There is a strange tendency among some thinkers to consider love, especially romantic love, as a product of the frustration of one of its elements -the desire. Love is a striving — of the total person — toward another person as object. It is biological in origin, cultural in pattern. Once it has passed the initial stages, it has a powerful momentum which tends to carry it on to its goal, which is the completion of the sexual act. But any striving when blocked generates ideation and emotion. Our culture always blocks this love striving, and the result is the powerful emotion of romantic love.
These ideas, like orthodox psychoanalysis, tend to disregard the concrete physiological processes in favor of some abstract concept of love as a homogeneous force, readily transmutable from one form into another. People can have frequent and thoroughgoing sexual satisfaction, either with the romantic beloved or with another person, and at the same time be in a high, intense state of romantic love. Literature and mythology do not create obstacles to love merely in order to intensify it.
Their function is also to provide a vicarious satisfaction to persons who are, by circumstances beyond their control, already frustrated. At the same time, there are always plenty of people who are enjoying romantic or erotic love, or both, to the fullest through frequent satisfactions. Neither they nor the unsatisfied would introduce any additional obstacles in real life if they had the power. Fiction and myth, with their imagined obstacles to satisfaction, serve to beautify the inevitable frustrations of living and thus reduce tension.
When any strong desire is frustrated, anger and aggression are apt to arise. To say that the frustrated feeling is transmuted into the feeling of anger or that the energy of the frustrated desire becomes the energy of the aggression, is in the writer’s opinion a false metaphor. There are no universal laws as to what kind or how much of a frustrated desire will result in what kind or how much of a frustration reaction. The result depends on individual learning and the cultural situation. But we do know that increased frustration in Euro-American culture increases the probability of aggression.
The real problem of the Western world is not that of a bad kind of love versus a good kind. It is rather how to widen the opportunities for the harmless satisfaction of all kinds of love. All kinds (that is, types of love feeling) are good. It may prove wise to have separate objects for tenderness, eroticism, and joy within certain limits; but in any case, the supreme satisfaction which human experience recommends is total love directed to one person-object. Adequate satisfaction does not weaken love desire except momentarily.
Indeed, the tendency is to repeat the pleasure-giving act more happily and constructively after an appropriate interval. Adequate satisfaction enriches and increases the volume of love feelings and reduces the stimulation to aggression and anger.
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