Free All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion by Lisa Appignanesi Page A

lost. Fear and jealousy were not incidental to love, they were love.
     
    The pain of lost love is as total, as self-obliterating an emotion as the initial ecstasy. In our own time, when we vest so much in the durability of love, see it as a path to self-realization, abandonment can engender a dissolution of the once merged self. Some passionately re-enact the loss over and over again, its low an emotion more intense than the initial high. Indeed, contemporary love lyrics–Bob Dylan’s, Leonard Cohen’s, Nick Cave’s–more often sing of sorrow and loss than of joy.
    The influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan postulated that loss and the continuous inner sense of lack it sets up in us originate in the moments when the infant’s early state of symbiotic plenitude with mother and world–his primary narcissism–is ruptured by the intervention of the father, the symbolic law-giver, and in that sense the keeper of language itself, which makes us social beings. This is the moment when the infant’s own separate ‘I am’ is constituted. In other words, the speaking subject comes into being with the loss of unity. To say ‘I am’ is already to say ‘I have lost.’ In successive loves, ever haunted by a sense of lack, the arrival of any third party reignites the first triadic structure, its threat and pain. Only death permits the final healing of that first split which is already in ourselves. So the romantic agony, the pendulum swing between longing and mourning, may be embedded in our very nature as speaking humans. Incapable of relocating that originary plenitude, we may seek it or its attendant loss, over and over again. Ecstatic love and loss may, it seems, be a fundamental couple, thrusting us into a bodily confusion which words alone cannot assuage. Thin-skinned, as vulnerable as babes, we’re prone to fall apart when we part.
    Neil Gaiman’s Rose Walker in The Sandman says it all:
    Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
     
    Within the annals of madness, love has long played its disreputable part. The first register of precipitating causes of lunacy in London’s great public asylum, Bethlem, ranks love high on its list. Love gone awry, hopes crushed in rejection by parental prohibition or by the appearance of a successful rival, can tumble the lover into a state of delirium or depression akin to mourning. A beloved has effectively died, but won’t die in us. In this state, suicide or its attempt is not infrequent. Back in the 1790s, the young Charles Lamb checked himself into a madhouse after an early love went awry. Arguably, his sister Mary was precipitated into madness when Charles’s affections left her. Goethe’s Werther commits suicide when it is clear that his beloved, Charlotte, can’t return his passion. A Europe-wide bestseller, based on an early unrequited passion of its author’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther precipitated copycat suicides in significant number. Even the courageous and redoubtable Mary Wollstonecraft attempted suicide when it became clear that her lover Gilbert Imlay, father of her first child, had rejected her.
    It