If Love Could Think: Using Your Mind To Guide Your Heart - Hardcover

Gratch, Alon, Ph.D.

 
9781400098156: If Love Could Think: Using Your Mind To Guide Your Heart
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400098157 ISBN 13: 9781400098156
Verlag: Harmony Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A clinical psychologist argues that every individual must accept ambivalence as a part of any loving relationship in order to find lasting love, using a three-step approach designed to help readers learn to manage rather than deny ambivalence to build a fulfilling, long-lasting relationship. 25,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alon Gratch, Ph.D., is the author of If Men Could Talk: Translating the Secret Language of Men, which has been published in more than twenty countries. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. A New York–based clinical psychologist and lecturer, Dr. Gratch has presented his work in many academic settings, including the medical schools of Harvard and Columbia.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Narcissistic Love

There was nothing Echo would ever say more gladly, “Let us get together!” —Ovid

We are all familiar with the story of Narcissus, the beautiful youth who fell in love with his own reflection in the pool. But we are less familiar with the story of his partner, Echo, the young nymph who was cursed by the gods to only be able to repeat, never initiate, speech. At one point, when Echo—whose heart was never deterred by her beloved’s self-absorption—came upon Narcissus and heard him uttering words of love, she naturally repeated his words. To the outside observer this would surely look like a mutual love fest. The truth, of course, was that Narcissus was talking to his own reflection in the pool and that Echo was merely being an audio version of that reflective pool. But even more interesting, Narcissus and Echo were themselves fooled by this house of mirrors: since from where she stood she couldn’t see the reflection in the pool, Echo thought Narcissus was talking to her, while Narcissus—his gaze transfixed by his own image in the pool—took Echo’s voice to be that of his beloved reflection, whose lips clearly moved to the same words of love.

It’s probably no coincidence that Narcissus is far better known than Echo. After all, seeking the limelight is what he’s all about. When you think about it, though, the character of Echo is no stranger to us either. The feminists see her in the supportive role of the traditional wife, the woman behind the man. And pop psychologists describe her as the codependent or the enabler—the selfless spouse who takes care, and unwittingly participates in the undoing, of her selfishly self-destructive partner (Narcissus ended up dying of starvation because he wouldn’t leave his reflection). But what’s less known about Echo and her contemporary versions is that even though she appears to be Narcissus’s opposite, she is actually every bit as narcissistic as he is. Traditionally, women in our culture were socialized to support and respect, if not obey, their men. They were supposed to attain high self- esteem not through an external achievement of their own but rather through the nurturing of others. In terms of child rearing, there may well be a biological predisposition for this in women—more so than in men. The point is that even as our society evolves, many women still make themselves feel good about themselves by making others feel good about themselves. In other words, their selfish need is to be selfless. Their narcissism lies in the fact that they need to be needed—regardless of whether or not the other person actually needs them. So their narcissism, while harder to detect, is just as pronounced as a man’s might be.

In Narcissistic Love, the couple’s dynamic often follows these gender-based forms of narcissism. The man is out there building Trump Towers, and the woman applauds and supports the effort by taking care of the home and by looking good in his arms. In a dating context, notwithstanding all the changes brought about by the women’s movement, the same assumption might be operating within the couple; that is, the man is the gifted, brilliant, important player—the lawyer, banker, architect, actor, doctor, or artist—whose work, mission, or schedule takes precedence over the woman’s, regardless of her work, career, or other overtly selfish desires. As upsetting as this might be to contemplate in this day and age, many women with significant achievements do not feel good about themselves—that is, they suffer from low self-esteem—if they are not needed by a partner or a child and if they are not socially pleasing to others.

These gender dynamics are not as rigid or fixed as you might expect, and as we shall see, they can flip. In addition, many people—men and women—follow a love path that takes them from a relationship in which they are the Echo to one in which they are the Narcissus, before finally ending up somewhere in the middle.

Step One: Recognizing Your Pattern

While we usually think of “pathological” narcissism as a form of excessive self-love, the truth is almost the opposite. Driven by unconscious low self-esteem or self-hate, the narcissist strives to feel good about himself by exaggerating and showing off his achievement, power, or beauty. In addition, the more consciously self-hating or low-self-esteem individual is just as much of a narcissist, for he too is self-involved in his relentless quest to feel good about himself. It is thus more accurate to think of narcissism as the self-centeredness resulting from our efforts to regulate our self-esteem. It is also important to appreciate that narcissism is not only a pathological condition but also a necessary and potentially positive aspect of psychological development. In motivating us to be productive or to please others, the drive to attain high self-esteem actually facilitates growth. Of course, when extreme, and under certain conditions, it does become a debilitating problem.

Similarly, narcissism plays an important positive and negative role in the phenomenon of falling in love. Since our self-esteem evolves from early childhood and onward out of the experience of being loved, when we fall in love it is immediately engaged. If our love is reciprocated we feel valued; if not, we feel inadequate. And because maintaining a high self-esteem is so crucial to our sense of well-being, our narcissism employs various defense mechanisms to that end. Chief among these and most relevant to the experience of falling in love is the defense of idealization. The emotional generosity we feel when we fall in love is made possible by the way we idealize our partner. This idealization enables us to ignore his imperfections, to believe we have finally met our soul mate, and to trust that he will not betray or abandon us. We often don’t really know this person when we fall in love and we have no factual basis to justify this attitude. But it nonetheless makes us feel valued, vital, and special—amid a vast sea of humanity in relation to which we are quite ordinary, unseen, and inconsequential. In short, idealization makes us feel good about ourselves, directly when we are idealized, or indirectly when we idealize someone else and bask in his reflection.

In lasting, more or less “healthy” relationships, this type of idealization is present sometimes—often dominating the early phases of a relationship, the “honeymoon” period, when we are also in love with love. But with time it is informed by the process of getting to know the other person. Diluted in some ways, enriched in others, it is influenced by the reality of the partner’s mind and body and by the accumulated history of our togetherness. While a kernel of the early idealization must remain if love’s to last, the intensity and expansiveness of the initial falling in love are ultimately inconsistent with lasting intimacy. This is so because if we cannot show our less attractive qualities and have them registered as such by the other person, we aren’t quite known to him and therefore are loved only superficially, which is what Narcissistic Love is all about. In the best-case scenario of Narcissistic Love we fall in love with something in the person, fixate our gaze on it and insist that’s the whole person. As a result, we don’t really get to know our partner up front, which often means we later find out he has some kind of a secret or unspoken life.

One of my patients, an attractive, articulate woman in her late twenties, nonetheless came across as...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Harmony Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400098157
ISBN 13 
9781400098156
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
236
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781400098163: If Love Could Think: Using Your Mind to Guide Your Heart

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1400098165 ISBN 13:  9781400098163
Verlag: Harmony Books, 2006
Softcover