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

is interesting to note that the tumultuous passions championed by the Romantic movement and its Sturm und Drang German precursor–passions arguably amplified in France by the Revolutionary decade–more or less coincided with the origins of psychiatry, or ‘alienism’. The French physician Jean-Étienne Esquirol ranked passion both as cause and symptom of madness. His distinguishing diagnosis of monomania mimics the obsessiveness of passionate love: a fixed unshakeable idea dominates the sufferer.
    Freud’s patients, too, fell ill of love, internalizing slights, glances, real or imagined seductions, and playing out conflicts spurred by love in neuroses or bodily symptoms–those coughs, loss of voice, limps, even paralyses, which went under the name of hysteria. The early-twentieth-century psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault gave his name to a syndrome of love gone awry: the journey of erotomania, a parody of love lived out in a shadowy fantasy world of delirium. His patients grew obsessed with strangers, usually grander than themselves, projected their own sexually charged desires for love or recognition on to them, tracked and stalked them jealously and obsessively, knew by distant signs that their love was returned, suffered from persecutory delusions–everyone, it seemed, was against the culmination of their love–and in a sudden vulnerability or moment of omnipotence hit out violently at the forces that they imagined impeded their love.
    The British analyst Peter Fonagy, using current professional terminology, draws parallels between the passionate lover’s experience of ‘impaired affect regulation’, compounded with ‘the lack of a sense of boundariedness’, ‘the wish to control and manipulate’ and ‘identity diffusion’, and the clinical picture of a patient suffering from borderline personality disorder. Indeed, psychiatrists have suggested that the so-called personality disorders are on the rise in part because parents, loving or negligent, find themselves unable to say no to their young and to establish necessary limits. Inside and outside, one’s own desires and the desires of others grow confused, sometimes irredeemably.
    If we grow sick of love, if part of its journey parallels morbidity, it is because love also loosens our established boundaries, the very limits of our self-definition. In love, we are no longer our known, delimited selves, but suddenly permeable. As vulnerable as a newborn. This very permeability, the new fragility of our once bounded state, can now only be bound once more in the presence of the other. It matters little if the beloved is a creature largely made of our imaginings, those phantasms that spring from body, heart and mind. ‘When the lover encounters the other,’ Roland Barthes writes in his brilliant A Lover’s Discourse , ‘there is an immediate affirmation (psychologically: dazzlement, enthusiasm, exaltation, mad projection of a fulfilled future: I am devoured by desire, the impulse to be happy): I say yes to everything (blinding myself).’
    In that state of permeability to the other, transformation can take place. ‘Crazy about you’, ‘all shook up’, I can also become somebody else in a world newly rich in meanings and signs. Recognized by the loved other, in her potent gaze, another version of myself comes into being. Frogs turn into princes, kitchen maids into princesses, disabled war veterans into avatars. But this business of moulding a newly edited self in the image of another is painful. It needs the act of attention, of recognition. Absence becomes an agony of waiting replete with hallucination. The doorbell is ever about to ring, announcing his arrival. The next face in the crowd will be his. The next text on the screen will signal he’s thinking of me.
    Absent, the beloved awakens in the lover a time of utter dependence when he was a mere vulnerable babe at mother’s breast. Taking his cue from the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott,