Love, According to Psychoanalysis

Most of what we read about love treats it as a matching problem, focusing on finding someone with the right values, the same love language, and the right chemistry. When a relationship fails, the assumption is usually that it was an issue with compatibility, meaning similarity.

Psychoanalysis has a very different account of love. It is interesting, somewhat less romantic, but also very beautiful and, most important, clinically useful. According to it, love is not mainly about the right person, but about something of our own that gets replayed every time we try to get close to someone.

You Have Fallen in Love with This Before

Falling in love, according to psychoanalysis, is about recognition. The object of our love is related to the earliest people who mattered to us, whoever fed us, held us, disappointed us. It is a refinding, the adult version of a very old search. This is why the same pattern shows up across different partners who otherwise look nothing alike. It is our own pattern, a structure that repeats within us.

It does not mean that love is only a symptom of the past, but yes, the past is doing more choosing than we initially see.

Love, According to Psychoanalysis: We Do Not Fall for Perfection

We fall for the place in people that is incomplete, a little lost, not fully put together. That is where we imagine we might be needed and able to give something the other person does not already have.

And what we give, when love happens, is also our own incompleteness, handed over. Love is two incomplete people, each giving the other something neither of them fully has. Nothing solid or concrete is being exchanged. There is only this.

Why Relationships Take Constant Work

There is no natural, built-in program that guarantees two people fit. Nothing wires two human beings to complete each other automatically the way instinct might coordinate two animals. Two people speaking, wanting, remembering, and desiring in their own singular way will never simply slot together. Something always has to be lost, translated, and rebuilt.

What people call love is largely what gets constructed in that gap, again and again. Seen this way, a relationship is an ongoing act of construction of meaning between two people who were never going to fit automatically and who keep choosing to build something anyway.

What This Means in Analysis

For psychoanalysis, working on relationships does not center on communication skills. It centers on what the person is actually repeating, and how to deal with the gaps, the missed elements that they carry and that they look for in others.

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Psychoanalysis at Real Talk