encounter where the mutual recognition is expressed. Aristotle emphasizes that, in this type of encounter, we gain knowledge about each other’s emotional life, which is crucial for the emotional bond being tied by friendship. As with Philia, Eros is strongly connected to the value the lover/loving attributes to the object of her love. While Philia arises from moral or ethical values, Eros arises from aesthetic values. Eros is drawn to the beauty of the outer world, for example an attraction to a perfect body that speaks to our own feeling or lack thereof. Hence, Eros is a more pleasurable and carnal kind of love than Philia. According to Plato, Eros can be likened to a pleasuredriven beast that is just about ready to besiege its prey. At the same time, Eros is able to put the instant lust gratification aside, and by doing so the lack, or the desire, is driven to its final frontier where perfection, in the world of ideas, can be experienced. Agape, which from the beginning was designated as God’s love for man, but which can be used to describe both man’s love for God and love between people, differs in crucial aspects from Philia and Eros. Agape is a gift – a kind of unconditional love – whose only claim is to be received. Agape is exempt from the violence and the destructiveness that often comes along with desire and can be recognized in the following passage from Strindberg’s famous drama Fröken Julie (Miss Julie) ([1888] 1974, p.53). Jean, the butler of Miss Julie’s father, has just decapitated Julie’s finch, which is now lying in a pool of its own blood. Did she really think she could bring the bird on their mutual escape after they had shamelessly made love to each other? (approaching the chopping block as if drawn against her will) No, I don’t want to go yet. I can’t… until I see… Shh! I hear a carriage—— (She listens, but her eyes never leave the cleaver and the chopping block.) Do you think I can’t stand the sight of blood? You think I’m so weak… Oh—I’d like to see your blood and your brains on a chopping block!—I’d like to see your whole sex swimming in a sea of blood, like my little

JULIE:

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bird… I think I could drink from your skull! I’d like to bathe my feet in your open chest and eat your heart roasted whole!—You think I’m weak. You think I love you because my womb craved your seed. You think I want to carry your spawn under my heart and nourish it with my blood—bear your child and take your name! By the way, what is your family name? I’ve never heard it. – Do you have one? I was to me Mrs. Bootblack—or Madame Pigsty. — You dog, who wears my collar, you lackey, who bears my coat of arms on your buttons—do I have to share you with my cook, compete with my own servant? Oh! Oh! Oh! ——You think I’m a coward who wants to run away! No, now I’m staying—and let this storm break! My father will come home to find his desk broken open… and his money gone! Then he’ll ring—that bell… twice for his valet—and then he’ll send for the police… and then I’ll tell everything. Everything! Oh what a relief it’ll be to have it all end—if only it will end!—And then he’ll have a stroke and die… that’ll be the end of all of us—and there’ll be peace… quiet… eternal rest—And then our coat of arms will be broken against his coffin—the family title extinct—but the valet’s line will go on in an orphanage… win laurels in the gutter, and end in jail! Agape is not thirsty for blood and would not chop or decapitate anyone. Nor is there a quest upward and onward – towards perfection. Agape is a meditative state in the sense that the lover directs his or her full attention to the object of his or her love. Agape is not about getting lost in the dream or the imagination about the loved one, but is about loving the real person that is standing right in front of you. Agape is, thus, a form of love that is directed towards a concrete person, a kind of face-to-face love with a socially realistic dimension. Despite the fact that Agape neither feels desire nor recognizes the value of the object of love, it is brought to life in the meeting with unique human beings. Agape only exists in the here and now and therefore it does not allow any great plans for the future or retrospective sentimentality. It is a heart that easily forgets, plans nothing and neither lends itself to the logic of democracy nor to the logic of the market – it is not a love for one and all, and it cannot be bought. What I want to make clear is that Philia, Eros, and Agape do not give us an understanding of love as a lonely activity – on the contrary, all three of them are expressions of love as a genuine social phenomenon. However, in current depictions of love we find, more and more often, stories where love mainly seems to be about working with the loved one in solitude, something I already mentioned and will exemplify in the following section. One reason for this can be found in the social regimen that places the performing subject at the center of attention. The genuine interest in others then tends to be equated with sin. So everything must be transformed into oneself, or rather into a performance by oneself, to be recognized and perceived as valuable by others.

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The achievement-subject Much indicates that we live in the first epoch of time where not only children, but also adults, tend to believe that everything within, and outside, themselves is the result of one’s own performance. We see ourselves, or our omnipotence, mirrored in everything. “I can do it myself,” calls the careerist. Such a mindset kills everything that takes the other – the one who is radically different from oneself – as a starting point. When Han lets Eros fuse with Agoni, the Greek word for agony, he wants us to understand that love is about losing oneself in another person, and from this new spot in the world rediscover oneself. To love is to die and resurrect. Death is, thus, frightening to the achievementsubject. It is perceived as an absolute value loss: to never again be able to achieve, perform and deliver. This explains why a long and healthy life often is preferred over a short and good life. Eros, or the excess of erotica, is therefore avoided as if it were the plague. In this context, Han mentions the bestselling novel trilogy Fifty Shades. The heroine of the novel at the beginning acts surprised over the fact that Mr. Grey sees their relationship as a business deal. A contract that regulates their intimacy is signed. The heroine is supposed to “keep herself clean and shaved and/or waxed at all times” (Han [2012] 2017, p. 14). Everything that might be perceived as dirt must disappear, as if the characters in the novel were extremely aware of the potential disgusting features of the others’ naked body. The S&M games that are carried out are all controlled by rules agreed upon in advance . No real transcendental experience occurs. Nothing unlikely is made possible. At most, “sweet torture” is achieved. Eros is being perverted: it becomes a formula for pleasure or consumption, which can only be understood in terms of performance. It encourages a quantitative approach to love: you simply start counting how many partners you have had sex with. And, all of a sudden, just by performing a simple addition, you have calculated your own fuckability. In an ambivalent version, the above-stated point can be illustrated through the following SMS, written, and shared with me, by a divorced man who recently turned fifty and works as a professor at a Swedish university: It feels meaningless to think of you and me as a life together. I see us as two souls who met, it’s wonderful. But I don’t think of a future with you in it, where we would be together, I think you got it right there. But I like to see you, and have sex and talk about important things; I like that a huge lot. But, as said, you are married and have children with someone else. That means I don’t think of a future for us. But we can of course have sex and such! Just so you know this is how I see it, that I very much like to be your lover, but would rather meet someone to live my life with. The infinite number of possible partners on the open sex and love market creates a kind of decision anxiety that makes it impossible for you to give

