Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering

Aldo Carotenuto

Vol. 15, No. 5, Winter 1989

Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering. By Aldo Carotenuto. (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1989, 141 pages.)

Aldo Carotenuto’s third book to be published in translation by Inner City differs from its predecessors, The Vertical Labyrinth and The Spiral Way, to the extent that it is not the account of one individual’s life experience but the compendium of many, including the author’s. Nor does the illustrative material come from the consulting room, but rather from the pens of those poets and writers, in particular Rilke and Barthes, who have given expression to the inexpressible.

The impetus for writing Eros and Pathos, however, did in fact come from the consulting room. Love and suffering, or, more accurately, passion and anguish, are the emotive forces of the analytic encounter.

While love may inspire our noblest acts, the underside of that same bi-polar love exposes us to deceit, betrayal and jealousy. Ostensibly a mixed blessing, love, in Aldo Carotenuto’s view, opens us to an experience of our own psychology which is rare and of inestimable value.

Falling in love is peculiar to the human condition, an “opus contra naturam.” Love without fear and guilt is not love as we know it. Arousing as it does the conflicting emotions of prohibition and transgression, love involves choices outside the “shoulds” and “oughts” of conventional morality.

But love is based on a fallacy. We delude ourselves that the basic structural emptiness common to all of us maybe filled. Love then is an experience of a need, an absence, which may only be met and completed by the beloved. The beloved in turn symbolizes not the qualities of an external other, but the potential of the lover.

Love in its most compelling and least conscious form is known as seduction, with ourselves as seducer and seduced. Relationship, in contrast, rests on an acceptance of separation of self and other, Rilke’s encounter between two solitudes, and a realistic appraisal of the beloved.

Yet who would forego the enchantment of seduction? Not Jung, whose most creative insights, according to Carotenuto, were stirred by the experience of seduction. (Presumably, he is referring to the Spielrein affair, the subject of his book A Secret Symmetry, and its effect on Jung’s appreciation of transference and countertransference issues in analysis.) And not Aldo Carotenuto, who equates susceptibility to seduction with the ability to sacrifice one’s certainties—the first step to self-knowledge.

The love relationship is an initiation into a new way of being with all the transformative possibilities found in initiation experiences. Patterning the love relationship are rhythms of union and separation which foster the growing awareness that at the heart of the love encounter is the paradox — “to find means to lose.” As we deepen our relationship to the other, we begin to discover just how “other” this other is.

It takes courage to allow ourselves to be seduced. No less courage or strength is required to see things as they really are. Aldo Carotenuto holds that without the tension of indeterminacy, the duality of fusion and separateness, the love relationship is more facade than reality. Its transformative potential for each partner in the direction of the other, and for the encounter itself—non-existent.

Such a situation exists when the exploitation of a power relationship is substituted for the I-Thou of love. “A person consumed by the will-to-power cannot be head-over-heels in love because this implies ... being completely absorbed by something that can be lost at any moment—and being powerless to prevent it.” Jealousy in this light assumes a positive value; jealousy is an acknowledgement of vulnerability.

Having devoted the first half of his book to redeeming in part the negative aspects of our loving, Aldo Carotenuto now counsels us, not as we might expect, on how we may learn to love more wisely and well, but on how we must accept our loneliness and the suffering it entails, and develop our autonomy. “Thus the need for approval and affection from outside is done away with. One nourishes oneself.” Yet, as he concedes in a later passage, “To live in the world without acknowledgement from it requires a level of psychological development that is difficult to reach, especially at an early age. ”

It’s an introverted pessimistic vision, dwelling on the superficiality of most of our relationships, our ill-preparedness for authentic ones, and the impossibility of giving expression to our deepest feelings without the fear of them being trampled on by others. The collective seems to be the source of many of our woes, in the form of collective expectations, collective demands and collective structures, all of which appear designed to stifle our individual uniqueness and creativity.

While I can accept that there are times in our lives, particularly should we be caught in that maelstrom of emotions constellated by affairs of the heart, when withdrawal serves a very necessary purpose, however, to suggest that complete detachment from the world should be the goal for the second half of life, seems to me to be neither consistent with Jung’s message, nor acceptable. Rather, I would posit, as Murray Stein did in his recent address to the society on “Relationship: A Myth for our Time,” reconciliation. “If one can stand the disillusionment, one loves the other in his differences. ”

“The task for the post-Piscean era,” I heard Murray Stein say, “is a deepening and grounding of Christian love, not the distancing of ‘agape’.”

—Alice Johnston