Romance as Rebellion — Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Sex, Love, and Group Affiliation
Using the term “love” in 2024 feels decidedly passe, dare I say, traditionalist.
My generation speaks in the language of zodiac signs, attachment styles, and love languages, blending the evidence-based with the mythological, and calling upon the priestesses of progressive culture (our handy online therapists) to divine upon our romantic forays. We know how porn and sex impact our dopamine levels and how heroin and a mother’s love play upon our oxytocin receptors.
But we don’t talk about love.
Of course, rainbow-colored t-shirts tell us that “Love is Love” — alluding to the equal sanctity of all forms of romantic union, demanding due respect for them from our societal institutions.
But amidst our traumatic opposition to normative gender roles and Chappel Roan’s frustrated abandonment of her poorly dressed male date for a Super Graphic Ultra-Modern Girl, how do we frame the romantic love of the heterosexual dyad if not as a shameful relic of a discarded cultural heritage?
Sigmund Freud is the last person you would look to for the answer.
Sex, Love & Sublimation
My recent Saturday morning used book store wanderings delivered a collection of treasures. All for $11.50 — Bertrand Russel, Konrad Lorenz, C.J. Jung, and Freud’s 1922 Group Psychology & The Analysis of the Ego.
What I thought would be a book on the use of psychoanalytical principles for group therapy, turned out to be a brief, 100-page discussion of Freud’s theory of social psychology. The book begins with a reaction to a popular book published in 1895 by the French polymath Gustav Le Bon called La Psychologie des Foules (‘foules’ is a false friend — it means “crowd” not “fool”), Freud reaffirms salient points from Le Bon about how group psychology impacts intellect and emotions and then jumps-off to further discussion about how the libido functions in groups.
And of love. Capital L-O-V-E.
Freud is generally remembered idiosyncratically for his concentration, not on love, but sex. Psychoanalysis, it is quipped, makes everything about sex. I was surprised then, to read Freud refer to the libido, not as a sexual force, but one of love — “Love-force, the libido of psychoanalysis” (p. 30) he calls it. In all the dimly lit, mahogany and marble-incrusted obscurity of the psychoanalytic image, Freud was a lover. And in Group Psychology & The Analysis of the Ego, Freud reminds us of the unique connective power of dyadic heterosexual love.
From the psychoanalytic perspective, when sexual impulses do not find their explicit resolution, they morph into the spectrum of emotional experiences classically associated with love, including yearning for nearness and openness to self-sacrifice. According to Freud, love within the heterosexual union is the combined force of direct sexual release and inhibited (frustrated) sexual energy. When speaking of the above experiences of romance, Freud states:
“All these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctual impulses; in relations between the sexes these impulses force their way toward sexual union, but in other circumstances, they are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it” (Freud, 1960, p.29).
Freud, the Darwinist, centers the human organism’s psychology on the necessity to survive and reproduce. From the materialist perspective, this is a difficult axiom to argue against. Everything beyond life, death, survival, and procreation becomes poetry.
Freud, the poet, provides a formula for love, saying that the lover “succeeds in bringing about a certain degree of synthesis between the unsensual, heavenly love and the sensual, earthly love, and his relation to his sexual object is characterized by the interaction of uninhibited instincts and of instincts inhibited in their aim. The depth to which anyone is in love, as contrasted with his purely sensual desire, may be measured by the size of the share taken by the aim-inhibited instincts of affection.”
There it is. Get the equation just right — the perfect balance of sexual release and sexual sublimation — and you have love.
Group Love
To understand the concept of dyadic heterosexual love as rebellion, we must first understand Freud’s ideas of how libido functions within the broader group dynamics within society.
Freud speaks mainly about two forms of sublimated sexual energy (love) that cohere the group. The first is love for the leader and a jealous desire to be the most favored. Sublimated libido for the group leader, as a transference object of infantile sexual motivation toward the mother or the father, creates a form of binding love. The second is libidinous love for other members, an affectionate unitive force also complicated with reciprocal jealousy for having to share the special attention of the leader (as in sibling rivalry).
“A group is clearly held together by a power of some kind; and to what power could this feat be better ascribed than to Eros, which holds together everything in the world?”
Love makes the group go round.
Fascinatingly, Freud highlights sublimated homosexuality as one of the most intense unifying factors at the group level, a force that the sexually aware observer of patriarchally organized systems (like the church, the army, and traditional male-driven corporate structures) becomes glaringly apparent. (Recently a gay male friend of mine desperately wanted for me to disclose details about the kinky grooming going on behind the curtains among males in the patriarchal, vertically-organized echelons of my former religious organization. I could not scratch this itch. Surely, explicit homosexual activity in this environment would weaken the sublimated libidinous bonds between males and undermine the power structure. Not to mention Yahweh’s homophobia).
Freud also makes bold statements about the weakening of the intellect by group intimacy, comments that ring true for those of us with a history of enmeshment within a close-knit community densely organized around ideology to the exclusion of our individuality and discursive thought. On this matter, Group Psychology & The Analysis of the Ego provides a welcome counterforce to popular dialogue that laments our loss of community connectivity and denigrates the Western value of individualism. Freud feels no need to apologize for his aloof objectivism about the primal and herdlike activity of the general populace. Something about his pre-Rogerian condescension feels refreshing:
“Whereas the intellectual capacity of a group is always far below that of an individual, its ethical conduct may rise as high above his as it may sink deep below it” (Freud, 1960, p.15)
Freud provides a mechanism for the phenomenon of emotional contagion in the group explaining that mirroring occurs between individuals in a group such that others immediately mimic each other's affective reactions and that the “greater number of people in whom the same affect can be simultaneously observed, the stronger does this automatic compulsion grow” (Freud, 1960, p.22).
Freud even speaks to the potentiality of language to insidiously impact thinking within a group, a concept similar to Lifton’s “loading the language” that I discuss at greater length in, A Voice from Inside. Our subconscious never sleeps, passively absorbing connections between language and affect in our social environment. From there, our brains integrate this information into our perceived realities. Small, seemingly insignificant alterations in language have been used for all of human history to impact the opinions of the masses, either explicitly by oppressive authoritarian forces or more subtly by social and intellectual movements. “One gives way first in words,” Freud says, “then little by little in substance too.” (p.30).
Isolation, individuation, and suspended acceptance of group assumptions and values allow for intellectual and pragmatic thought. Distance from the group cools the emotional contagion, the organismic influence, reducing the perception of reliance upon the group and the threat of expulsion for thinking differently — a gradual reduction in the organismic experience of amygdalic reaction to the potential threat of rejection for violating passively or explicitly communicated group values (Churchland, 2019). This is the perspective of the artist in obscurity, the mystic on the mountain, and (in a surprising and pointed recent phenomenon) the cult member who wakes up to the psychological oppression of their environments only when obligated by state powers to distance themselves from the ritual movements and emotional mirroring of their brethren. (I’m alluding, of course, to how many JWs woke up to their indoctrination during the COVID lockdown of 2020.)
The reversal of the effect of libidinous love within a group and the subsequent loss of intellect has led many a former religious fundamentalists or secular radical to later express with embarrassment and wonder:
“How could I have been so stupid?!”
Romance As Rebellion
To summarize, at its most intense, group connectivity includes sublimated libidinous drive (love) for both the leader and the brotherhood, leveraging top-down and lateral influence to maintain group cohesion.
So far so good.
Freud then explains that the intimacy of the heterosexual dyad becomes a rebellion against these forces. Romance as rebellion.
The intimacy and connectedness of the love bond have an interesting social function in Freud’s view:
“Two people coming together for the purpose of sexual satisfaction, in so far as they seek for solitude, are making a demonstration against the herd instinct, the group feeling. The more they are in love, the more completely they suffice for each other. Their rejection of the group’s influence is expressed in the shape of a sense of shame.”
The couple creates a private rebellion against the tyranny of the group. In their sacred chamber, they are set apart from the powers that be — the state, the academic, scientific, and clinical mechanisms, and the emotional and cognitive contagion of social movements. The rebelliousness of this separateness from the group is evidenced by the shame that the couple experiences about their private sexual activities. Their sexual union is a dilution of the sublimated sexual drive that coheres the group, a prioritization of the psychological intersubjectivity of the romantic union above the emotional contagion of community love.
(Incidentally, criticism of current societal pressure to publicly identify gender identity and sexual orientation may be a reaction to the perceived intrusion of the group into the private sexual rebellion. Seductive community acceptance threatens to disperse the libidinal force into the group-a de-privatization of the most intimate sexual motivations.)
The influence of post-structuralist and feminist thought, proliferated by therapy culture, has trained the modern secularist to dissect and fixate upon the dynamics of power in intimate relationships. The idea that one could be wholly devoted to another individual feels passe at best, and dangerous at worst. This is more than just a traumatic reaction to broken-heartedness. This is a real fear that a mismatch of social capital and the resulting power dynamic could cause someone to “lose themself” in a romantic relationship. Indeed as Freud warns, there is the potential that the object of affection takes the place of either the ego ideal (the individual is placed on a pedestal just slightly ahead of the hamster wheel that the other party runs on), or the ego itself (complete loss of individuality).
But Freud’s 1922 work brings the reader back to a lost ideal — the private romantic rebellion of two parties who nurture their complementary strengths, the sum of which becomes greater than its parts. In Freud’s view, sexual shame reflects not a traumatic kernel of oppressive restriction on our libidinous freedom by top-down power but rather the subconscious awareness of psychological rebellion against the group.
The sacred speech of the romantic chamber, where we dare to speak honestly against both top-down oppressive power and community influence, renders us most vulnerable to violence from the former and rejection by the latter and marks the transcendent intimacy of the romantic bond.
In the trite:
“It’s us against the world.”
References:
Churchland, P. (2019). Conscience: The origins of moral intuition. WW Norton & Company.
Freud, S., & Strachey, J. (1922). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego (Vol. 18). New York: Boni and Liveright.
Originally published at https://thomaswmoore.substack.com.