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total attention to the other, which is what it takes to make, and keep, the other as your absolute desire. Both the past and the future is threatened by the tyranny of the moment when the sexual act is unleashed, as anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2001, p. 13) would have put it. The thought of creative repetition in the form of a constant restoration of the bond to the other is hardly something one takes into account and works for. Even within the world of pop music, some have stopped believing that a lover’s warmth will make you stay the same as the person you were yesterday. Or is it a wish for something like that, which is expressed in the following excerpt of a verse? Do you think that you and I will meet again? Do you think that you and I have a future together? Do you think that you and I will live for much longer? I don’t think so. (Berg, 2012) In The Art of Loving (1956), the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm states that the above approach fits the modern human being. She is simply too lazy to put in the hard work it takes to close in on the center of love: the heart that constricts and pounds for the possibility of the unlikely. This statement may come off as counter-intuitive in this context, since the performance-oriented subject seems to be anything but lazy. Personally, I argue that it is not about laziness, but about the expected direction of our energy, or our work effort, and about the different media we use to express ourselves with. The inability of modern man to see the other’s radical difference goes hand in hand with the commercialization of all societal institutions. As I already discussed, with help from Bauman and others, the commercialization of love is the last cry of capitalist society. Similarly, Illouz (2013) states that love hurts because it has become something we choose, just like any other commodity, in an abundant marketplace. Love is no longer one, but infinitely many. The heat of passion has faded and its glow rapidly turns into suffocating ashes. According to Han the crisis of love is, however, not caused by the great supply of possible love partners or other others. It is worse than that: the other is threatened with erosion. Instead of seeing the other as a You, the other is seen as an It. Thus, we are dealing with an objectification. In the achievement society the objectification of the other has, though, nothing to do with domination. The subject of domination has to stand back for the benefit of the subject as an entrepreneur of self: a self-exploitation project. Han plays with words he borrowed from Foucault and the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It is a serious game which reveals a self-deception typical of our time. Behind the apparent freedom of the achievement society lures a compulsive structure: the dictatorship of self. The achievement-subject is exploiting herself out of her own free will, which paradoxically is a lack of freedom much greater than the exploitation of the other. You cannot oppose the self. Nor is there anyone else to blame for your mistakes. No cure and

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reformation at hand to free the guilty from their guilt. Such a procedure presupposes the existence of the other. According to Han, this is the reason why the achievement-subject to a greater extent suffers from depression.

The broken structure of desire While Han speaks of how eroticism has vanished, Bauman (1998) discusses “the postmodern erotic revolution.” The result of this revolution is an erotic, or a broken, structure of desire, which is disconnected from three crucial aspects: (a) sex in the sense of biology and reproduction; (b) love in its insistence of eternity, exclusivity, and loyalty; and (c) the production of immortality and thus art, politics, life strategies, and all other aspects of culture. Only such an unbound version of desire could sail freely under the flag of pleasure-searching. Without being obstructed or guided the wrong way by any other purposes than the purely experience-oriented one, it is free to establish itself and negotiate its own rules as it goes along. But this freedom cannot be changed nor ignored by desire. The newly gained indeterminacy is certainly a source for intoxicating experiences of freedom, but also to extreme insecurity and anxiety. There are no longer any legitimate solutions to rely on. Everything has to be constantly renegotiated and caught on the fly. One could therefore say that we have never been freer than what we are right now. The peculiar thing is that this freedom does not seem to lead us beyond or out from ourselves, but further and further inward. In the end we will be buried in the loneliness, which we will find if our self is depopulated, just like we are being cleansed from the other’s radical otherness that actually is the reference point from which we are able to rearticulate who we are, or at least who we should be or want to become. Then, nothing is left for us to understand and the loss of meaning is obvious, on the verge of being total. In current literary love fiction, and in the experiences of a single individual, we increasingly find this pattern illustrated. Among other things, we find it in the shape of working with the lover in solitude. There is, however, something more precise we need to grasp if we want to be able to understand the meaning of depressive love and how it differs from melancholy or depression in general.

Self-reduction as a distortion of the ideal of love As I understand it, there are two types of depressive love, which are both characterized by the inability to be yourself in the other. Expressed differently, we are today seeing examples of two different types of self-reduction that are being produced as an ideal, or alternatively are distorting the ideal of love. Both can be related to the disappearance of the other’s radical otherness from one’s self.

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The reduction of the self to an object, through different forms of selfsilencing. The reduction of the self to a subject, through different forms of selfcommunication.

The author and journalist Lena Andersson’s bestselling and award-winning novel Egenmäktigt förfarande: en roman om kärlek (Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love) from 2012 (English version, 2016) and its standalone sequel Utan personligt ansvar (Without Personal Responsibility) serve as good examples for what I want to say. In both novels Andersson paints a picture of a long and partly painful wait for signs and signals from the loved one. There are many cries, without answers. This excludes Agape as being the kind of love depicted in Andersson’s novels. Rather, the lack of erotic is a feature of Andersson’s writings on love. As far as sex appears at all in Willful Disregard: A Novel about Love, it is in the shape of bad sex. Carnal lust is not depicted at all. The most physical activity we get to partake in is a recurring marathon. The lover (Ester Nilsson) goes alone for a run. This physical activity becomes a recurring topic of conversation between Ester and her loved one (Hugo Rask). He asked if she had been running a lot during the weekend and she answered that she had run four miles since they met. The running was still like half a transmission between them, both the premise and the barrier for their intimacy. It’s a full Marathon! he called. But spread out over three different runs, she said. Why did she call today? Because she was hoping to get an answer to the considerations he promised her he’d make? Not really. That wasn’t realistic. She called because the itching was back, the feverish itching of love, which forever lies dormant in one’s cell system and could break out at any point. (Andersson 2013, p. 149, my translation) The question is: What kind of love are Ester and Hugo engaging in? Most of the novel depicts Ester’s thoughts, dreams, or even her fantasies about Hugo. Is it not a fact that Hugo actually loves Ester, or at least that he should love her? Peculiarly, Hugo is not the one that Ester turns to when searching for answers to her questions, but she turns to her own reason. Ester’s obsession is not revolving around what Hugo really feels or thinks, but revolves around what Ester, after reasonable consideration, thinks that Hugo should feel and think. The novel is mainly a description of Ester’s inner conversation with herself. In Andersson’s second novel, this inclination reveals itself instantly, among other things, when Ester’s new object of love, Olof Sten, at the beginning stage of their relationship already declares that there is no chance he will ever leave his wife. Ester “thought that this was exactly what married people would say when they met someone who swept them off their

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feet and shook up their world. When people wanted something that much, it happened that they stated the opposite” (Andersson 2014, p. 23, my translation). Ester is not taking Olof literally. Nor is she taking into account her girlfriends’ voices – telling her to listen to what he is actually saying. Ester had a friend called Lotta. She often stressed her opinions. “Take people literally, that’s the most practical and simple. Don’t interpret, assume that they mean what they say.” Lotta was wise and careful. Ester’s opinion was that nothing good could come out of being wise and careful and taking people literally when it come to nascent love relationships, since language in this particular case was used to fool oneself, get rid of difficult decisions and avoid love. People feared love, so she had read in the writings of the great poets, since it carried the seed of the greatest pleasures and therefore also to the most painful losses. (Andersson 2014, p. 24, my translation) Through this line of reasoning, which we recognize from the conversation between Clara and Ann, the other turns into a shadow figure. The genuine interpersonal encounter is thwarted, since it requires at least two concrete people, each with a personal identity, who express themselves truthfully. Ester is lacking something, possibly ontological security, which is implied in the novel’s title. To the extent that the novel is about love, it is about love without personal responsibility. Ester is also alone and, as far as I can tell, she is incapable of feeling that she is loved when the object of her love is absent. Whether Ester has been thrown to the ground as a child is not clear. That is not how she is depicted. At this point there is a daunting difference between, for example, Lundberg’s writings on love, which I have mentioned earlier, and Andersson’s. Ester is not depicted as a victim of circumstances outside of her control. Ester is a woman who does whatever she wants to do on her own terms – kind of like an anti-heroine and undoubtedly a new female ideal. Above all, Ester is depicted as an intellectual person who also wishes to be reflected as one in the objects of her love. But she shows emotional bravery as well and to a certain extent possesses the emotional style that works well in personality tests. However, no reason is given to interpret Ester as depressive, meaning self-silencing in her love relationships, which often is found in depressive women’s stories. Ester does not believe that it is more important to please the other than being herself. Let us therefore leave Ester for a while to return to her later, when a discussion of self-communication is at hand.

