Love is not an Emotion: Marc Gafni

Love Misperceived

We have come a long way. It is now clear that, contrary to what we are taught, love is not at its core an emotion. At least not in the sense we were used to thinking about emotions. We are taught that an emotion is something that happens to you. You are love-struck. Blinded by rage. Falling in love. We experience emotions, negative and positive, as external forces with which we have to contend, victims of their venom or recipients of their nectar. We are plagued by emotion, wracked by guilt, paralyzed by fear, heartbroken, carried away, smitten; love strikes us from behind; we are wounded by Cupid’s arrow, poisoned by bitterness, or driven insane.

Or if we do claim emotions as welling up from inside, then we automatically revert back to Freud’s mechanical human steam engine model. In Freud’s day, the steam engine, the driving power of the early industrial revolution, was the metaphor of choice. It has a dramatic if subconscious influence on how Freud thought and taught. We bottle up anger, we blow our tops, vent rage, dam up our aggression, let off steam. The image is again hydraulic, the human apparatus is understood as a boiler system filled with volatile gas or superheated steam. Freud’s writings are filled with images of discharge, repression and keeping the lid on.

Even sublimation just means blowing off steam through a safer valve.
The individual becomes an out-and-out junkyard of rusting machine that never quite functions properly. Failed robotics. Of course, in all these images, we are not responsible actors in our lives. We lose our freedom to choose our path and chart our destiny. Even the law excuses actions that are seen as a breakdown in the hydraulic system — so you can kill your mother as the Mendes twins did and claim temporary insanity. The system merely broke down.

In this model, love is just one more of those emotions that we need to keep in check lest it drive us insane and cause us to do things we might later regret.

Yet, for the biblical mystic, the human being is less a junk yard than a thriving garden. She is a divine miniature, who is infinitely free, infinitely fruitful, and infinitely powerful. Of course, attention to our internal workings and equilibrium are important. But they flow from our love and will, the seats of the soul, rather than cruelly holding us captive. In this understanding, love is not merely an emotion. It is at its core a perception, which then brings in its wake a gorgeous and pleasurable emotion.

marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
share comments on info@marcgafni.com