"Lover's Heart Love in the Eyes of a Psychologist" Recommendation Preface What is the truth of love?

Lover's Heart Love in the eyes of a psychologist

A PsychologistLooks at Love

By Theodor Reik

Translated by Meng Xiangsen

Recommended Preface What is the truth of love?

Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages, National Taiwan University, Huang Zonghui

What is the truth of love?

Usually when we have just "fallen in love", we naturally do not have time to pay attention to the truth of love. Fan Liuyuan and Bai Liusu in the ending of Zhang Ailing's "Love in the Fall of the City", after experiencing the disaster of the fall of Hong Kong, decided to "hold the hand of the son and the son with the old", there is such an interesting dialogue: "Yanagihara also said: 'The ghost makes God send the land, we are really in love!'" Tassel said, "You said you loved me." Yanagihara laughed and said, "That doesn't count." We were too busy in love at that time, where is the kung fu love?' If you are busy in love and don't even have the kung fu to fall in love, how can you have the kung fu to manage the truth of love? Lovers are even convinced that love makes no sense, because the more unreasonable love is, the more it resembles the love we imagine: ethereal, charming, constantly cutting, rational and chaotic. And when we just "fell out" of love? We may be even more reluctant to believe that love has any truth: love must be absurd, so we will lose it suddenly! And as a result, as the author of the book, Theodore Rique, puts it: "The subject of the most talked about and written about is still mysterious." Somewhere on earth, at every hour, there are people who experience this feeling, but still can't understand what it is."

How can we experience love that we don't understand? Does love really not need to be understood? Not quite. Sometimes we struggle to figure out the truth of love; when the passion fades and the nature of love changes, we wonder if it is still love; after gradually calming down from the excitement of losing love, we want to find a way out of the truth of love to make "the next lover better"; when we are turned away from love, we certainly want to know what makes us miss it all the time. However, it is also at these times that we find that our knowledge of love is so limited!

So psychologists should say a lot about the "truth" of love, right? But when we turn to psychologists for explanations of love, we will find that "the literature of psychologists on sex has been exhausted, but there seems to be a tacit understanding about love that we should not ask... About the birth and nature of love... The psychologist himself remains in the dark land." Indeed, Freud, for example, found that the reason why children are curious and ask, "Where did the baby come from?" Often because the second baby came into his life to share his parents' love, he wondered where the "intruding" baby had come from, as if he thought that by inquiring and understanding he could prevent this terrible thing from happening again ("On the Sexual Theories of Children", Freud, 1908), an observation that pointed out a demand for love. How to fight has affected us from the beginning, but for the nature of love, Foss has not understood the difference between talking about love and libido and the love of parents and children and the love of friends on the grounds that "our knowledge is still not enough to talk about this matter" as the author Reiko.

Unlike psychologists who exile love outside the field of scientific knowledge, Rike believes that "even if we think of love as an illusion, we have a task to investigate this illusion", and he has succeeded in leading the reader into this "dark land" with rigorous theories and vivid examples to find out what love makes.

However, in the eyes of psychologists, love should be dull under the accumulation of serious theories, right? In fact, the rarity of this book is that although it is from a psychological point of view to enter the inquiry of love, it can help readers easily understand love through the eyes of psychologists through the evidence of literary and philosophical works.

Love arises from "a state of dissatisfaction with oneself before love occurs, the resulting internal tension, and attempts to remove or alleviate it", "the prerequisites for love, in addition to dissatisfaction with oneself, are also the hidden jealousy of the future object of love." To put it more clearly, the admiration for an object initially includes the desire to be this object or to have this object", "the precursor of love may be unconscious hatred and hostility", these seemingly difficult abstract arguments, because Ricker is good at using literary examples or small stories in life to interpret, always give the reader a sense of enlightenment. Believing that "some of the poet's auspicious pieces of feathers can sometimes see the dark places of people's hearts more between the moments", Riker used the plot of Shakespeare's "Othello" and the famous sentence in Goethe's "William Meister" "The safest way to fight against the advantages of others is to love him" to illustrate the relationship between unconscious jealousy and love, and the Yuan Dynasty painter Zhao Mengfu's wife Pipe Sheng used to dispel her husband's concubine's "I Nong Words" - take a piece of mud, twist one you, shape me, break two of us together, mix with water, and twist another you. Mold another me, I have you in the mud, you have me in the mud - then it is appropriately used by Rick to show the mystery of the so-called fusion of affection: the fusion of "you" and "me" seems to be a gentle and tender renunciation of oneself, but it is also the most gentle way to have others, "in this roundabout way, the person concerned fulfills his desire to have someone else or to be someone else.".

The quality of love is so complex that it is not easy to theorize love, so as He explores the origin and nature of love, he is bound to deal with the question of how love is (unrelated) to sexual desire, friendship, and pity. Opposing the confusion of love and sex and criticizing Freud for not using lust to encompass love and attraction, Necke used the example of "whisky is often mixed with soda, but this does not turn whiskey into soda, nor can it make soda into whiskey" to illustrate that even if love and sex can be mixed in many different proportions, no matter how they are mixed, they will not become the same essence.

In proposing that "love means deciding to choose only one object— at least for a certain period of time... If you doubt whether what happened to you is a miracle, it must not be" In his argument, Reich is not an oath of moral dogma, and he chooses to illustrate the difference between self-doubt and self-confidence with a short story about Mozart: a boy plays in front of Mozart, and then asks Mozart if he will persuade him to become a child prodigy. Mozart said, "No, not at all." The startled boy wondered, "But wasn't you once a prodigy yourself?" Mozart replied, "But I didn't ask anyone." Bearing witness to the many examples of half-heartedness in love who have failed by repeatedly asking questions to confirm their love, we have to admit that Rike is indeed good at using interesting metaphors to illustrate his arguments.

"This is not a book written by a learned man, but a book written by a seeker of truth." At the beginning of the book, Rick humbly begins his questions about love: "We cannot judge love. The most we can express is opinion", and after a methodical and interesting exposition of what love is in his eyes, Rike concludes the book's inquiry with his usual humility. Although Reiko did not exhaust the explanation of love (who can ask?). But this does not affect the charm of love, nor the value of the book; for even if love is like the "shadow of the shadow", after reading this book, we will still find how the shadow projected by this self-illusion will show its true imprint in the change of time; and "What is the truth of love?" Although this question is still a "big question", this book has proved that it is by no means "unspeakable".

※Huang Zonghui is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Chinese Literature at National Taiwan University, and is currently the editor-in-chief of Chinese and Foreign Literature. He has published books in the fields of Joyce's research, psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonialism and other research fields in academic journals such as English and American Literature Review, Chinese and Foreign Literature, Journal of Literature and History and Philosophy, Society of Comparative Literature of the Republic of China, Symposium on Four Sexes, and International Symposium on Jin Yong Novels.

A lifelong desire for life

Meng Xiangsen

When we want to understand love, we must have the recognition that love cannot be understood.

Love, like life, can only be invested, not understood.

Love and life are outside the realm of "knowing"; they forbid to be understood, they refuse to be understood. We can only treat it with "love" and "life".

We cannot "understand" what the core of love is and what the cause of love is. At best, we can only understand the workings and mental processes of love.

The discussion and discussion of love can probably only be within this scope, and the more so it is "wrong to say something.")

But within the scope of what can be said, there are still people who say well, and people who say things badly. Theodore Rique is one of the ones who said it well, and he said it very well.

Theodore Rique was a disciple of Freud, a psychologist who understood human nature, and was also the most humanistic and closest to the poet's temperament among psychologists. At the same time, he is also a very critical and uncompromising person.

His writings explore the depths of human nature without compromise or compromise. However, because of his deep understanding of human nature, although rigorous but not severe, although sharp but not hurtful; the discussion of science and the sensibility of the poet are one furnace, which makes people think deeply and play.

There are very few translations of him in Taiwan, and to the best of their knowledge, there are only two. The earliest was "Inner Exploration" published by Buffalo Publishing House (translated by Hou Pingwen), followed by the translator's translation of "Inner Voice" (Shepherd Boy Publishing House); both are good books, but both have been published for more than twenty years, and now it is probably difficult to buy in the market (after the translation of this book, I learned that Mr. Chen Cangduo had translated Reik's two books "Psychology of Sexual Relations" and "Discovery and Surprise" (Xinyu Publishing House), and Mr. Chen also mentioned "Goethe's Love History" in Chinese translation).

"Lover's Heart" is both deep and amazing, allowing the translator to have a more real understanding of love and desire, and is a good mirror to perceive himself. I believe that for every reader there will be a mirror function.

The only point that the translator cannot digest is the author's view of the origin of love, which he believes stems from dissatisfaction with oneself and envy, jealousy and hostility toward the other party. In order to make up for one's own dissatisfaction, in order to overcome the jealousy and hostility towards the other party, the heart produces a strong reaction formation (1), and the jealousy and hostility are transformed into love, and identify with this object. (1) The Japanese translation of "reactionary form" Chinese the dictionary of psychology as "reverse behavior."] In order to be easy to understand, the translator translates it as "rebound" or "rebound effect" in this book. 】

Of course, Riker says that this jealousy and hostility and its transformation process are unintentional, so we are not aware of it.

Before love occurs, the person's own uneasiness and dissatisfaction are indeed what we can perceive, which is the state of mind described in "The Troubles of Young Werther" before falling in love; the beautiful yearning for the other party is also a fact, and the envy and jealousy of the other party's beauty also have more or less traces, but to say that love is the transformation of hostility, I think it does not fit my own feelings.

My feeling is that the other person makes you move, and you desire to merge with the other person's life, which is a life-to-life desire. I think both sex and love have a life-level root, not just physical and psychological phenomena.

Aside from the fact that I don't have a very good opinion with Rick, this book still benefits me deeply and enjoys it deeply. So, I translated it anyway, and I hope you'll read this good book as well.