Self-silencing Today, one can leave everything, from writing descriptions of oneself to be used in personal ads to the choice of a love partner, in the hands of so-called experts. In this way, love is not only disconnected from the other, but also from ourselves, which becomes clear in Hochschild’s book The Outsourced

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Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (2012), where we get insight into Evan Katz’s story of his work as a love counselor: The Internet is the world’s biggest love mall. And to go there, you have to brand yourself well because you only have three seconds. When I help a client to brand herself, I am helping her to put herself forward to catch that all-important glimpse. A profile could say ‘I talk about myself a lot. I go through bouts of depression and Zoloft usually works’. That might be the truth but it’s not going into her brand. (Hochschild 2012, p. 25) We can here find the self-silencing that often is present in depressive women’s stories. It is more important to please the other than being oneself, which can be accomplished through everything from starving oneself to not saying or doing what one wants. Often self-silencing occurs in relation to the mother or the husband. It is a non-verbal way of saying: love me! In the sociologist Dana Crowley Jack’s book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (1991), we get insight into several different stories which highlight self-silencing as being the altogether specific form of depression. One of the women in the book expresses herself in the following way: Bill had the terrible habit of giving me this horrible look, which was to me a Mr. Yuk look, when I would – let’s say if I was basically talking about something that was unpleasant or being selfish, or eating too much, he’d just give me this horrible look. I don’t know if it was really conscious to him that he was doing it, but it showed me that I was being very unpleasant in his eyes. And because I wanted to impress him, because I wanted him to like me so bad, well because I wanted our relationship to work, it really bothered me. I don’t know how to explain it but it really got to me because it wasn’t just every once in a while. A lot of time it was all the time, like, ‘Yuk, what am I doing with this lady? Get her away from me’. This type of thing. So I got drunk and obnoxious, you know. … It was, I think, really hard for him to be around me because I was a very unpleasant person to be around. I was unladylike. I think when I was heavier he was probably made a lot of fun of by his friends, you know, about my weight and being porky and this and that, because a lot of his friends are, you know skinny and good-looking guys and they’ve all got beautiful girlfriends and here Bill had this porky fat girl. But I can put my make-up on and have my hair fixed all perfect and be in good clothes and look in the mirror and see that I’m not this big fat ugly cow that guys used to bark and laugh at … We’re doing everything he wants to do and I’m not getting nothing done that I want to do, but I won’t open my mouth and say something. I’m keeping it in my mind and drilling, and letting it drill on my brain, you know. (Crowley 1991, pp. 133–134)

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The woman who speaks used to be both strong and stubborn. She describes herself as a talkative and loud person who has never been afraid to speak her mind. Nowadays, however, she thinks before she speaks. According to Crowley (1991, p 34 f.), she has entered heterosexual intimacy through female rituals that can be found in our culture, for example self-silencing or self-starvation, and she exercises them to achieve deeper goals. In this case, a relationship with a specific man and recognition, or acceptance, from her peers. The woman identifies herself with the male gaze, or the aggressor, as it is called in feministfocused psychoanalytical theory. Self-silencing runs like a silver thread through depressed women’s stories and often occurs in relation to their men, but also in relation to their mothers and culture at large. What I find remarkable is that the stories always revolve around dysfunctional love: intimate relationships where the storytelling women are not recognized as people in concrete need of emotional care, affective support and encouragement. The most radical form of self-silencing – suicide – is illustrated as aesthetically appealing in the fashion report “Last Words,” published in the Internet magazine Vice, all-female fiction issue, 2013. The models in the report reconstruct, in an aesthetically appealing manner, female authors like Virginia Wolf and Sylvia Plath right before or right after their suicide. One of them is lying dead in her own blood, another is standing up with a rope around her neck, yet another is about to drown herself. Vice does not provide any additional information about the authors, except for their names and date of death. If one wants to know more, and performs an Internet search – which is what most people would do to gather information quickly in today’s Western societies –the following information can be found about Plath on Wikipedia: She was furious at not being at a meeting the editor had arranged with Welsh poet Dylan Thomas – a writer whom she loved, said one of her boyfriends, “more than life itself”. She hung around the White House Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel for two days, hoping to meet Thomas, but he was already on his way home. A few weeks later, she slashed her legs to see if she had enough courage to commit suicide. … Following electroconvulsive therapy for depression, Plath made her first medically documented suicide attempt in late August 1953 by crawling under her house and taking her mother’s sleeping pills. Plath suffered from both love and depression; a psychological suffering which was so difficult that she took her own life. At least, that is the story of love, depression and unrecoverable self-silencing we get insight into via the Internet. If one reads Plath’s poetry, for example the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (1951), one gets the feeling that love and depression intersect. It is interesting how, through this poem, we get a foretaste of the type of depressive love I call self-communication: the loved one may very

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well be someone that has been created inside one’s head. This is how the poem ends: I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Self-communication That women should remain silent was advocated in the Bible and the selferadicating woman is not a new ideal. While self-silencing is the most obvious form of depressive love, the type of self-communication that has been facilitated by the last decade’s technological development is, however, a typical example of the depressive love of today. A growing number of our love conversations, which previously took place face-to-face, are now taking place face-to-screen. In this way, love is increasingly characterized by what Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger have called “post-social relations”: new ties that connect people with things rather than with other people. In post-social relations, the self is structured by lack, wishes, and desires rather than by relatively stable norms and values: “(B)inding (being-in-relation, mutuality) results from a match between a subject that manifests a sequence of wants and an unfolding object that provides for these wants through the lack it displays” (Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002, p. 170). Visual illustrations of a loving self (here we see a fusion of love and desire) structured in this way are found in fashion photographer Miles Aldridge’s exhibition I only want you to love me (10 July – 29 September 2013, NYC, USA). On the Internet the following can be read in conjunction with this exhibition: Women and colour are Aldridge’s twin obsessions. His work is filled with glamorous, beautiful women from dazed housewives and decadent beauties to sunbathing sexpots and ecstatic Virgins. Luscious colours dazzle from every image – blood red ketchup splashes against a black and white floor; a mouth drips with gold; egg yolk oozes across a plate. But the technicolour dream world of seemingly perfect women with blank expressions belies a deeper sense of disturbance and neurosis. Look more closely and there is silent screaming, a head pushed down on a bed, a face covered in polythene, a woman pushing an empty swing. (www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/miles-aldridge-i-onlywant-you-to-love-me) The image in Aldridge’s photos of the self that only wants be loved is in many ways controlled by the self and its capacity to imagine its own appearance to the other and society. In this respect, the self in Aldridge’s photos can be viewed in terms of Charles Horton Cooley’s looking-glass as including three

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principal elements: imagination of our appearance to the other person; imagination of his or her judgement of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling such as pride or mortification (Cooley [1902] 1992, p. 184). We are faced with a looking-glass self and it almost drowns in its own loneliness. There is an I (subject) who is transformed into a me (object) with the help of societal norms. Self-awareness, which entails making oneself into an object to oneself, is activated. The other – in the sense of being a concrete person with needs – is, however, left unchecked. Instead, a generalized other appears, who could be anyone and anywhere: a person without qualities. What has been lost in the process is not the subject’s subjectivity (the ability to act), but the other as specific and unique: a physical, psychological and emotionally distinct person. The self, who is in need of recognition in the form of love, is no longer standing face-to-face with an incarnate person, but face-to-face with itself mediated by a thing: a mirror, a computer screen or a camera lens. Thus, this is about what I call self-communication. The question is: who is supposed to recognize the self that just wants to be loved? Are we perceiving ourselves to be self-assertive; autonomous and authentic, all at once? Maybe. Aldridge’s photographs visualize – and this mainly relates to Knorr Cetina’s and Bruegger’s desiring self – an ideal of love that never comes true. In front of us we see a human being who, encapsulated in herself, experiences a lack in the shape of unfulfilled wishes and unsatisfied needs, almost ready-to-burst, despite her shiny and polished facade. It seems like the medium is message, that is, the form we use to express love gives love its matter. I will even argue that the transformation of love, which we are witnessing today, moves love away from involving You and I. Instead, love seems to get caught in a third-party intermediate that partly represents a more objective position, and I argue that, from time to time, we therefore are dealing with I and Them. In her book Why Love Hurts (2012), Illouz uses the concept of “autotelic desire,” which she understands as a desire that aims at itself. Autotelic desire is an effect of our inability to let fantasy and desire merge with reality. One of her male informants describes his experience of this form of desire: I hate one night stands. It feels empty. I need the whole package that enables me to fantasize. … Without love I have no inspiration in my work: it is my drug. I cannot be alone. I mean I cannot be alone in my head. Not alone physically. I have no interest whatsoever in intimacy between four walls. I am done with the whole business of domesticity. But not with fantasy. (Illouz 2012, p. 233 f.) Autotelic desire is the pleasure that emanates “from the e-mails we sent to each other from home, each of our spouses not knowing, and it was all the sweet agony of waiting to see him, to fantasise about him endlessly at night, and when waking up, and at work. Being in this situation where you can’t

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talk to each other, and see each other when you want, really makes you long for him” (Illouz 2012, p. 134). In this context it may be interesting to recall Lena Andersson’s novels, since instead of staging a female ideal in the form of self-silencing they are staging a female ideal of self-communication. The character Ester, who neither silences herself nor is suicidal, is driven by an autotelic desire, which I will argue for a little further on. The autotelic desire consists of the lover’s dreams and imagination about his or her loved one and it is common in relationships where the loved one is absent. According to Illouz, this hyper-autonomous form of desire emanates as a result of the difficulties we have today when it comes to letting our imagination and desire fuse with reality. Hence, we prefer to meet the other in our imaginary world instead of in real life; face-to-face. Illouz also argues that the autotelic desire is an aesthetic, rather than a moral, experience. A Swedish PhD student, I call her Vera, describes it as follows in a conversation I had with her: During almost ten or fifteen years I thought he was the most beautiful creature on earth. His face was perfect. His skin spotless. His style… He was cool. I could see the two of us in front of me when I closed my eyes: pure beauty. People always noticed us when we were together. ME: Did you love him? VERA: Love? Of course I loved him. My whole desire was directed towards him. He was always present. In many years I was living in his shadow. He was my invisible companion… When I was in therapy for my insomnia, he was the only thing I talked about. Besides crying and insisting that the only reason I was in therapy was because of my insomnia… We hit a point when my therapist suggested that he was a break. ME: A break? VERA: Yes. Break was the word she used. I think she meant that he was my escape from reality, the boredom of everyday life. I remember thinking she was brilliant coming up with that idea. I used to tell that to myself – he is a paus – kind of like a mini-vacation. But the truth is, he was always present. VERA:

If we continue to read Vera’s story about autotelic desire it becomes obvious that the line is thin between pleasure and what I call depressive love. In what way was he always present? I’m not sure… I talked to him almost all the time. ME: Talked? VERA: Sent letters, e-mail, SMS… and in between I felt his presence… As I said: he was my invisible companion. I lived in his shadow. ME: In his shadow? VERA: Like, it didn’t matter what I did or who I met… He was always there. And I wanted it. For him to be with me. He lived within me and I was ME:

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A distorted love ideal waiting for a sig, a signal – a message, anything. O my God, I suffered if I didn’t get it. Sometimes I’ve viewed it as self-injury. One of my best girlfriends told, actually told me that I might as well be injecting heroin. I guess it was then I started to think about it like that.

Naturally, the agony of love cannot always be equated to depressive love. On the other hand, the suffering often entails the cause and effect of depressive love, namely the missing recognition of oneself as a concrete person with needs, and the subsequent meaning loss. These elements are constitutive of depressive love and are also present in the love conversations I have gathered. A Swedish female senior lecturer, in her forties, whom I talked to expresses it like this: It wasn’t only the fact that he didn’t answer, he blocked me from all social media. He kind of erased me from his life, as if I’d never existed. The whole situation felt unreal. I felt unreal. At the same time I had thousands of messages from him in my computer, on my cell phone. I mean, he had sent thousands… even an unpublished poem that he was working on, like, two hundred pages, to read while I was trying on shoes. He was funny. He made me laugh. Anyway, was I supposed to ignore ever having met him, exchanged messages twenty days in a row? Didn’t these messages exist? Of course they did, but there was no reality behind them. The words were the reality. I couldn’t or didn’t want to realize it. I’m not stupid. I just couldn’t believe that something that meant everything to me – then and there – meant so little to him. I became Alice. “Who the fuck is Alice?” Alice in Wonderland. I fell down the rabbit hole. It may seem like we have ended up far from Andersson’s novel character Ester and have instead closed in on Lundberg’s question of what happens if you throw a child to the ground. But, in fact, Ester is also thinking that “what was life-changing for her was pastime to Hugo.” For short periods of time she considered this thought. Then she dismissed it to be able to endure. In April, she wrote two long letters she sent by mail. She wanted to explain herself. She wanted to formulate what she had felt, and why she had acted and believed the way she did, saying that his actions had shaped hers, that no one acts without reacting too; he had given her good reason to make her assumptions. She did not expect a response and did not receive one either. (Andersson 2013, p. 133, author’s translation) A radical conclusion that can be drawn in this context is that when the work with the loving, in her solitude, is pushed so far that it turns into meaning loss or depression, it is a sign of a neurotic and, in the worst case scenario, psychotic state. The depressive love present in our society – in the form of

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both self-silencing and self-communication – can be perceived as a manifestation of a culture where mainly neurotic, but also psychotic, staging is stimulated. When love loses its intersubjective foundation, a common definition of the situation becomes harder to reach. As a result, both the feeling of being anchored in a social reality, as well as the moral responsibility to the other, weakens. Let me, in a final step, elaborate on the meaning of that claim by looking at how the structural societal changes have impacted another central activity for the development and realization of the self: labor or paid employment. Let us look at the place given to depression within psychiatry. Can we detect any connections, which make clearer the causes of depressive love, or rather make clearer its individual and societal functions? Maybe this reasoning can even provide additional clues to our understanding of depressive love as a distortion of the ideal of love – clues that we are not fully aware of or not will admit we are intrigued by.

