The Link between Love and Power

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In this talk, which is about power and love, I have been influenced by several backgrounds that I want to acknowledge right away. Any practitioner in my field hears a lot about love and love problems, and love has been a major force in my own life. If I talk about my life truly, I always talk about the love relationships in my life. One of the influences on this paper, however, comes not from my personal life, nor from psychoanalysis and what I have learned there, but from what I learned from a political scientist, the late Hans Morgenthau, who taught at Columbia for a while. He was a master theoretician of power and power relations, and occasionally he turned that lens not just on international politics or national politics, but also on everyday, human politics. Love is one of the great experiences in all of our lives, whether we are speaking of romantic love, familial love, or of another intimate interaction or attachment. Love is also important in our devotion to a cause or a belief system. Although in the end I don't think any of us can truly analyze love, there's much that can be said about it as a crucible for personal change. Because of the identification with the person we love that always occurs in passionate love, love often demands a significant reordering of values and priorities. In love the self is exposed to new risks that result in enlarged possibilities. We may even feel free, born again, as love rewrites the narrative of our lives through its own force. Love can be seen as a paradigm for any profound realignment of personality and values, such as those that occur in the great religious conversion experiences, and in the process of psychoanalytic therapy. Love gives us meaning and generally leaves us feeling more powerful, more full than we feel generally. Given the many pleasures of love, love and power would seem