Love and Worldliness in Psychoanalysis and in the Work of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

What is Love?-Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God.-On Love, Percy Bysshe ShelleyLOVE BETWEEN THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERESHannah Arendt was fundamentally sceptical about psychoanalysis, which she saw as reductionist and solipsistic rather than encouraging political activity. Psychoanalysis, writes Arendt, destroys of in-between that enables us to form relationships since it recommends that people focus on an inner of sensations in order to explain failures in public sphere. Rather than encourage revolutionary ideas and actions aimed at bringing about change in world, psychology instructs us to 'adjust' to those [bad] conditions, taking away our only hope, namely that we, who are not of desert though we live in it, are able to transform it into a human world (2005, 201). Arendt finds that psychoanalysis and totalitarian movements have something in common for they both deaden faculties of passion and action that could help us to change and make it better, more inhabitable. Taking a psychoanalytic approach, or living under totalitarian rule might, in some ways, lessen our suffering, but cost is that we relinquish our courage-a courage that allows us to act.Despite Arendt's adamant resentment of psychoanalysis I would like to initiate a dialogue between Arendt and Freudian psychoanalysis. Hannah Arendt's explicit discussion of occurs in her Love and Saint Augustine, where Arendt differentiates between Eros, erotic love, philia, friendship, and agape, of God. In her subsequent work, however, Arendt does not take into consideration libidinal aspects of collective bonds, nor does she give an account of passionate aspect of being together despite crucial role of amor mundi. By contrast, Freud views libidinal and sublimated as forces that bind people together so that they may form political cooperation and bring about artistic and technological innovation in civilization. In this sense, Eros becomes a meaningful force that introduces worldliness into individual's life. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud presents as a force capable of subduing violence and enhancing in-between of relationships that functions as basis of our joint activity in work and in formation of civilization. Because love, or Eros, is not just discrete but a political force, it enhances worldliness rather than withdrawal from world.By juxtaposing Arendt and Freud I will argue that is basic to worldliness, central to amor mundi, forgiveness, and making of promises, which are pivotal components of Hannah Arendt's political thought. I will argue that desire for enhances friendship/forgiveness and thinking/respect of others and of worldliness as such. In psychoanalysis and in work of Hannah Arendt worldliness or amor mundi comprises a move away from realm of need to that of thinking, which in turn inaugurates action in public sphere by realizing bonds of aim-inhibited or friendship. By juxtaposing Arendt's and Freud's relation to I will suggest that without relation of humans to is swayed by interdictions of obscene superego. Such a loveless relation to engenders anxiety and doubt. The ultimate question I want to ask concerns relation between of and its negation by radical evil.LOVERS OF THE WORLDTo begin staging dialogue between Arendt and Freud I want to juxtapose their texts that were written at same time. Love and Saint Augustine was published in 1929 while Civilization and Its Discontents was published in 1930. While Freud's text studies importance of divine decree love thy neighbor as thyself for formation of communities and nations, Arendt's text inaugurates a research question about the relevance of neighbor,and demonstrates that Augustine's philosophy is engaged in world. …