What are the functions of depressive love in contemporary Western societies? As far as I can see, and even have argued earlier, love’s entry into the global market is the last cry of capitalist society. What is left to objectify through commerce? Nothing. To tell the truth, we consume love relationships like never before. In Sweden – according to Statistics Sweden (SCB 2015) – 26,933 marriages ended in divorce in 2013, the highest number since 1975. An urban myth tells the story about a groom who could not promise to be faithful for ever after, but he could promise that if you had been married to him you had significantly greater chances of getting married again. Moreover, in the Swedish daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, an article from February 18, 2015 by journalist Clas Svahn featured a story about 23-year-old Indira and 25year-old Jugal, who were on their way to do seven laps around an open fire and cast their wedding vows when the groom unexpectedly fell down to the ground. While Jugal was taken to the hospital, Indira asked one of the guests if he could marry her instead, which he did. We can, without further ado, draw a parallel between the above example and the ways in which certain types of fixed-term employment, or projectbased employment, are legitimized: they increase your future employability. In the sociologist Luc Boltanski and economist Eve Chiapello’s work on the new spirit of capitalism, which is based on French management literature, today’s ideal company is described as having a slimmed-down and networkbased organization, which relocates large portions of its business. This means that the company has as few permanent employees as possible, which is compensated for by having a huge network of partners – in different ways knowledgeable people who can be employed temporarily – as well as locating manufacturing to those places where land, premises and workforce are cheaper. To survive in such a work culture, one should at least possess a number of the traits listed by Boltanski and Chiapello ([1999] 2005, p. 112 ff.),

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and which emanate from the praise that was most commonly worded in French management literature from the 1990s: – – – – – – – –

Enthusiastic, involved Flexible, adjustable Mobile Versatile, has potential Employable, autonomous Open-minded, engaging Present, tolerant Has a large network that can contribute to others’ employability

Put differently, we could talk about the type of personality that provides status and power in today’s Western societies. Boltanski and Chiapello call this ideal type “the great man,” which is distinguished significantly from the ideal type they call “the little person,” which is characterized by the following traits: – – – – – – –

Uninspired Not trustworthy Authoritarian Intolerant Immobile, local Rooted, bound Has a fixed status, prefers security

However, we must be clear on the fact that many traits that are characteristic of “the little person” make up the ideal employable type of the earlier stages of capitalism. When one studies the differences between “the great man” and “the little person,” one realizes that times have changed and the winds of capitalism are blowing in new directions. Boltanski and Chiapello argue that capitalism managed to survive, at an early stage, by incorporating the social criticism directed towards it, and, at a later critical stage, incorporating the artistic critique to tune down the social critique. The great man of today is not an inward ascetic as in the first stage of modern Western society, nor a politically oriented organization member as in its second stage, but a subjectivity-driven creator and entrepreneur (Carleheden 2007, p. 89 ff.; Engdahl 2009, p. 141 ff.). The fact that traits like being rooted, local, immobile and bound are today seen as negative traits when looking for a job, while flexibility and mobility are seen as positive traits in doing so, can be transferred to our discussion on the current ideal of love. And reversed: as in the case of love and consumption, it is neither the cosmic order, nor the social institutions, but individual freedom that is the center of the labor market. Or at least what appears to be freedom; “as if”-freedom. Or, perhaps more correctly, a freedom that leads to the domination of certain social groups over others.

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The precariat The huge demand on flexibility and adaptiveness, which is connected to the idea that growth and development are dependent on the market’s competitiveness, has, according to the sociologist Guy Standing, contributed to the emergence of a new social class: the precariat. The precariat consists of millions of people around the globe that rootlessly wander around without permanent employment. Not seldom, this class also performs underpaid work for which they are over-qualified. The precariat is far from being a homogenous group of people. However one defines it, the precariat is far from being homogeneous. The teenager who flits in and out of the Internet café while surviving on fleeting jobs is not the same as the migrant who uses his wits to survive, networking feverishly while worrying about the police. Neither is similar to the single mother fretting where the money for next week’s food bill is coming from or the man in his 60s who takes casual jobs to help pay medical bills. But they all share a sense that their labour is instrumental (to live), opportunistic (taking what comes) and precarious (insecure). (Standing 2011, p. 13 f.) The person with a PhD in the humanities, who is currently working as a secretary in a wholesale company without any chances for advancement, and many others, can also be included in this class. Common to these people, who are living their lives in completely different contexts – and what makes them constitute a class-in-the-making and soon maybe a class-for-itself – is their feeling of performing instrumental, opportunistic and precarious work. This group of people simply take whatever temporary job is offered to them in order to secure their survival, and to escape at least part of the vulnerable conditions of their existence. Not seldom, their precarious life situation leads to mental illness in the form of meaning loss, lessened or no faith in the future, increasingly high levels of negative stress, and feelings of general anxiety and life fatigue. A resigned: “Well, life, this is it.”

Positive potency Standing also speaks of the precariat as “neutralized citizens” who, for different reasons, are denied the same rights as others, for example health insurance, vacations or pensions. Hence, in one way or another, they are not fully citizens. The lack of ontological security, which these people have to live with, may force them into working three jobs at the same time, to make sure they are not left without a job in the near future, or they may educate themselves within a field they know they will never work within, but having the education will make them employable. This type of hyper-activity is the spitting image of positive potency: the ability to do and preferably do more than what is asked; a soldier ready to serve.

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Many times, to possess abilities which go beyond what is actually needed, gives you an advantage on the market. Not many of us are full out using all the opportunities offered to us by the technical equipment in our homes. If we choose between different products we seldom choose the one with less positive potential – the one that might have us say: no, you cannot do this or that with this thing. On the contrary, we tend to choose the product with the most functions, many of which we will most likely never use. It is in the positive potency – that has its opposite in the negative potency that is the ability to say no – that we today find our desire. By means of that which is unused, we can become someone else, or at least do something we have not done before. However, the negativity is what makes us into living human beings – unique, distinguished, and able to express our own need of recognition. In the book The Burnout Society ([2011] 2015, p. 23) Han argues for the alarming loss of negative potency – which without doubt is an objectification of man – in the following way: The computer calculates more quickly than the human brain and takes on inordinate quantities of data without difficulty because it is free of all Otherness. It is a machine of positivity. Because of autistic self-referentiality, because negativity is absent, an idiot savant can perform what otherwise only a calculator can do. The general positivization of the world means that both human beings and society are transforming into autistic performance machines. One might also say that overexcited efforts to maximize performance are abolishing negativity because it slows down the process of acceleration. If the world is going to spin faster and faster, all resistance must be conquered. Human characteristics such as the ability to hesitate – to make a mistake and undo it – must be eradicated in favor of a convenient and easygoing life. We move forward and onward on lighter and quicker feet. We even run. Maybe we even imagine ourselves having wings that will carry us even if we were to fall. If we get tired and exhausted we will do so in solitude, and for one reason only: there is nothing else we can do. Once upon a time we took time off. All days were not alike. There was a Sunday when we were allowed to be tired: together. We had the ability to say no. We are not working today. Today we will play and get to know each other’s differences: the physical, psychological and social limits that are the proof of us not being reducible to barrel hurdy-gurdies. The common day of rest reminded us that we did not have to take off and fly higher than everybody else. The imposed rest emphasized the right to just exist: to feel the weight of our infinite responsibility, which manifests itself in the moment we see each other’s bare faces, and to experience our own vulnerability. To stand face-toface with the other is, of course, a resistance; a form of negativity. But it is a form of resistance that prevents exploitation and the war we fight against ourselves and others. “Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from

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excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.” That’s how Han ([2011] 2015, p. 11) puts it.

Depression as the feeling of being insufficient The sociologist Alain Eherenberg expresses himself quite differently in the book The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age. As Ehrenberg ([1998] 2010, p. 166 ff.) perceives it, depression is not only an illness, but also a language that we use to understand ourselves, especially when we fail to live up to the expectations of autonomy and authenticity, that is, freedom and self-realization, which are characterizations of our time and culture. The fact that depression today has the status of a quite common and widespread disease is not necessarily a result of a greater societal pressure on the individual, but rather a result of the ways in which we today comprehend ourselves. The relationship between, on the one hand, the individual’s urges, wishes, and desires, and, on the other hand, other people’s and society’s requirements, is no longer perceived as something that creates inner conflict or psychological tensions, but as something that creates feelings of inadequacy. The distinction can originally be found in Freud’s and Pierre’s distinct approaches to neurotic behavior, feelings and thoughts, which are preceded by what George Miller Beard defined as neurasthenia. According to Ehrenberg ([1998] 2010, p. 30 ff.), a democratization process of psychological suffering was launched in 1869 when the neurologist Miller Beard presented a definition of neurasthenia as a specific psychological suffering, caused by the enormous pressure that was put on the individual in the transformation of the traditional society into an industrial society. Neurasthenia was perceived as a weakness of the nervous system, which manifested itself in the form of fatigue and obstructed the individual’s ability for self-realization. Miller Beard’s definition of neurasthenia can thus be seen as an early model of Roger’s self-psychology, which was mentioned earlier. The concept of neurasthenia was relatively quickly taken out of use in favor of Freud’s understanding of neurosis as an inner conflict between, on the one hand, the individual’s urges, wishes, and needs, and, on the other hand, the requirements of society’s prevailing standards. A polarity between the forbidden and the allowed was considered to emanate from these different needs and requirements, and the individual had to learn how to navigate between them. If the individual’s urges, wishes and desires constantly were being censored and opposed – downright rejected or prohibited by the societal structure – neurotic behaviors, feelings and thoughts will appear instantly, as an individual defense. Psychoanalysis may, however, help the neurotic through making her aware of the repressed urges, wishes and thoughts. Put differently: the super ego, that is, the societal norms, which have been internalized by the individual and are used to discipline oneself, give a little so that the ego can get access to the id, which is a part of the subconscious. If psychoanalytical practice works

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for the neurotic, it leads to a greater ability to love and work. The neurotic is still a neurotic, but is better able to handle herself and her discomfort in the culture. Freud’s thoughts were dominating until the 1970s, but were thereafter partially abandoned in favor of a line of thought that has similarities with Ehrenberg’s understanding of neurosis as an expression of a weakening of the nervous system caused by feelings of inadequacy, rather than guilt, as Freud would have it. “The nervous system is shaken and the mind’s budget taxed,” as Ehrenberg would put it (Ehrenberg [1998] 2010, p. 34). Furthermore, it is in the 1970s that depression first becomes the mental disorder in focus for psychiatry. There are at least three reasons for why the interest in depression was so low prior to that: First, depression was considered to be a form of psychological suffering or distress, which only a few suffered from. Second, the definition of depression, or rather of melancholy, was not specific enough to be used as a diagnostic tool. And, third, since the eighteenth century, depression or melancholy had partly been perceived as a desirable condition; a sign of, above all, male genius. After the 1970s a radical change took place, which can be related to a historic democratization of psychological suffering, as well as to the development of both new drugs to treat depression and new diagnostic tools, which clearly and effectively decided not only who should be diagnosed as depressed, but also what type of depression they were suffering from. The very idea of neurosis as a pathology of inadequacy goes hand in hand with our contemporary societal norm of self-development and self-realization; that is, our own performance is equalized with human value. Thus, depression is no longer characterized by a specific way of being or a specific way of experiencing reality, but is directed towards the single individual’s ability to act and take initiative. The depressed person is today seen as someone who suffers from performance anxiety and paralysis, and therefore loses sight of both ends and means, and ultimately, of all meaning. The ceaseless dancing around ourselves makes us exhausted. Our exhaustion is also affected by the fact that we all – each one individually, rather than together – are expected to strive for and reach success. At the end of his book on depression as experience as well as an expression of the exhausted self, Ehrenberg ([1998] 2010, p. 232), quotes and critically comments on Freud in one sentence to illustrate his point: If, as Freud thought, ‘a person becomes neurotic because he cannot tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on him,’ he becomes depressed because he must tolerate the illusion that everything is possible for him. The fact that we talk about ourselves as exhausted and inadequate is relatable to today’s understanding of neurotic depression, or what in ICD-10 is called mild depression, which is in line with Ehrenberg’s view. The increased use of SSRI drugs or antidepressants further contributes to such an understanding

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of the self as the drugs effectively fix the more frequent occurrence of performance anxiety and paralysis. Medication with SSRI drugs simply decreases the suffering that is caused by the individual’s experience of being unable to live up to societal expectations: the feeling of inadequacy and, in the long run, the experience of being worthless. Of course, one can argue, as Ehrenberg argues, that this is not problematic per se, but rather it says something about our society and its norms, as well as the social techniques we use to behave as good citizens. As I see it, the problem is, however, the diagnostic language which we increasingly use as a tool to help us understand ourselves. In its quest to become a clear and effective diagnostic tool, the language has become poor and meagre, and transforms us, and our distinguishing features, into one and the same. Soon a majority of us will, at least once in our lifetimes, be diagnosed as depressed and treated with drugs. Of course, diagnosis and medication can be necessary to be able to cope with the psychological suffering we experience, but it also helps erase whatever it is that rubs us the wrong way and is not fitting in. Diagnosis and medication suffer our otherness, rather than requiring us to develop a new and more nuanced language and a politics that, in depth, would embrace difference. And love, what is it and what does it become rather than a temporary mirroring in a generalized other, who is no longer a person with distinguished traits but is all and everything and therefore no one. The thing. This distortion of love, in which it is transformed into depression, is a contemporary form of self-destructive behavior. Something that we are encouraged to partake in, which has its explanation in the fact that depressive love is founded on the idea of love as a positive potency – a sort of intersubjectivity, which one might put into play and which would give love a certain attractiveness. It is an as if – love that beats both within us (subjectivity) and outside of us (objectitivity) – but not in the genuinely interpersonal. Intersubjective coexistence requires not only a positive potency, but also a negative one. The other must appear as a concrete person with needs and urges, wishes and desires, which she cannot satisfy by herself, that is, as a person who actually cannot do everything and therefore possesses the ability to say no. The negative potency is, however, erased in depressive love that, thus, becomes an opium of the people. A sentiment of what this could imply is given through this passage from an e-mail that was sent to a woman from a man, in the protection of darkness, or maybe in the threat of it: Now you exist in me, like a very beautiful, intense memory. And I think of it and you, not at least during nights like these when everything else is just anxiety. So good to be with you! And so good was all that you gave me. I cannot help myself thinking of it. Like a poison. Hard. A lot. For long. Like an animal, but is all of this since it is the deepest, most human. I argue that we need depressive love to manage our vagabond, roving and temporary existence, where possibilities to meet face-to-face decrease and are

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replaced by a sociality mediated by things or memories that tease our imagination. Depressive love is a forever-love-me that never happens; a phantom feeling; a sting to the heart, whose beats you no longer feel. As a living dead, the depressive becomes a cog in the global market machinery. Let me underline: depressive love is not a result of a lack of norms. Today’s contemporary Western societies are not anomic, that is, non-regulated. Depressive love is a new ethic and aesthetic that puts personal suffering, as well as sexuality and love, at the center of attention, and, furthermore, turns it into a profit-making business.

Note 1

The interpretation of Philia, Eros, and Agape presented in the following passage can be compared with the view that Boltanski develops in Love and Justice as Competences ([1990] 2012), p. 89 ff.).

Conclusion

The voices get louder and louder and we are starting to go around in circles. But what are we listening to? Is something being said that cannot be ignored; something that is spelled out to us in black and white? There is no doubt that we live in an increasingly detraditionalized, democratized, individualized and commercialized society. At the same time, intesubjectivity – pulsating interpersonal relationships – is what we want. Who among us would not like to coexist and interact; to be a part of what is still weak and unspoken, but will grow strong? Is love a polyphony? Is that how it is recognized? Most likely it is. Simultaneously, we are dealing with something more precise. Many of the voices heard throughout the book perceive love as a form of recognition that is based on primary relationships and consists of strong emotional bonds. Such relationships require from us a mutual recognition of the other and the self as social beings with concrete needs, as well as wishes, dreams and desires. Love is simply what is left when the needs we cannot fulfill by ourselves are expressed by us and satisfied by the other. When the other satisfies these needs, he or she is not only taking care of us, “holding us,” but is expressing his or her love. When these needs are not recognized by the other, we are violated as desiring beings. If the worst comes to the worst, this love violation results in a reduction of the self into one of its two extremes: subject or object. We have been given a number of examples of this process, in the form of self-silencing and self-communication, throughout the book. Some voices even argued that intersubjectivity is impossible. But, most voices convey a view of pure subjectivity or pure objectivity as a distortion of the ideal of love, ultimately a kind of inhuman condition. The risk of becoming someone who cannot break through in the interpersonal extremes, that is, of becoming no one at all, is imminent to us all in today’s Western societies. This is what is at stake when we no longer can assert our dignity by referring to social positions, a beforehanddetermined template for status and power. If we are caught in intimate relationships without recognition in the form of love, we are at risk of being driven into melancholy or to use a more modern and medical-sounding word: depression. We then experience that there is something wrong with our own persona. The condition is serious. We

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may end up suffering from everything from disheartenment to intense thoughts of suicide. Strictly speaking, everything that makes us function normally, such as sleep and appetite, is perturbed. It is as if we found ourselves skin to skin, but are either too intimate or too distanced. Either we are skinless and just about anything penetrates and hurts the most vital of what is inside of us, or our skin is so thick that our biggest organ becomes an impenetrable fortress. Regardless, the self gets lost, that is, our ability to be both subject and object; a rock so porous that the water is allowed to permeate it and leave its trace. We long for the touch that puts us in motion and stops us from solidifying in the pose that depressive love, in a way, constitutes. Just like power and glory, love is an abstract relation; something between the self and the surroundings, which we constantly dance around, either lightly floating or solemnly. Ideal love never stands still, but takes on different shapes depending on the dance of its different expressions. Sometimes love is a noun. We are simply trying to establish something by naming it, which is exemplified by the statement “I love you.” In the next moment, love is a verb, something one does, which becomes obvious in the expression “love”; that is, to satisfy the needs, wishes and desires that the other expresses but cannot handle by herself. Love can also turn into an adjective, as in a property or trait, which distinguishes the loved one, or the object of one’s love. Moreover, it can be a conjunction; something that connects I and You, or We and Them. As a commodity, love becomes a type of knowledge, which can both be taught and bought. Or, even more radical, something that is already signed, sealed and ready to be delivered to – and owned – by me, as if love was something premade and predetermined. In the predetermination, both the other and the self are objectified, which means they are both locked in while love as an ideal slips through people’s fingers. In the midst of the book a hub is formed, around which all other stories revolve. Clara and Ann’s conversation makes up a void that is so hard to fill with meaning, but yet passes as normal due to the fact that the heroine, on the surface, does not seem passive but rather seems active in the very manner that is advocated in our culture. Thus, we are facing a lover who hides her depression from both herself and her surroundings in a manner typical of our time. It is a fleeting existence where nothing is allowed to sink to the bottom in a noticeable manner. If the form spills over to the content, what does the Internet do to love? What in this form, other than an autotelic desire, is soothing our temporary anxiety over being alone and over being thrown into a world where we no longer are expected to have a solid and resistant core that requires its own limit and says no from time to time? Maybe we do not meet at the depths of each other, but in the forms that are available to us when it comes to expressing ourselves and reaching out to others and to society? Maybe the forms of love are shaping us, instead of the other way around? The medium is the message and the void is what cannot be expressed thereby, which leads to an experience of disheartenment and

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depression, withdrawal and disappearance. Maybe the right to this kind of suffering – the Thing – today has been democratized at the expense of the moral requirement to love your neighbor? What are all the symptoms listed a sign of, other than the fact that we cannot seem to reveal our true selves in a meaningful way to ourselves; we neither possess the words, nor the politics to promote a loving approach to the other and to ourselves? Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost something crucial. Yet, we have never had greater opportunities than what we have right now to, out of our own free will, be included in a mutual love relationship. Wonder is probably the attitude we must put our trust and hope in, to make love thrive in the gap between us: what separates me from you and the rest of the world. Maybe we can go on living, dancing in the gap and realizing that anything else would be death or boredom. As far as I can see, this is the only way we can escape the type of hyperactivity that finally forces us to endlessly run the treadmill – fixed in a convulsive ethical and aesthetic expression of discomfort in a culture that neither currently feels like it belongs to us, nor seems to have a future.

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Index

Abraham, Karl 68 achievement-subject 92–94 Agape 90–91, 95 Agoni (agony) 92 Agony of Eros, The (Han) 89 Alberoni, Francesco 27–28, 34–35, 54, 78 Aldridge, Miles 99 Amanda and Gustaf 39–40 ambivalent attachment 38 Anatomy of Melancholy, The (Burton) 74–78 Andersson, Lena 95–96, 101 Annie Hall 5–6 Another Night In (Tinderstick) 52 Aristophanes 25 Aristotle 74, 77, 90 Ars Amotoria (The Art of Love; Ovid) 72 ars erotica 54–55 Art of Loving, The (Fromm) 93 Art of Shrinking Heads, The (Dufour) 84 artistic critique 58 asset, establishment of oneself as 49–50 attachment 37–38 autotelic desire 100–102, 112

Blixen, Karen 2 Boltanski, Luc 103–104 Bruegger, Urs 99, 100 Buber, Martin 84 Buff, Charlotte 79 Burnout Society, The (Han) 106 Burton, Robert 74–78

Bakhtin, Mikhail 9 Baldwin, James 3 Barthes, Roland 17, 18, 81–82 Baudelaire, C. 41 Bauman, Zygmunt 24–25, 42, 47, 53, 54, 93, 94 Beck, Ulrich 24 Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth 24 Being and Nothingness (Sartre) 41 Berg, Aase 20 Bernays, Edward 83 Bernays, Martha 58 Binet 57 Birgitta Svit (Birgitta Suite; Dagerman) 21

Dagerman, Stig 21–22, 23, 89 dating app culture 52–54 death 22 depression: psychology of 41–43; symptom of 42 depressive love: antique roots of 72–74; functions of 103–104; types of 94–95 depressive melancholy 63–64, 69–70 Derrida, Jacques 84 desire: autotelic 100–102, 112; broken structure of 94; love versus 76 Dewey, John 3, 9, 47 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) 42

capital, personal 5–7 capitalism 4, 103–104 Cetina, Karin Knorr 99, 100 Chiapello, Eve 103–104 child, infatuation and 34–35 Chodorow, Nancy 38 Clara and Ann’s conversation 60–71, 96, 112 Cold Intimacies (Illouz) 59 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 79 commercialization 84, 93 confession 55–56, 57 consumerism 83 consumption 24–25, 92 Cooley, Charles Horton 3, 99–100 cultural cannibalism 84

