État amoureux normal et pathologique

Abstract

This reflection is an overview of the works of writers, poets, philosophers and doctors. We evoke the psychology of love disorder, love diseases, disorders in which the theme of love is central: morbid jealousy, erotomania, normal and pathological love passion or delusional blindness. We pay tribute to illustrious authors: Maurice Dide, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and Gaétan de Clérambault. In this field, the use of new terms is booming, but does not always come with a deeper psychological understanding of the mechanisms depicted. Love that is not pathological does exist and, under certain conditions, it can last. There are also various phenomena of paradoxical attachment. Hostage-taking and the Stockholm syndrome should not make us forget much more frequent traumatic situations, such as mistreated and abused children, battered spouses or victims of war crimes. Such acts are regularly underpinned by relationships of domination and control over others, for which access to a therapeutic approach is almost non-existent. The semiology of passionate love seems to coincide, on several points, with that of fanatical passion: the exclusivity of the object, the blind certainties, the submission of the object, overestimation, idealization that distorts judgment, and the absence of criticism. The fanatic, as the lover can sometimes become, is a remorseless criminal. The lover is passionate about the ideal, like the passionate idealists described by Dide. This connection informs us about the relationship between the loving self and its object. In passionate love, Freud observes that the self empties itself in favor of the object, which becomes more and more grandiose. The lover gives the impression that his or her self disappears and fades under the shadow of the ideal. But there is nothing altruistic about this self-sacrifice: the self remains faithful to its self-love. This abandonment of the self to the object is a narcissistic strategy of the self that is nourished and restored through the investment of the object. If we consider the psychological signs and disorders that characterize the psychic mechanisms of love, we find that these phenomena have points in common with psychiatric pathologies, especially in the intellectual, physical and affective spheres. The obsession, the impulse, the narrowing of the field of consciousness of a lover explains the fact that he becomes unable, despite his awareness of the danger, to renounce his passion, sacrificing instead his fortune, his situation, and even his life, to a love that he knows is sometimes harmful, even dead-end. For Pierre Janet, passion itself resembles madness, both in its origin and in its development and psychodynamic mechanism. Love-hate is a great purveyor of criminal conduct, such as violence, robbery, rape, crimes of passion, suicides and double suicides. According to some authors, the crime of love is only a crime of self-love that reveals an assertion of control over an object. Many scientific works have introduced a distinction between passion without delirium and delirium with passion, including erotomania, where passion becomes central to psychic activity. Its outcome can be fatal, taking the form of homicide, suicide out of desperation or spite. It can also result in moral suicide by sacrificing the future and then lead to social death. Jealousy-passion and jealousy-delusion, closely linked to feelings of love, have been the subject of writings both in literature and in psychiatric works, and their nosographic descriptions by many authors reflect the difficulty of drawing a tight partition between them.