120

Index

diamonds 49–50 disunion 27 divorce rates 103 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 9 Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 9 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 35 Dufour, Dany-Robert 84 dyad 26–28 Egenmäktigt förfarande: en roman om kärlek (Willful Disregard: A Novel About Love; Andersson) 95 ego 107 Ehrenberg, Alain 107, 108–109 Ekelöf, Gunnar 7 elated third 27 Elensky, Torbjörn 81–82 emotional competence and emotional intelligence 7, 59–60 emotional labor 4 emotional script 1–2, 4–5 emotional unison 48–49 emotional work 4, 5 employment 103–105 English disease 79 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 93 Eros 89, 90, 91, 92 Ethiopian Story, The (Heliodorus) 73 Ett dockehm (A Doll’s House; Strindberg) 18 Evans, Mary 24 exclusivity 19 exhaustion 108 existential loneliness 22–23 expressivism 20 Falling in Love and Loving (Alberoni) 27 Ficino, Marsilio 74, 77 Fifty Shades 92 Foucault, Michel 54–55, 56–57, 59, 93 France, Louise 53 freedom 22, 59, 75, 81, 89, 93, 94, 104, 107 Freud, Sigmund 58, 68, 107–108 friendship (Philia) 90 Fröken Julie (Miss Julie; Strindberg) 90–91 From Melancholia to Prozac (Lawlor) 73 Fromm, Erich 93 Galen, Claudius 73–74, 77 Gestalt therapy 24 Giddens, Anthony 24, 36, 38–39, 54 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 79–81 Guibert, Hervé 81–82

Hamlet (Shakespeare) 79 Han, Byung-Chul 84–85, 89, 92, 93–94, 106–107 Havelock Ellis 56 Hebreaus, Leon 75–76 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 3, 38, 71 Heidegger, Martin 93 Heliodorus 73 Herder, Johan Gottfried 20 Hippocrates 77–78 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 4, 24, 71, 82, 96–97 homosexuality 56–57 Honneth, Axel 3, 38, 39, 42 human documents 9–10, 12 humoral pathology 77–78 I only want you to love me (Aldridge) 99 Ibsen, Henrik 18 id 107 Illouz, Eva 5–6, 59, 60, 71, 82, 83, 93, 100–101 immigrant experience 3 impulsiveness 49 infatuation 34–37 International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) 41–42 internet dating 52–54 intersubjectivity 22, 111 Irigaray, Lucy 84 I-Thou 84 Jack, Dana Crowley 97–98 Jackson, Holbrook 75 James, William 9 Jerusalem, Carl Wilhelm 79 Julie, ou La nouvelle Heloise (Rousseau) 79 Kaan 56 Katz, Evan 97 Keats, John 79 Krafft-Ebling 56, 57 Kristeva, J. 60, 63, 69, 70, 84 Langius 75 language 20 Lawlor, Clark 73, 74, 79 Lévinas, Emmanuel 84 loneliness 22–23, 82–83 love: as affirmation 17–20; desire versus 76; disappearance of 89–90; distortion

Index of ideal of 94–96; ethical dimension of 84–85; exclusive 26–28; logic of 47–48; poet’s sense of 20–34; truncated 28–34; types of 90–91 Love as Passion (Luhmann) 25 love counselors 97 Love is for them (Kärlek är för dem; Thåström) 23 love melancholy 72, 77–79 Lover’s Discourse, A (Barthes) 17, 81 Lucius 75 Luhmann, Niklas 25 Lukács, Georg 4 Lundberg, Kristian 37–38, 96, 102

plastic sexuality 54 Plath, Sylvia 98–99 Plato 25–26, 47, 76, 90 Plenzdorf, Ulrich 81 Plotinus 76 Polish Peasant in Europe and America, The (Znaniecki and Thomas) 3, 9 polyphony 9, 111 positive potency 105–107, 109 post-social relations 99 precariat 105 psychosexual obesity 53 pure relationship 24, 36

“Mad Girl’s Love Song” (Plath) 98–99 Managed Heart, The (Hochschild) 4 Mann, Thomas 81 marriage 18 Marx, Karl 71 Mead, George Herbert 3, 20 ménage á trois 27 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 72–73 methodology 8–13 Micyllus, Jacobus 75 Miller Beard, George 107 Mills, C. Wright 10, 13 Mohn, Bent 2 Molle 56

rationality, social pathology and 3–4 reciprocity 18 Rogers, Carl 58, 107 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 3, 79

narcissism 82 narcissistic wound 69 Neeson, Liam 82, 83 Nerval 70 neurasthenia 107 neurosis 107–108 neutralized citizens 105 normality, social pathology and 3–4 objectification 93 ontological security 38–39, 96, 105 open relationship 36 Other/other 41, 84, 93, 94–95, 100 Outsourced Self, The (Hochschild) 96–97 “Överge inte vårt ögonblick så snabbt” (Do not abandon our moment so quickly; Wine) 36 Ovid 72–73 Park, Robert E. 4–5 Perls, Fritz 24 Perls, Laura 24 Philia 90 Pierre 107

121

Saga and Richard 28–34 Sales, Nancy Joe 52–53 Sartre, Jean-Paul 41, 84 Saving the Modern Soul (Illouz) 5–6 scientia sexualis 54–55 secure attachment 37–38 self-communication 95, 99–103, 111 self-hatred 82 self-identity 38–39 self-realization 38, 58–59, 107 self-reduction 94–96 self-silencing 95, 96–99, 103, 111 sexuality: plastic 54; talking about 54–57 Shakespeare, William 79 Silencing the Self (Jack) 97–98 Simmel, Georg 26–27 sleep deprivation story 50–51 Smith, Charlotte 79 social class 58, 60 social identity 23 social integration 3 social pathology 2–4 social responsiveness 53 Sociological Imagination, The (Mills) 10 sodomy 56–57 Soleil Noir (Kristeva) 60 Sorrows of Young Werther, The (Goethe) 79–81 SSRI drugs 108–109 Standing, Guy 105 Strindberg, August 18, 90–91 struggle for recognition 39, 41 suffering 57–59, 71–72, 83, 101–102, 107, 108–109, 113

122

Index

suicide 69–70, 74–75, 78, 81, 98 super ego 107 Sutherlan, Edwin H. 2–3 Svahn, Clas 103 Symposium (Plato) 25–26, 47 Tardieu 56 Taylor, Charles 20 Thåström, Joakim 23 Thing, the 70, 113 Thomas, William I. 3, 9 Tinder 52–53, 54, 60 Tinderstick 52 transmutations 4 triad 27–28 Twenge, Jean 54

Vårt omättliga behov av tröst (Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable; Dagerman) 21–22 Verdinglichung: Eine Anerkennungstheoretische Studie (Honneth) 4 vulnerability 82–83 Weariness of the Self, The (Ehrenberg) 107 Weber, Max 23 Why Love Hurts (Illouz) 100–101 Wine, Maria 36 Wisniewski, Wladyslaw 9 Woolf, Virginia 98 Yard, The (Lundberg) 37

Utan personligt ansvar (Without Personal Responsibility; Andersson) 95–96

Znaniecki, Florian 3, 9